Reclaiming the Stolen Harvest:

The following was penned for the February 4, 2007 program for Seedy Sunday, the United Kingdom's largest seedswap.

"The time has come to reclaim
the stolen harvest."

- Vandana Shiva

A new natural and cultural drama is unfolding. Revolutionary insights into the nature of seed stewardship are fuelling a sudden surge in our understanding of how to steward plants, landscapes and our own lives, in a manner that is authentically rooted in a co-evolutionary dialog with Nature, rather than along lines dictated by the closed, essentially synthetic rationales of a dominator mentality. As you might expect, these insights are myriad: but let us focus here on one key observation.

No plant breeder worth their salt will pretend that the major imperative behind plant breeding strategies is not an economic one. As such, the overriding focus of recent decades has been on fashioning breeding techniques to create plants that are ‘hybrids’ - life forms whose genetic structures are literally, structurally, proprietary. When we save seed from a hybrid, the 'temporary holding pattern' of a cross between two typically highly-inbred parents, and replant it, the resulting progeny is highly unstable. It does not breed true. What we get, instead, is a highly variable mess that also 'disguises' the genetic inheritance of the parental lines. Hence, farmers and, more importantly, seed industry competitors, see little benefit in 'growing out' hybrids. Hybrid vendors lock a recurring annual profit into the structure of life and with it, their balance sheet. The majority of the food plants we and our animals now eat, are hybrids.

And yet, the true absurdity of hybrids is not that they prevent us from saving seed that breeds ‘true’ – a somewhat superficial characteristic - but rather the evolutionary dead end that such an economic power play demands. By deliberate design, hybrid genetics cripple the defining biological dynamic that makes possible an ecologically coherent interplay between plants, landscapes and people, through time. The foundational co-evolutionary symbiosis that has existed between food plants and local cultures, both human and non-human, for countless centuries, is thus fractured. We have become unhinged.

Open-pollinated (OP) varieties, as distinct from hybrids, are entirely different constructs. Here are organisms which do not ‘de-volve’ at the culmination of each cycle of growth. Indeed, precisely the antithesis: OP crops breed ‘true’ from season-to-season. They are capable not only of being handed down, and improved from year-to-year, but also of being reinterpreted and used as inspiration for new varieties. With each and every cycle of replanting, open-pollinated varieties evolve with their environment and us: as we evolve with them. Fundamentally then, the genetics of open-pollinated crops embody an unbroken, co-evolutionary feedback loop, reflecting a synergistic array of countless cultural interrelationships, both human and non-human, which characterize the local web of life. OP varieties, in other words, possess an evolutionary integrity and with it, access to both the wisdom and means - entirely precluded by hybrids – of conscious stewardship.

Because our cultures, wherever we live, are held up by our food webs – literally, that which most deeply sustains us – the art of seed stewardship amounts to a root activity animating cultural values at large. So it is hardly surprising that the stewardship of open-pollinated food crops, following nature's designs and meeting nature's needs, is now emerging as a centerpiece of burgeoning efforts worldwide, to reclaim and restore foundational cultural values along ecologically coherent lines - in the implicit image of openness, interdependence, abundance and the regenerative power of Nature.

Where efforts are indeed moving away from reliance on hybrids and toward open-pollinated seed, the consequences are proving revelatory. We are finding, for example, that the open-pollinated phenomenon naturally lends itself to stewardship activities that exist, literally, beyond the ecological reach of Big Money – as befits approaches that are small-scale, highly-localized, and inextricably related to the long term care of the larger ecologies in which they are embedded. The implications are startling. If biological realpolitik is now clearly placing the mantle of authentic cultural stewardship squarely beyond the centralizing grasp of the ancien regime, who, in your neighborhood, will now assume it? Which crop varieties hold the most promise for you and your local landscape? Where are they to be found? What, all of a sudden, is to be done?