The New England-based Native Plant Trust has reached a milestone in an effort to bank 10 million seeds.
The trust is the oldest seed bank in the country, and focuses specifically on cataloging and conserving rare and endangered plant species that are native to New England. It's also focused on education, teaching homeowners to grow native plants in their lawns and gardens.
Tim Johnson, the organization's CEO, said that seed banks aren't just a scientific endeavor - they're an insurance policy for the future.
"Biodiversity, that variation in species and subspecies, that's what gives our ecosystems their functionality," he said. "It's what protects them from disturbances and when bad things happen, it's what allows them to bounce back."
A seed bank is a place where seeds are stored to preserve genetic diversity. They are usually flood, bomb and radiation-proof vaults holding jars of seeds from different plant species.
Johnson called seeds "the foundation for all human civilization."
"Although we have pocket computers that we carry around with us, and we can travel all around the world on jets, nature is the thing that provides us with the resources we actually can't manufacture: clean water, clean air, the cycling of nutrients which produce our food," he said. "Sometimes we can forget, especially in modern society, how utterly dependent we are on nature."
Native Plant Trust also announced they've received a $1.5 million dollar gift for their endowment, which Johnson says should safeguard their operations for years to come.