Seeding Civilization

Food Chain Radio Podcast with Michael Olson

Janisse Ray, Author The Seed Underground and Wild Spectacle

For a hundred million years, give or take, plants looked for a way to reproduce themselves. Those that found the most efficient ways to reproduce won the right to survive, produce seeds, and populate the earth.

A hundred thousand years ago, give or take, we showed up on the scene and began our search for ways to survive in this what’s-eating-what world. Then about 12,000 years ago, give or take, we developed the ability to civilize flowering plants, and by doing so, developed agriculture and became farmers.

Agriculture is the process of manipulating plants so as to increase the quantities of their edible parts. This business of manipulating plants, and their seeds, allowed us generate of a surplus of food, and with that surplus, some of us could move into cities.

Today we have the ability to reach into the very genes of flowering plants and re-program their phenotypic response to the world. And yet despite this incredible intelligence that we have developed, we are somehow losing our seeds and the intelligence those seeds contain. This loss leads us to ask:

Can civilization hold on to the seeds of its future?