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The first year the Hudson Valley Seed Company tried to grow yakteen on their farm in upstate New York, the heirloom variety of Palestine gourd spread rapidly until its vines were sending their tendrils over an entire acre of land. Born out of a partnership with artist, researcher and conservationist Vivien Sansour, that pilot was just one of many pieces of evidence that supported Sansour’s thesis: that it could benefit not only Palestinians but help sustain an entire planet in crisis.
Sansour is the founder of the Palestinian Heirloom Seed Library, a project that began in 2016 to preserve Palestinian heritage and culture by saving heirloom seed varieties and telling the stories and history of their origin.
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The project feels particularly urgent in the context of Israel’s ongoing bombing of Gaza, there is the impending “man-made” famine that aid groups claim is imminent and the knowledge that last year was the hottest on record. “The seed library’s mission is to revitalize and preserve a living archive of our heirloom seeds,” Sansour said. “Not only for Palestine, but also for the world. The world is in a hospice state and we need all the different tools and biodiversity we can to adapt.”
Sansour’s love for edible plants was born in Beit Jala in the West Bank, where she spent many of her formative childhood years. She remembers Beit Jala when it was still a small village rather than a town, full of terraced gardens full of stone fruits, olives, artichokes and herbs. “My life has always been a beautiful bouquet of diversity in terms of plant life,” she said. But as time went on, that biological diversity began to shrink as the climate crisis affected long-standing growing cycles, Israeli settlements encroached on the land and agribusiness pushed local growers out away from the types of seeds that had been planted for generations.
Within a period of about 10 years, the area “went from “soil and sun-based agriculture” where various crops were grown together, to a monocropped system that was heavily dependent on Israeli agricultural businesses for inputs seeds and chemicals, said Sansour.
It was against this background that she decided to start the seed library, to try to “nurture and preserve the things we love that have kept us alive for thousands and thousands of years”. Sansour started talking to local growers to identify which foods were most at risk of extinction and collecting those seeds, like those of the jadu’i watermelon grown in Jenin or the white cucumber grown in Battir and Wadi Fukin, and building relationships with local farmers to encourage and support them to cultivate those varieties again. Another branch of the project, called the Traveling Kitchen, includes a small portable kitchen that Sansour sets up and maintains in public places from the West Bank to London, Chicago and New York to encourage conversation with passersby about cultural preservation through food. .
The work has earned high praise from the world of international art (she has presented her work at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the Venice Art Biennale) to the academic world (she was a fellow of the religion, conflict and peace initiative at the University Harvard and is currently the celebrity art fellow at Bard College in New York’s Hudson Valley). But what Sansour wants is recognition and to see the people, culture and landscapes she loves intertwined.
“I got into seed work as a result of a lot of pain and grief,” she said. “Losing so many of the things I love.”
As in Palestine, so in the world
Some of the challenges facing Palestinian farmers and cultural foods are related to the geopolitical realities of the region, while others are shared by small farmers around the world in the face of a changing climate and the growing impact of industrialized agriculture.
The former category includes threats of harassment from Israeli soldiers and settlers, farmers being denied access to their land and crops or having their water cut off. Other times, Sansour said, settlers and soldiers will set fire to crops or “wild” land, destroying food sources for a group of people for whom hunting has historically been second nature, especially in the winter. In more difficult cases, violence directly confronts cultivators. One recent case of an olive grower being shot and killed while harvesting his orchard received international attention, but Sansour is aware that such cases are often overlooked in the international community, recalling a lesser-known story about a young female farmer who Sansour thought to be. at the forefront of “the new generation of farming”, who was shot in the stomach on her way home from school.
“We’re literally talking about the guardians of these seeds being killed,” Sansour said.
Where Sansour grew up in Beit Jala, agriculture is blocked by what she and many other Palestinians describe as an “apartheid wall”. The barrier, built by Israel in the West Bank, has displaced many Palestinian families from their olive groves and made it difficult for residents to build more housing as the town’s population grew. As a result, families are building on top of each other, and the terraced gardens that Sansour remembered from her childhood are more crowded.
But many of the other challenges Palestinian farmers face are those they share with small farmers everywhere. “A lot of our farmers will say: ‘One of the biggest problems we have is that it rains in the summer, and that’s something that never happened.’ So crop varieties that are used for drying weather in the summer are sometimes inundated,” said Sansour.
The changing climate is part of the reason Sansour is so passionate about saving seeds, because she says we’ll need all the biodiversity we can get to deal with current and future crises. pertaining to a warming globe. Where Palestine used to have a “whole world” of different types of wheat, now there are only two commonly cultivated types – meaning that if growing cycles affect one of those types, it puts food security at risk for one of those types. everyone. Saving seeds from a wider range of varieties will lead to better recovery, she says.
And the recovery will not only benefit farmers in the West Bank or Gaza. She points to seed varieties bred by Palestinians over thousands of years to grow abundantly in the summer without irrigation, often called “ba’al” crops, after the Canaanite god of the same name. “I have people in California calling me asking for these varieties, because we have droughts in California right now. So a fava bean that grows without irrigation is very valuable,” she said. “Our work is also research work. How do we develop varieties that can tolerate more heat or more flooding?”
Seeds from the library have already begun to “grow wings” and make their way around the globe, from the yakteen in upstate New York to the eggplant in California.
“Sharing seeds can create strong cross-cultural bonds while holding us accountable for historical injustices and current dilemmas. Seeds represent destruction and loss as well as the dream and possibility of survival,” said K Greene, founder of Hudson Valley Seed Co. balance of supply.”
Greene notes that customer response to yakteen seed packages has been overwhelmingly positive, and Hudson Valley Seed Co sold out of the seeds last year.
“Seed stories are multi-layered; not all the stories are as romantic as a lot of people would like,” Greene continued. “The Palestine Heirloom Seed Library gives everyone a firm resolve not to be shy, but instead to find ways to share the ambitious and challenging stories of seeds.”
Sansour notes that the project is called a “seed library” rather than a “seed bank” for a reason. It’s about partnering with people who will grow things now rather than preserving seeds in some safe vault for some future doomsday, because in Sansour’s view, “doomsday is already here.”
“I got an email from people in Gaza asking me what is there to eat in the wild right now, like, ‘what could be growing outside that we can eat? Because we are hungry.’ That email made me cry, not only because they are hungry, but also because it made me realize the urgency of the work we are trying to do,” said Sansour. Reconnecting with heirloom seeds also means trying to preserve cultural knowledge about food that is already growing wild, in times of crisis and with the dream that someday it might be enjoyed in times of prosperity as well.
“Every time we plant a seed or plant a tree, we are planting it with hope and with the intention of having a future,” Sansour said.
