Much of the food we eat, the flowers that bloom, the trees that shade, grow from seed. A seed pit becomes an avocado, a seed sliver becomes a marigold, a seed acorn becomes an oak. With so many things around us growing and producing seeds, it seems people wouldn’t have to worry about saving them.
And yet they do. Changing climate and favorite varieties of plants like corn, mean that some plants are not growing the way they have throughout much of history. So people created a seed bank, a place to save millions of these tiny bringers of life, where they can be kept for future need.
Just in Case: Saving Seeds in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, is a picture book by Megan Clendenan that tells all about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault—which aims to save seeds from around the world—why it was created, and how it was built. The facts are astounding: the vault was built in the Arctic, deep in a mountain, where the treasures it holds are safe from earthquakes, fires, and asteroids. It protects more than 580 million seeds, and there’s plenty of room for more.
Illustrations by Brittany Cicchese perfectly capture the icy nature of the location, an island in Norway home to polar bears and Arctic foxes. The images set in Svalbard are mostly blue toned, giving the feeling of cold. In contrast, the illustrations of places where the seeds come from, shown in times of growth, are warm toned, with browns and mossy greens and rust reds.
Facts about seeds throughout the book are a great companion for learning. Also, there’s more information in the back about how the seeds are kept safe for the long term and what’s in the vault. It’s an interesting story that should have wide appeal for children who are drawn to stories about real life.
The publisher provided a copy of this title in exchange for my honest review.
