THE SEEDS THAT WON’T SAVE US

WITH DR. XAN CHACKO

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

One might presume that botany—a broad term for the scientific study of plants that encompasses an investigation into species structure, ecology, classification, and beyond—deals with that which is alive. Bright green, sprouting, surrounded by their brethren. A rolling field, each blade of grass indistinguishable from the next.

But what if I told you that much of what botanists study looks entirely different? When they’re not in the field identifying and collecting plant specimens, these scientists are conducting research inside repositories of physical knowledge, storing botanical artifacts that have been pressed, dried, and/or frozen, stowed away for further study, future use, or safekeeping. One such repository is a seed bank. These facilities vary in purpose and function, but their general objective is to protect plant species’ genetic diversity through the preservation of their seeds. Some seed bank institutions might utilize their stores for agricultural research—specifically in service of engineering genetically modified species that are adaptive to climatic changes— while others are simply invested in genetic conservation. The practice of storing seeds goes back thousands of years, and seed banking as we know it today has taken place since the early 20th-century.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is located in Norway’s remote Spitsbergen archipelago. With its futuristic facade, Svalbard is just one highly visible example of an international institution, independent of any government entity. Dr. Xan Chacko, Director of Undergraduate Studies for Brown University’s department of Science, Technology, and Society, has spent the last two decades of her career investigating international seed banks like Svalbard: uncovering their histories, situating the scientific expertise they produce within their broader context. Chacko’s research, in her words, “complicates the taken-for-grantedness of scientific knowledge production.” She interrogates the ways in which these epistemological processes have historically taken place, and reimagines how we can continue to engage in knowledge-making in ways that avoid harm and provide for a livable future.

As a chill overtook the air and threaded between the dead hydrangeas that line College Hill, Dr. Chacko sat down with the College Hill Independent to discuss her recent research: how science is made in colonial and postcolonial systems, how feminist vocabularies can transform scientific research, and how seed banks can function within changing research and environmental ecosystems.

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Mariana Fajnzylber: Your current book project historicizes seed banking and interrogates its colonial legacies. For readers who may be unfamiliar: What is seed banking?

Dr. Xan Chacko: Seed banking is part of a whole myriad of different practices that are currently working in tandem in order to conserve the living systems that are on Earth. The idea is very simple. You take these seeds of the plants that are alive in the world and you bring them to a facility called a seed bank laboratory. Then you prepare them for long-term storage in a freezer. Most of these freezers are around minus 20 degrees Celsius. The idea is that by slowing down their metabolism in a sub-zero environment, we take advantage of the seeds’ natural capacity for dormancy. That’s what seed banking is. As I said, it’s part of a whole ecology of practices that emerge around the need to save biosystems.

MF: What major institutions are usually involved in this work?

XC: This form of seed banking is a pretty recent phenomenon because it requires the technology of the freezer. So while the practice of saving seeds across multiple seasons in cold, dry places has been part of systems of agriculture for more than 5,000 years, the extension of that in the freezer is relatively recent. You have to ask: Who has the capacity to maintain that kind of energy requirement? Who has the capacity and space to go about collecting and preparing seeds for long term storage?

Historically, these institutions have fallen into three main groups. One is the hyper-local, small-scale facility that is innovating and doing research in particular crops. These tend to be local government institutions. Then, we have [seed banks at] the national scale, to whom a local institution might say, we have all these seeds that we’re putting in our freezer, but there’s always a possibility for something to go wrong, like if our power fails or we have a flood. So it would be good for us to have a backup copy of our collection housed at a facility that is controlled by the national interest. The third kind of seed bank is the one that I’ve been focusing on most, because it is the one that symbolizes what I see as a recapitulation to colonial practices more clearly than anything else. And that is the international organization. They gather seeds from all over the world and claim responsibility for safeguarding them on behalf of the populations and places that are represented in that seed bank. And alongside those international organizations are private organizations that take on some of this kind of responsibility. The one that I spent the most of my time doing research on is the Millennium Seed Bank partnership, which is the seed bank of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, which is based in the UK. It’s partially government funded, but mostly privately funded.

MF: Your work looks at how these privately-funded facilities engage in conservation work, perhaps in their own self-interest. Could you expand a little bit more on the role that these entities play in seed banking today?

XC: The third category is the most publicly visible kind of seed bank. If you search for seed banks in the media, it’s predominantly those ones that come up. Funnily enough, those spaces tend to have very iconic architecture and edifices; they’re very photogenic, very clickbait-y. The other seed bank where I spend time in that third category is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. When I first started working on this project, I would have had to explain my research for the first five minutes of any conversation. But now, when I say the word ‘seed bank,’ more often than not people have seen something: Oh, you mean the one in the Arctic? It’s so good that people are doing that. And I guess that’s the other part that was really intriguing to me, that these institutions like Kew and Svalbard have managed to gather public approval and quite a lot of private funding to support their activities.

For me, it was very curious because I know that there’s this huge system of safeguarding seeds that has been taking place since the early 20th century. Yet the ones that folks pay the most attention to are these big flashy ones. There are books being published about them. There are no books being published about the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources in New Delhi, even though they have more genetic diversity than Svalbard. By a lot. It baffled me that there was all this interest suddenly happening in this space. So, part of my project was shaped to attend to this. How is this rhetoric of [saviorism] being mobilized to gather interest and support for this research? How likely is this research to actually be viable? This whole seed banking project has built into it a kind of unknown future. We must do this now, otherwise we won’t have anything in the future. But we will only know if this was efficacious in the actual future. One that doesn’t yet exist.

There’s a part of us that needs those kinds of stories. We need the hope that the seed banks offer, amidst the doom that they already portray. Take the Svalbard institution. How does that not already communicate that we’ve done something wrong? You’re supposed to be keeping something alive in this seemingly inhospitable environment? They even call it the ‘doomsday’ vault.

What these seed banks have been really good at doing is showcasing examples where they have reintroduced plants that have gone extinct from ecosystems. I call them their poster plants. One of these poster plants at Kew was a species that had gone extinct in South Africa that had been part of their historical collections, but actually [landed in] the UK by theft. All of those stories can be greenwashed: They have managed to save those seeds where they have now become extinct, and by saving them in the freezer, they’ve actually prolonged their lives— so it doesn’t matter how they got there.

MF: Going back to the comment you made a few minutes ago, about these private, international initiatives as a recapitulation of colonial projects: Some of your historical research draws attention to the practices and legacies of plant exploration, or, as you refer to it, ‘plant hunting.’ These USDA-led expeditions were led not by professional botanists or farmers, but self-described ‘explorers.’ Could you expand more on the ways in which imperial projects coincided with scientific research, particularly in the field of botany? Does this history feel linked to the private influence exerted in botany today? How so?

XC: I started my training in the history of science. One of the areas I was really drawn to was about how knowledge about the world was created under colonialism, the process of colonial transfer as being key to the production of knowledge about the world and the kind of classification systems that we have inherited. So, for instance, the gender binary, racial hierarchies, were created by scientists who were examining bodies of plants, animals, and humans. [They were] trying to make sense of the world that they had already felt they understood very well, trying to make sense of ‘scientific objects’ that were new to them.

I thrived thinking about those questions: transport and translation and the lives and impacts of intermediary players who did not manage to have their stories valorized. We always hear about Darwin and Hooker doing their travels, but we don’t necessarily hear about the brokers, the intermediaries, the translators, the guides in the places where they were that took them to see the things they were asking to find. The intermediaries took these scientists to see the things that they had already known existed. Yet the scientists still managed to call it their discovery.

I spent a lot of time thinking about it along the animal side, but I found that my colonial science training came alive when I was thinking about plants. In your need to be able to survive in a new place, whether it’s because of settler or market colonialism, understanding what not to eat and what to eat, what’s going to give you a headache and what’s going to kill you—it’s a question of life and death. The kind of analytical work that goes into the movement of people and plants from one place to the whole world for migration or economic gain requires not only an understanding of the plants, but also of plants as the primordial experimental subjects.

Keeping track of what plants are involved in these exchanges needs to always be alongside our study of human labor systems and social reproduction, a lot of what we now see as racial capitalism. And institutions like Kew [historically] have been central in doing things like ‘discovering’ something in one place, bringing them back to Kew, and then transporting them to their different colonies to see if they could be useful and productive and profitable.

Part of the reason why I was curious to follow the story into the 21st century, as a postcolonial subject myself, was because I thought that this story was in the realm of the historians.

But then, as part of a science communication project, I went to Kew. I was in London, we were doing a thing on plants, so of course you have to go and hang out with people at Kew. And when I went to Kew they were like, Oh, if you’re talking about cutting-edge plant science, you need to go to the Millennium Seed Bank. And I was like, what is this thing you speak of? And this was the early 2000s, so there wasn’t a lot in the papers about it. When I went to the Millennium Seed Bank and heard what the project was, and why it was so crucial to our very survival as a human species, some part of me was like, wait, hold on. You’re telling me that you have expeditions that you get funded and you go to places around the world and then you collect up their seeds and then you bring them back to London? I was like, this is very… similar to this other thing that was happening 150 years ago, that, for all intents and purposes, I thought was over.

There’s the very literal aspect of the accumulation, which is profoundly similar. But more than that is the rhetoric of neoliberalism, which is a different kind of rhetoric than what was being mobilized in the colonial period, but of which there is a colonial legacy. This is overtly paternalistic: We owe it to these places that have been subjugated through colonialism. Institutions like Kew will offer things like skills training for scientists in those countries to do identification and collection—the ‘right way’ to do things because Kew knows the ‘right way,’ of course—and they might sponsor facilities for them to do the same kind of seed banking in that country.

The idea is that we’re not taking all of your seeds, we’re just gonna be the backup, and whenever you want them, you can take them back from us. Whether or not that has actually panned out is to be seen in the future.

MF: But there’s no provision of capital or other resources from institutions like Kew to ensure that happens, right?

XC: Correct.

MF: So much of this research deals with materiality, right? These physical specimens, seeds, these storage facilities, even artistic or journalistic artifacts. But I’m also interested in the way that your work deals with language. You just published a journal article that outlined a feminist genealogy of the word ‘seed.’ It seemed to me that so much of that article was rooted in how we conceptualize scientific production as an economic imperative rather than an act of care. Can you speak a little more about the role of the words we use in producing scientific knowledge?

XC: I’m a devotee of Donna Haraway, and Haraway articulates very clearly how much it matters what language we use to understand the world. It matters what concepts we think with. Haraway has been really inspired by the work of science fiction writer Ursula Le Guin, who meditates on the idea of naming as being this profoundly world-making phenomenon. When you do it in poetry, when you do it in literature, when you do it in art through different media, it doesn’t necessarily have the same kind of standardizing, homogenizing, and universalizing effect that it can have when it comes out of the sciences. One of the cunning traps of science is that the representations of the world that are being created out of science do not care about whether they are just. They just have to be ‘accurate.’ There is this experimental forces of science in order to be revealed to us mere mortals about how the world actually is. It has the sticking power, such that even if we know that certain terms or certain categories are actually harmful or not true, it’s really difficult to work against the incredible inertia built into their usage, getting people to not only change their minds, but change beliefs.

In the plant world, it’s particularly frustrating because plants have been horrifically misrepresented in the way that we know them through the binomial nomenclature that we have inherited. Not only does Linnaeus [the ‘father of taxonomy’] assume that there are correlates to human male and female anatomy in plants, but also the way that the classification of plants happens in Linnaean systems portrays them as husband and wife, as specifically heteronormative and heteropatriarchal.

And that is very dangerous because it does not accurately reflect the reality out there at all, which is supposed to be the fundamental reason why science has so much power. What if I told you that 80 percent of the flowering plants have both the male and the female sex organs in their flowers? How can an overwhelming majority of beings be an ‘aberrant’ outsider in the way that we consider it for human beings? We either need to change what we consider to be an outsider from the human perspective, or we need to radically revise the way that we understand plants.

MF: Or both.

XC: Yes, yes. The thing that I tell people who are like, Oh, you’re a feminist science studies person. Why are you paying so much attention to plants? is well, we have a lot to learn from plants. What could we learn by actually vegetalizing ourselves, by looking at the kinds of kin relations, the kinds of networks of communication that plants have? It would radically open up the possibilities for human community, collaboration, kinship. Plants are famous for doing interspecies breeding, for being overwhelmingly hermaphroditic, and for having ecologies of relations that are intricately a part of the reproductive processes. They’re so much more radical than we would even dream to be. Gender studies and queer studies have a lot to learn from plants, because they have been modeling nonheteronormative kin for their entire existence.

MF: But the language imposed on plants seems to me to be a very active agent in these colonial histories of botany. Do you see these Western, colonial epistemologies being undone in the field of botany, and specifically in the practice of seed storing?

XC: That’s a very hopeful question. I can’t say that the spaces that I am spending so much time in are really open to rethinking not only their practices, but also their epistemologies. There are some indications that this buzzword of ‘decolonization’ could be something that motivates institutions to rethink some of their practices, but when you have the twin crises of the climate and extinction, it’s really difficult. I have had conversations with folks where I’ve been met with resistance; that to stop the work that they’re doing and slow down could be the difference between success or failure. That’s how strongly they are embedded in the logic of the crisis. And the crisis is real; I’m not a crisis denier. Yet at the same time it is so blatantly obvious to me that part of the reason that we look at some of the historical collections and talk about returning them to the communities from which they were taken.

It’s a very negative answer to your question, but the reality is, I don’t see it happening in the spaces that I’m following. There are other small, non-governmental organizations that are doing all kinds of fantastic work, working with farmers, working with local communities, taking seeds out of museums and repatriating them into indigenous communities. Those people exist. Their work is fantastic. That’s not the story I’m telling.

If people take anything away from spending five minutes with me it is that there are 1500 seed banks. It’s not going to be Svalbard, it’s never going to be Svalbard. Svalbard exists as an icon. It’s not meant to directly serve people; it directly serves the institutions that have banked seeds there. Local institutions like the Rice Research Station in Southern India are not affiliated with any multinational corporation. They’re entirely government funded, and they have produced new [rice] varieties that can withstand antibiotic stresses that are happening because of climate change. They have been successfully introducing new varieties every year that farmers, including my father, have had great success in growing. There’s a side of the seed banking story that is actively connected with food production that you never hear about, that is just constantly going on in the background.

MF: In this work of more accurately situating both historical and modern-day institutions within a colonial legacy, how can we better study botany and produce better technoscientific research?

XC: I see my role in bringing those things together split between my responsibilities in publication and in teaching. Part of what I try to do in all of my classes is make it such that folks who have science backgrounds or don’t have science backgrounds can come together to create a common vocabulary. It comes back to words. Because often if you don’t have scientific training, you may not necessarily be able to parse out the nuances of what is being promised versus the reality. Because if you’re not comfortable reading scientific journal articles, you’re not necessarily thinking about how this piece of science fits into a bigger ecology of scientific knowledge. And then from the science side: You may be very familiar with the actual science itself, but you may not necessarily be thinking of the kinds of impacts it has on the world and the worlds that have produced it in the first place. Studying the histories of the sciences that have produced the knowledge that you are embedded in as a scientist is incredibly empowering. It can be paralyzing at first to learn that the science that you are studying has deeply colonial and very troubling histories. But I think that if anything is, it should provide the impetus to do things differently.

The trouble with this God’s-eye, ‘objective reality’ that science provides is that it doesn’t recognize or take seriously that it matters not only who’s doing the science, but also why the science is being done. If we have folks who are better equipped to ask the questions about who this affects and in what way, then it leads to, hopefully, the production of scientists and people who are working toward a future that’s based in justice.

MARIANA FAJNZYLBER B’23.5 is pocketing cherry pits in case of end times.

I’m not much of an online shopper. In fact, I’m not much of a shopper at all. I could easily lie and say that I reject the capitalistic customs of our modern society, that I prefer to hand-sew my garments out of recycled fabrics rather than contribute to the insatiable appetite of the clothing industry. But to be honest, I’m as cheap as they come. I prefer to collect trinkets I find in antique stores and rain-swept gutters not only because I secretly wanted to be a crow as a child, but also because they cost less than faded Nirvana t-shirts at Spencer’s. So when I discovered Craigslist as a contemporary alternative to dumpster diving, I felt like I had entered an entirely new realm of purchasing power. With just a few clicks on my keyboard, I could find free scrap metal sold a few miles away by a man named Hank, or a signed copy of a book I had never heard of, or even a set of dusty medals from a bygone era. In middle school, I became known as the boy with the auctioneer’s hammer, constantly scrolling through endless pages of discounted garbage in search of a better bargain. Here’s a list of some of my favorite finds:

• A life-sized replica of Slimer from Ghostbusters ($120)

• A Philly cheesesteak ($450,000)

• A slightly melted Geiger counter ($35)

• An entire deli ($350,000)

• A goldfish named Kevin ($15)

• A flashdrive containing 80 books on Civil War prisons ($10.95)

• A “super funky and cool lamp” ($45)

• Free almonds ($5)

• A human hamster wheel (Free)

• A pair of vintage porcelain rats ($30)

• A haunted chair covered in claw marks (Free)

I never actually ended up purchasing anything, no matter how cheap. Being a 12-year-old Latino in Brooklyn, New York meant that buying anything online was strictly prohibited by my mother because God forbid somebody were to track my location and rob the duplex wedged between the projects and a rat-infested bodega. But since Craigslist’s offers are based on your location, living in New York proved to be an advantage. Weirdness and absurdity were abundant, and browsing Craigslist became my form of daily entertainment, similar to watching compilations of people getting hurt on yoga balls. As the years wore on, I slowly forgot about my sanctuary of discarded knick-knacks and dusty antiques. Like so many other parts of the World Wide Web that shaped my childhood, Craigslist became a relic of the past, left to rot in the corner of the internet where purple URLs curl up and die.

Time passed in a swift blur of academic drudgery. I grew a few feet, gained some scraggly facial hair, took some AP exams, and graduated high school. In what felt like the blink of an eye, I found myself sitting on an Amtrak headed to Providence, Rhode Island, a place I had never been before but that I knew would somehow become home over the course of four years. My mother stirred up a dizzying whirlwind of power strips, shower caddies, and dorm posters that reminded me of the Tasmanian Devil’s cartoonish antics. When the dust finally settled, I was sitting in a dorm room that felt like it had just landed on an alien planet thousands of miles away. I nodded my way through the tedium of orientation events, campus introductions, and icebreaker activities, a faux smile plastered onto my face. And the endless array of Instagram stories, Sidechat posts, and BeReals that bombarded my phone screen every night did nothing to help. I felt isolated and alone in a school that practically advertised its community as the world’s largest group hug. Was I doing something wrong? Or was something wrong with me? In a last-ditch effort to explore more of Providence without having to leave my room, I opened up my computer and logged back onto Craigslist for the first time in years. I was immediately met with the same stark UI that had greeted me so many years ago. It seemed that while I was busy growing up, Craigslist had refused to undergo even the simplest of changes, frozen in time like a digital fly trapped in pre-2000s amber. As I prepared to scroll through some local oddities and unwanted furniture, a feature near the bottom of the screen caught my eye: a section for forum pages. Wondering what people could possibly be discussing on a page dedicated to the unwanted, I clicked on the link and was sucked into a rabbit hole of internet obscurity.

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The Craigslist forums are an overwhelming hodgepodge of topics at first glance, ranging from “marriage problems” and “bicycling” to “taxes” and “philosophy.” There are no likes or retweets on these pages, nor are there accounts to click on or pop-ups to block. There aren’t even any photos. There is nothing but a gaping white void covered in tiny, pixelated letters that squirm like ants as your cursor scrolls past. In an age where the internet has become primarily known for its uses as either a mass-marketing machine or a government surveillance system, it is refreshing to see a website without any unnecessary add-ons or features. On a page called “missed connections,” people describe the fleeting moments of love they felt with a stranger in hopes that they may find them again. A man describes a moment of intimate eye contact he shared with a woman in a Whole Foods. Their eyes lingered for what felt like an eternity over two shopping carts stuffed with whole-grain bread and processed meats, then each person set off on their separate way. Star-crossed lovers, separated by the fact that they parked their cars in different spots. Maybe they will meet again, or maybe they were fated to be two ships passing in the night. Meanwhile, in a section titled “moving and relocation,” people leaving Rhode Island bid emotional farewells to their beloved pets, describing their lovable traits in hopes that someone will give them a new home. In another section, an elderly man discovers that he was adopted over half a century ago. After reaching out to a few extended family members to find his biological mother, he learns that she died at a very young age. All he has left of her is a single photograph.

The forums are full of stories like these. They are the lonely moments in life; the moments that often go undocumented and unnoticed. They are all cataloged here, immortalized within the binary code of a digital interface. Here’s a list of some of my favorite finds:

• A 71-year-old woman finds joy in her new job at a puppet museum. Her most frequent visitors are kindergarten children and dementia patients, and she describes being caught in a realm where one group is learning while the other is losing what they have learned.

• An author advertises his book about an elderly Christian man whose encounter with a rat makes him reconsider everything he believes in. The entire narrative is told through a series of back-and-forth emails. He says it’s based on a true story.

• A woman discovers that her aging father with dementia uses one of her purses to store his old mechanic’s tools. Another man notes that he makes paintings for his mother with Alzheimer’s that depict moments of her life before they fade away.

• A group of senior citizens commemorate their deceased friend named Clusterhead, who died last August from stomach cancer. He was an electrical engineer with a passion for motorcycles. His proverbs and sayings are now quoted regularly on the site. One of my favorites is this:

“Essentially, we’re all like a candle in the wind, one breath away from being extinguished.”

• A group of philosophers discuss the legitimacy of a website called the “Near Death Experience Research Foundation.” It is a page dedicated to the stories and experiences of those who have undergone NDEs (Near Death Experiences). They ultimately conclude that Jesus is a collective hallucination.

• A woman in a failing marriage begins writing haikus. She says it is like knitting for the mind. Here is her first attempt: space

Between toes Sand

• An entire forum is dedicated to people with insomnia talking while they wait for sleep to find them. This often involves teaching one another their favorite childhood nursery rhymes. Some tell stories about their friends and families, while others simply talk about their day.

• A man’s friend passes away with little to no recognition besides a brief obituary in a local newspaper. Known by the community as “Pure Gabby,” he was a kind man with a warm heart. His friend attaches a Spotify link to one of his songs called “Moonlight Lady.” It is now one of my favorite songs.

The Craigslist forums are a sobering glimpse into the extraordinary lives of ordinary people. Those lives may be ugly, flawed, or tragic, but they weave a web of the forgotten and the lost, united by their shared desire to be heard. This is not to suggest that the forums are a wholesome, loving community; Craigslist is no paradise. In fact, it is quite the opposite. It’s almost impossible to go five minutes without seeing a fight break out in the replies of a thread, no matter how mundane or inoffensive the subject may be. I am not saying that the internet can recreate the delicate warmth of human touch, or that these people truly found closure on a website used to sell vintage McDonald’s toys and moth-eaten jackets. But I am saying that even here, in the most unlikely of places, there is beauty to be found. I am saying that even in the loneliest of times, even during the days when you are surrounded by friend groups and spike ball nets and you