Walk with me, on a hot day of wispy, white clouds and lines of dry grasses.

It was sparse in the bird department, because I unwittingly managed to pick a day at the refuge where landscape restoration was in full progress, chainsaw noises and large number of workers driving them into hiding. Or maybe the smoke from the nearby wildfires had displaced them, the smell still lingering.

For every missing bird there were about ten dragon flies and a hundred mosquitoes, at least in the more wooded areas of the Columbia River Delta.

There were butterflies galore,

but the real magic came from the air – it was filled with wisps of cotton seed and thistle down, flying about like snowflakes, in literal clouds drifting before a soft wind and getting caught on the vegetation eventually.

Seeds clung to plants, thoughts clung to seeds. In particular, the effects of war and greed on the seed repositories of the world. How will the increasing temperatures due to the climate crisis affect the Swalvard Seedbank, assumed to be safely storing humanity’s survival crops in permanent frost? You can now take a virtual tour of the vault here, by the way.

How will farmers recover their seed stocks when war manages to destroy seed banks and generally disrupt food production? Think of seed banks this way:

Seed banks represent genetic reservoirs of adaptive traits. By knowing the conditions under which the seed’s ancestors had developed, botanists can identify characteristics signaling where else a plant might thrive.For instance, wheat from regions getting only a few rains a year might point to some form of inherent drought tolerance. Similarly, strains of legumes that offer bounty crops when others succumb to blights might signal natural disease resistance. Those that fruit early may prosper where growing seasons are short. Those whose fruits ripen in cool to cold environments might survive high altitudes. And those with deep roots may anchor erodible hillsides.

As climate changes or communities begin extending a crop’s production into new areas, growers may need to find existing cultivars that match their current environment–or breeders may need to develop news ones by crossing varieties with a mix of desired features.

For each case, calls to the regional library of genes, a seed bank, may be in order. (Ref.)

This was written 10 years ago when the Afghan seed bank was destroyed by thieves. (To add insult to injury, the robbers took only the plastic and glass containers, emptying seeds, collected for decades, indiscriminately onto the floor, making them unusable.) Not having cataloged seeds that indicate their usability for a certain region is particularly dire in a country where so many farmers were displaced due to the war, and now have to work in regions unfamiliar and without seed starts that would flourish or at least survive there. How will Afghan farmers, now fully back under Taliban rule, get the seeds that were provided by NGO’s for the last decade, now barred from the country? I had written at length about a comparable situation not so long ago, if you recall, in regards to Syria, where at least scientists managed to save some catalogued repositories, smuggling them to safer countries.

I was reminded of it all due to this week’s report on Ukrainian losses from the Russian invasion. Last year Russian missiles destroyed part of an enormously precious Ukrainian herbarium at the University of Kherson. It served a vital role in the study of species extinction, invasive pests, and climate change The collection held specimens that can only be found in Ukraine and that are now at the brink of extinction. After all, about a third of all protected Ukrainian areas have been destroyed by bombing, burning, and military maneuvers. According to the non-profit Ukraine Nature Conservation Group (UNCG, whose Logo I adore, ) Russian troops have scorched tens of thousands of hectares of forests and put more than 800 plants at risk of extinction, including 20 rare species that have mostly vanished from elsewhere. And because they mined large swathes of land, scientists won’t be able for decades to see what can still be rescued, should this war ever stop.

What was left of the herbarium was rescued under somewhat harrowing circumstances by two devoted botanists this January, and moved to a different university in the country, some 1000 km away – also not entirely safe under war conditions. You can read about the efforts here.

I am usually not a fan of Eliot A. Cohen, but his deliberations on the West’s need for admitting Ukraine to NATO, a step severely curtailed by the U.S. and Germany during the recent summit, strike a chord with me. As he wrote in The Atlantic yesterday:

The only security commitments that can give Ukraine some prospect of peace are those that guarantee the active and effective support of Europe and the U.S. in the event of a renewed invasion. Bilateral guarantees, however, simply take the burden off America’s NATO allies and are hostage to the vagaries of American domestic politics. Far better to achieve the same result by bringing Ukraine into NATO as soon as possible. Let it be remembered, too, that in the three-quarters of a century it has existed, NATO has had a 100 percent success rate in deterring conventional Russian attacks on its members, including postage-stamp-size Estonia and other states that, like Ukraine, were once subject to rule from Moscow.

The noise of the chain saws stopped during lunch break and the quiet was noticeable, encouraging the deer to emerge, close enough to where I was resting in the shade that I could see the hair in their ears.

I was thinking about how war changes both, the soundscape of the environment and the way people are listening, with silence often more threatening than actual sounds, heralding an anticipated attack, the moment before the (fire) storm. It was interestingly an aspect of war that both of my parents were willing to talk about (in contrast to abiding silence on many others), from the perspective of living in Berlin during bombing raids (my mother) and the battlefield (my father.) There is a fascinating literature emerging on the issue – you can download an edited volume about the Sounds of War and Peace published a few years ago, of interest to me in its relation to memory research. A groundbreaking book by Joy Damousi, Sounds and Silence of War, is on my list to read about the topic from a cultural historian’s perspective. And now we have artists and historians record the sounds experienced in Ukraine, during the war, at very different locations and occasions. I am linking to the description of the project here, and it is worthwhile reading the essay. Some of the links to the sounds (found in the bolded titles) are working, others not so much, I believe the acoustics.net server might have limited capacity. Worth a try, though.

Here is music by a young Ukrainian composer. One of her new scores was chosen to be among the ones played by the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra for the 2023/24 season after an open call for scores this January.