Making Post/Anthropocentric Futures in Agrobiodiversity Conservation

Since the mid-twentieth century global modernization of agriculture, seed banking has become a core technoscientific strategy to counteract agrobiodiversity loss and ensure future food security. This article develops a post-anthropocentric reading of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault as a nodal point o...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	Nature and culture 2021-03, Vol.16 (1), p.47-64
Main Author:	von Verschuer, Franziska
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	20th century Agricultural production Agriculture Anthropocentrism Banking Biodiversity Biological diversity conservation Climate change Conservation Corn Crises Farms Food Food security Food supply Gene banks Genetic diversity Methods Modernization Nature Rationality Seeds Technology application
Online Access:	Get full text
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Summary:	Since the mid-twentieth century global modernization of agriculture, seed banking has become a core technoscientific strategy to counteract agrobiodiversity loss and ensure future food security. This article develops a post-anthropocentric reading of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault as a nodal point of global ex situ conservation efforts. Based on qualitative expert interviews, I explore the rationality of crisis and salvation that underlies these efforts and discuss its roots in an anthropocentric relation to nature as a resource. By arguing that the latter produces the crises that conservation measures intend to counteract, I show how the Seed Vault conserves this resource-orientation. I then illustrate a concurrent unruliness of more-than-human worldly becoming the embracing of which, I argue, is a way for conservationism to cultivate different, non-crisic futures.
ISSN:	1558-6073 1558-5468