{"id":15075,"date":"2017-04-13T08:44:02","date_gmt":"2017-04-13T16:44:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/?post_type=blog&p=15075"},"modified":"2023-09-06T16:02:39","modified_gmt":"2023-09-06T23:02:39","slug":"banking-on-seeds-rare-diverse-and-endangered","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/blog\/banking-on-seeds-rare-diverse-and-endangered\/","title":{"rendered":"Banking on Seeds: Rare, Diverse, and Endangered"},"content":{"rendered":"

When <\/span>National Geographic Magazine<\/span><\/i> reported that about 94% of the world\u2019s vegetable seeds circa 1903 are now missing from the Earth, Taggart Siegel and Jon Betz promptly started work on a feature-length documentary about the seed saving movement. The product of their labor, <\/span>SEED: The Untold Story<\/span><\/i><\/a>, i<\/span>s the third in the filmmakers’ trilogy (which includes <\/span>The Real Dirt on Farmer John<\/span><\/i> and <\/span>Queen of the Sun: What Are the Bees Telling Us?<\/span><\/i>) that uncovers the subtle connections between food and the natural world. \u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

As infrequently as seeds are the subject of dinner conversation, when we do take notice of what the plant world is up to, it’s mind-bending to realize all this is happening underneath our noses (and feet). \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Nobody believed a farmer who, in 1876, grew a squash that purportedly exerted a lifting force of 5 thousand pounds per square inch. So he set up an exhibit and invited the public to come and see. Out of curiosity, this Massachusetts farmer had harnessed a squash to a weight-lifting device with a dial like a grocer’s scale to measure the pressure exerted by the expanding fruit, and kept piling on counterbalancing weight. (Via writer Annie Dillard, who cites Rutherford Platt’s story in The Great American Forest<\/em>, as “one of the most interesting books ever written.”)<\/p>\n

SEED<\/span><\/i> is the documentary version of that Massachusetts farmer, inviting us to come and see the expansive potential in these silent species. To show us this hidden world, the film introduces passionate, quirky subjects who steward us along. <\/span><\/p>\n

One such character is the seed-saving botanist Joe Simcox who traipses through the jungles of Peru and the Kalahari Desert telling us, \u201cWhen people ask, \u2018how do we feed a hungry world?\u2019 I say, \u2018what about the wild things?\u2019\u201d Simcox is part of a worldwide network of seed savers. A latter-day Doctor Livingstone, he travels to some of the world\u2019s more extreme habitats searching for the planet\u2019s rarest seeds. \u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n