Saving seeds and souls in the High Arctic

70 years apart, an adventurous woman and Earth's seeds find refuge on Spitsbergen

Jan 27, 2025

The Svalbard archipelago

Think of your response when the sun doesn’t appear for a day or longer, then multiply that feeling a hundredfold. As I finish this essay (Jan. 27), residents of Longyearbyen, the population center (2,400 people) on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen that is more than 200 miles (350 km) north of the Arctic Circle, have not seen the sun since October. They are now in the phase called nautical twilight, which, according to the U.S. National Weather Service definition,1 is that period when the center of the sun is 12 degrees below the horizon. You can see the horizon and possibly the mountains’ outlines, but you need artificial light for any outdoor activities. Civil twilight, when the sun’s center is 6 degrees below the horizon and lights no longer are needed during the day, will begin in about two days and the sun will peek above the horizon for the first time in mid-February.2

With this Arctic island as our setting, I want to share two stories. The first involves an international seed vault bored into the permafrost on a hill above Longyearbyen. I consider the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which opened in 2008, as an engineering triumph and something of a political miracle, and I want to tell you more about it. The second story was first published in 1938 by Christiane Ritter, who traveled from Austria to the northern shore of Spitsbergen to spend a year with her explorer-hunter husband in a ramshackle hut on a barren coast. I recently encountered Ritter’s memoir through Katherine May’s True Stories Book Club, and Ritter’s experiences, strength, and wisdom have reinvigorated my attention to the crucial role of the Arctic.

The snow and ice of Spitsbergen’s mountains catch the low, brief February sun, just back from its winter hibernation. After a nearly two-hour flight over an ice-cold ocean, the view of glowing glaciers and coal-black cliff faces made me catch my breath. (Personal photo, 2014)

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault

Food and crop seeds are essential powerhouses for local, state, and international stability and welfare and, not surprisingly, their human-grounded history contains stories of both abused power (for example, colonial biopiracy) and dedicated stewardship (by seed sovereignty movements, among others). In an attempt to respond to this troubled history, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) ratified the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture in 2004.3 The hard-won treaty created a multilateral structure, called the Multilateral System of Access and Benefit-Sharing, that addresses access to plant genetic resources (a scientific and political category that includes seeds) and the economic power that is tied to those genetic resources. In effect, it created guidelines and a formal process for acquiring and transferring plant genetic materials.

And here’s our connection to Svalbard: The international seed treaty also set up the legal scaffolding for a global seed depository to provide “fail-safe” storage. The world already had the benefit of many seed libraries, banks and depositories, administered by international research organizations, nations, communities, and non-profit organizations, but treaty negotiators knew that these research, storage, and distribution locations were not enough to guarantee a secure future for existing seed varieties, which face high levels of risk; we still face critical losses due to regional specialization, underfunding, understaffing, natural disasters, war, and climate change, among other dangers. Something much more ambitious needed to be done at the level of global collaboration.

But where should this coveted new vault be located? Negotiators and planners recognized that Norway was the best possible choice due to its tradition of political neutrality, control of Arctic territory (including Svalbard), economic and political stability, and the Norwegian government’s commitment to establish and pay for this investment. A new deep-time vault was badly needed and Spitsbergen, the largest island in the Svalbard archipelago, was an optimal site. A few dedicated individuals—in particular, agriculturalists Dr. Cary Fowler and Dr. Geoffrey Hawtin—pursued the goal skillfully and relentlessly, the Norwegian government put its money on the line, and we are now miraculously lucky to have a seed depository drilled into the Svalbard permafrost that is protecting seeds from around the world.

Longyearbyen, looking across the bay of the fjord during the daytime twilight (Personal photo, 2014)

The flights from Tromsø to Longyearbyen are the farthest north scheduled air transport in the world, and that high latitude means that the required conditions for vault storage (-18 C) are both physically possible (with additional backup refrigeration) and accessible. In terms of administration, Norway owns the seed vault, which it manages in collaboration with NordGen (a regional gene bank) and Crop Trust (an international non-profit). Fowler, an American who deserves enormous credit for the project’s success, led the Crop Trust for many years and was the initial chair of the Seed Vault’s International Advisory Panel.

American agriculturalist Dr. Cary Fowler (right) greets visitors at the entrance to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Fowler and British agricultural scientist Dr. Geoffrey Hawtin received the 2024 World Food Prize “for their extraordinary leadership in preserving and protecting the world’s heritage of biodiversity and mobilizing this critical resource to defend against threats to global food security.” (World Food Prize announcement; personal photo, 2014)

If you have seen my earlier Substack essays, you’re aware that the ownership of seeds is the central focus of my work and, I argue, a core issue in political, social, and ecological terms. Some critics raised concerns about who would have control over deposited seeds when the vault first opened, but the Svalbard vault’s documentation ensures that seed samples continue to be owned by the seed banks or countries that deposited them. However, depositors are committed to making samples of those seeds—from their own stocks, not from the Svalbard vault itself—available for plant breeding research and education. This stipulation could be interpreted as a loss of control, in a sense, but I view the depositors’ commitment to share as a recognition of seeds as a community, not just individual or corporate, asset.

Sealed containers deposited by countries and gene banks are stacked inside one of the three vaults. (Personal photo, 2014)

The University Centre in Svalbard, with its campus in Longyearbyen, is the world’s northernmost higher-ed institution. All in attendance undergo polar bear safety training with rifles. (Personal photo, 2014)

“The Polar Night”: Finding one’s place in the world

Now I turn to the second story: Christiane Ritter’s memoir, A Woman in the Polar Night. Last year, I became a dedicated fan of Substack’s slow-read phenomenon (thank you, Simon Haisell at Footnotes and Tangents!) and several more slow-read book clubs called to me this year. One of these is Katherine May’s True Stories Book Club, which has devoted January 2025 to an English translation of Ritter’s newly reissued book, first published in German in 1938 (Eine Frau Erlebt die Polarnacht). Her memoir is an account of the harrowing, transformative year she spent with her explorer-hunter husband, Hermann, and a younger Norwegian hunter, Karl, in a tiny hut on the barren but beautiful shore of Spitsbergen, many weeks’ journey from human settlements.

Christiane Ritter and her husband Hermann in front of their hut (photo from 1954 edition, George Allen & Unwin)

I’m a native Minnesotan, which means that although the darkness of Arctic winters is beyond my homeplace experience, extreme cold and blizzards are definitely part of my world. In fact, the temperature outside my home while I was finishing Ritter’s memoir was -16 degrees F. (-27 C) and the windchill (“feels like” temperature) was -31 degrees F. (-35 C). We generally get one or two of these extreme-cold periods each year in Minnesota and similar temperatures were in effect in February 2014 when I made my northward journey to Svalbard. Oddly, the temperature at 78 degrees N in Longyearbyen at my arrival was a stunning 45 degrees F. higher than at my home latitude of 45 degrees N—one more example of the frightening trend toward Arctic warming.

We pride ourselves on toughness here, but Ritter’s memoir is rough living at an entirely different level. As the photo above suggests, their home base was a hut of scavenged wood with a marginally workable coal stove. Evidence of the Arctic harshness is demonstrated by names of the area’s navigation points: Anxiety Bay, Distress Hook, Misery Bay, and Bay of Grief. The survival of Christiane, Hermann, and Karl depended on hauling water, hunting for meat, and all the other chores that sustained frontier polar existence, but she also found time for reading, writing, hiking, and friendship with an Arctic fox.

Through the physical and psychological turmoil this year required, Ritter was a perceptive, sympathetic observer who also became an advocate for the clarity of values that Spitsbergen demanded. I especially value Ritter’s memoir as a series of discoveries: her gradual understanding of herself, her growing appreciation of the Arctic as an ecosystem that is both brutal and beautiful, her recognition of the integrated but often over-inflated role of humans on this earth. Her writing is lucid, filled with sensory details, and, above all, caring. It did my heart so much good to think about Spitsbergen again through her discerning eyes and loving heart, and I highly recommend A Woman in the Polar Night to anyone as a great read.

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The Nature of Seeds