“Do not lay up for yourselves

treasures on earth,

where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal;

but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.

For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also. “

Matthew 6

I always though this was pretty good advice: Not to go poor and starkers here on Earth if you can avoid it, but that the best of things are those that go beyond heaps of gold and sheaves of bearer bonds.

Turns out there is an exception to Matthew’s rule; an Earthly treasure that can and should be stored up here and now.

From Reuters.

Arctic vault takes shape for world food crops
Thu Sep 20, 2007 2:35am EDT

By John Acher

LONGYEARBYEN, Svalbard (Reuters) - In a cavern under a remote Arctic mountain, Norway will soon begin squirreling away the world's crop seeds in case of disaster.

Dynamited out of a mountainside on Spitsbergen island around 1,000 km (600 miles) from the North Pole, the store has been called a doomsday vault or a Noah's Ark of the plant kingdom.

It is the brainchild of a soft-spoken academic from Tennessee who is passionate about securing food for the masses, and will back up seed stores around the world that are vulnerable to loss through war or disaster.

A 20-metre (66-foot) long concrete entrance, still under scaffolding, juts out of the snow-dusted mountain above the coal-mining town of Longyearbyen.

It is reached by a switchback road rising to 120 meters above sea level, offering spectacular views of the fjord below and snow-capped Arctic mountains beyond.

Visitors descend through the mouth of a gently sloping 40-metre steel tube into the frosty cavern which smells of new cement and is dotted with portable lamps as work progresses for February's opening.

"There aren't going to be any better storage conditions than what we will provide here," founder Cary Fowler told reporters during a recent visit to the site in the Svalbard archipelago off northern Norway. "This is a safety deposit box, like in a bank, where you put your valuables."

Although this is one of the world's most northerly settlements, an electric freezer will be used to keep the seeds in the three-chambered concrete-lined vault at minus 18 degrees Celsius (minus 0.4 Fahrenheit).

If the power fails, permafrost will still keep them frozen, but not as deeply.

The project is at the heart of an effort by Fowler's foundation, the Global Crop Diversity Trust, to safeguard strains of 21 essential crops, such as wheat, barley and rice.

Rice alone exists in about 120,000 different varieties.

…

The aim is to preserve genetic diversity, needed by plant breeders in the future to produce varieties able to adapt to challenges like climate change.

Crops consist of numerous species, some as different from each other as a "Dachshund from a Great Dane", Fowler said.

If such a store had existed 10 years ago, he said, the seeds would have been needed about once a year as seed collections have been wiped out -- for instance by a typhoon in the Philippines and war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"I'm sorry to say we will be using it a lot," Fowler said.

Eventually, the vault will have capacity for around 4.5 million bar-coded seed samples and it hopes in its first year to collect half a million.

…

What Fowler is protecting is nothing less than the future itself.

Or, rather, the idea that the future is a real place where our children and grandchildren will have to live, work, eat and dance.

A place that deserves our treasure, our labor and our hearts.

Because as Richard Feynman said:

“We are at the very beginning of time for the human race. It is not unreasonable that we grapple with problems. But there are tens of thousands of years in the future. Our responsibility is to do what we can, learn what we can, improve the solutions, and pass them on.”

As for me, I don’t need to believe in a Great Bennigan's in the Sky to be happy, or a Hell to frighten me into doing the right thing.

I will settle for knowing that in 10,000 years our descendents will still be here, fucking around, savoring fine writing over a dram of the Irish (made from the umpteenth generation progeny of one of Fowler’s barleys perhaps), and still be striving to figure out the lyrics to "Bennie and the Jets"

("She's got electric boobs"? "Her mom has two"? WTF?)

That a hundred centuries from now the human heart will still be grappling with the Big Questions, that human hands will still be healing, knitting and building amazing things. And that human eyes will be watching sunrises on Mars, the rings of Saturn from Titan, or interstellar whatnots zinging past as we move out among the stars.

That is a treasure worth fighting for.

That is Heaven enough for me.