Episode Details

About 20 years ago, Cary Fowler and Geoffrey Hawtin wanted to prevent hunger and protect the world’s food supply. The two men imagined a so-called “doomsday vault” for plant seeds. (A vault is a secure storage structure.) 

大约 20 年前，卡里·福勒 (Cary Fowler) 和杰弗里·霍廷 (Geoffrey Hawtin) 希望防止饥饿并保护世界粮食供应。 两人想象了一个所谓的“末日金库”来存放植物种子。 （保险库是一种安全的存储结构。） 

Fowler and Hawtin’s goal was to keep a supply of seeds safe if existing seed banks were threatened by war, climate change, or other crises. They decided to build their storage building into the side of a mountain north of the Arctic Circle. 

福勒和霍廷的目标是在现有种子库受到战争、气候变化或其他危机威胁时确保种子供应安全。 他们决定将仓库建在北极圈以北的一座山的一侧。 

“To a lot of people today, it sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing to do,” Fowler said from Saudi Arabia in an interview with the Associated Press. Seeds, he added, are a valuable natural resource that needs protection. 

“对于今天的很多人来说，这听起来是一件完全合理的事情，”福勒在沙特阿拉伯接受美联社采访时说。 他补充说，种子是一种宝贵的自然资源，需要保护。 

But Fowler said: “Fifteen years ago, shipping a lot of seeds to the closest place to the North Pole that you can fly into (and) putting them inside a mountain…” did not sound reasonable. In his words, it was “…the craziest idea anybody ever had.” 

但福勒说：“十五年前，将大量种子运送到距离北极最近的地方，你可以飞到（并）将它们放入山中……”听起来不太合理。 用他的话说，这是“……任何人曾经有过的最疯狂的想法。”

Their idea became the Svalbard Global Seed Vault on the Norwegian island of Svalbard. The vault opened in 2008 and now holds 1.25 million seed samples from nearly every country in the world. The structure was built into the side of a mountain. It protects the seeds of over 6,000 kinds of agriculturally important plants. The Crop Trust website says: “Its purpose is to backup genebank collections to secure the foundation of our future food supply.” 

他们的想法变成了位于挪威斯瓦尔巴群岛的斯瓦尔巴全球种子库。 该金库于 2008 年开放，目前保存着来自世界上几乎每个国家的 125 万份种子样本。 该结构建在山的一侧。 它保护 6,000 多种重要农业植物的种子。 农作物信托网站称：“其目的是备份基因库收藏，以确保我们未来粮食供应的基础。” 

Last week, Fowler and Hawtin were nam