Cary Fowler, the executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT) will be speaking at 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 5. GCDT is located in Rome, Italy, but Fowler is travelling more often than he is in the office, so his trip to Minnesota will be nothing new. He will be covering many topics in his speech.
“I don’t write out any speech or lecture, so I only have a rough idea when I go on stage,” Fowler said. He plans to talk about some of the challenges facing agriculture, the role food plays, and will play, in conflicts in the future and he will certainly discuss the seed vault the GCDT supports, located near the North Pole.
The seed bank is located on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergenv, about 810 miles from the North Pole. The primary function of the seed bank is to preserve plant diversity. The GCDT works with seed banks all around the world to ship duplicate copies to this master bank. The vault is naturally -4.5° C, so even in the event of an electrical failure the seeds would remain frozen.
“We wanted to minimize dependence on human beings and human systems,” Fowler said. The point of keeping the seeds frozen is to delay decay.
Fowler has a diverse background. He grew up in Tennessee in the 1960s and ‘70s. Being so close to the civil rights movement got him interested in politics, civil rights and justice. “I was very involved in opposing the [Vietnam] War,” he said. As a journalist in his earlier years, Fowler was assigned an article about agriculture in the south and loved it. “I got involved in agriculture … [as a way] to celebrate something about the American South,” he said. “Emotionally, I felt at home.”
He embraced the opportunities presented to him, and though agriculture and crop diversity were not his original interests, he loved them. The complexity of the field intrigued him. He had to utilize, among other fields, biology, history, genetics, literature and law to succeed. “[I have] to combine all of these in order to do very good work,” Fowler said. The pioneer aspect was another draw for him. “When I started my work, no one else was doing it. I thought I would be lucky to be employed.”
Fowler has won the Right Livelihood Award and a Heinz Award, holds a PhD from Uppsala University and has been featured on the show 60 Minutes and in The New Yorker magazine. He has achieved much more than just finding a job, and it is an honor to have him on campus. He will be speaking at 1:00 p.m. on Tuesday, Oct. 5 in Lund Center.