An article from the Center for World Indigenous Studies tells of the work of Mahan Chandra who is in a race to preserve Indian native rice seed before the effects of climate change threatens to destroy these varieties.
Chandra travels to villages across Northern India, meeting with elders of the communities to create his “seed-saving” library that has now grown from 2 to 250 different kinds of rice.
Seed preservation libraries are not new with the most famous one being the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway that preserves the world’s crops and plants in case of some type of global disaster.
No one wants to think about or consider doomsday scenarios, yet each of us spend many minutes of our day worrying about how our lives might derail in circumstances that will probably never happen. Worrying is a adaptive capacity that we have to make sure we are protecting the downside and managing risk. That kind of thinking is a resilience strategy and it never hurts to make sure we are considering how to avoid disasters (whether real of contrived.)
So, we buckle up in the car, create a saving account for rainy days, and take an umbrella with us when it is cloudy. Preparation doesn’t take much more effort than stopping and considering what dangers might be out there and putting a preventive step in place to ensure that we’re ready for it just in case it happens. This week, you may want to pay attention to how you are managing personal risk and whether your fretting about this or that really makes your life better or merely takes energy away from other productive activities. Mr. Chandra’s work is truly designed to help save the planet and based on the picture above, he looks like he is having a good time.
© Richard Citrin, All rights reserved, 2018
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