By Harry T. Cook

While the Earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease – so went Yahweh’s promise to Noah once the great inundation had ebbed. It was my first Sunday school memory verse learned by rote as a six-year-old boy among three other six-year-olds in the musty basement of a rural northern Michigan church. Genesis 8:22.

College and graduate school helped me understand the flood epic as truth-laden mythology – the truth being that Homo sapiens is possessed of a survival instinct along with a death wish.

Some of us work overtime to pump greenhouse gases into Earth’s atmosphere and to dump toxic effluent into its lakes and streams. Gasoline at the pump may soon cost as much as $4 a gallon, but the building of freeways goes on apace because road commissioners and road builders alike know that the ardor of America’s love-affair with the automobile is unabated after all these years.

There may not, after all, be a balm in Gilead to soothe the sin-sick soul, but there is an ark in Norway that may be humankind’s hope for survival if climate change wreaks the havoc some computer models predict, or if we do it the quicker way by nuclear war.

Deep inside an Arctic mountain at Longyearbyen on the Norse island of Svalbard is a plant bank in the vaults of which are being stored seeds and sprouts that New York Times writer Elisabeth Rosenthal in a recent article called “precious genetic resources that may be needed for man to adapt to climate change.”

Rosenthal likened the collection to “a back-up hard drive,” and, again, to Fort Knox.

I liken it to the mythic ark of Noah, though I suspect the Norway facility is not made of gopher wood pitched within and without, 300 cubits long by 50 cubits wide and 30 cubits tall, as were the divine specifications laid out in Genesis 6: 14-15.

But an ark it is, nonetheless, as the Noahs among us are paying attention to what is afoot upon this fragile rock, third out from the sun.

One of the Genesis writers depicted God as seeing that his human creation had grievously fouled its nest. The deity was grieved at heart that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. Thus were all the fountains of the great deep broken up and the windows of heaven opened.

We should be so lucky. Our problem may be liquid-related, all right: rising sea levels where we least can stand them and drought upon drought in the very areas of the planet in which food is already scarce. Where potable water is concerned, the words of Coleridge’s ancient mariner may apply: Water, water everywhere, nor a drop to drink.

So our collective human praise and thanksgiving goes out to the Noahs of Norway who with the Global Seed Vault – impervious, it is said, to earthquake and bomb blasts – are in the process of preserving, if not two by two, as many of the seeds of the past and present to guarantee some kind of future if and when the latter-day idiots over the likes of whom Yahweh once shook his head in anger bring cataclysm upon themselves and us.

Of course, the flat-earthers who persist in denying global warming conveniently forget the continued melting of the polar icecaps while they gloat over this colder- and snowier-than-average winter that has gripped parts of the world as a sign that things are going to be hunky-dory. And the august U.S. Senate recently caved to the Bush Administration and its good buddies, the oil lobby, in failing to extend vital tax credits to producers of wind, solar and other renewable power sources.

All aboard for Longyearbyen.

 © Copyright 2008, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.