Authors: Dan Lewis
The last sighting of a dodo bird was in 1662. It is probably the quintessential example of an extinct species. The dodo is long gone, dead—never to return. And in general, that is what “extinct” means.
But sometimes, an exception occurs—such is the case of the Judean date palm.
The Judean Desert extends, roughly, from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea. As the name implies, not a lot of flora grow in the area. But up until about 1,500 to 2,000 years ago, a tree called the Judean date palm was generally plentiful in the area. The tree, which became the symbol of the region roughly 2,500 to 3,000 years ago, provided fruit (dates) to the people in the area as well as shade and shelter. When the Romans captured the region and destroyed the second Jewish Temple in the year 70, the Roman emperor Vespasian minted a coin called the “Judaea Capta.” The back of the Capta depicts a Judean date palm, demonstrating how prevalent the tree was in the area.
Yet soon after it vanished. Exports of the dates ended under Roman rule, and sometime before the year 500 the Judean date palm disappeared from the area—and, therefore, the world.
The tree would have been lost forever but for one thing. An early Roman ruler of the area, Herod the Great, built a fortress on top of a mesa called Masada about a century before the destruction of the Second Temple. Masada still exists today (and, in fact, is one of Israel’s top tourists attractions). In the mid-1960s, excavators working on the site found some seeds well preserved in ancient pottery. Using carbon-dating techniques, researchers determined that the seeds were 1,900 to 2,000 years old. They kept the seeds in storage for forty years until they could plant them with reasonable success of germination, and in 2005, did exactly that. The seeds were placed in a special, hormone-infused soil.
Eight weeks later, one of the seeds sprouted. By 2010, the young tree had reached a height of two meters tall, and the Judean date palm returned from the land of the dodo. Today, the tree—male—lives on a kibbutz in southern Israel. Plans are being made to mate it with a female tree of another species, in hopes of developing fruit by the mid-2020s.
BONUS FACT
Over the past few decades, China has taken many steps to protect existing forests while encouraging the planting of new trees. In 1999, for example, the government banned the cutting down of trees in natural forests, and, as recently as 2010, China has invested more than $8 billion annually in planting new trees. It is one of two nations that have had a net gain in the number of trees thus far in the (admittedly young) twenty-first century. The other? Israel. The mostly desert landscape now has 240 million trees, according to the Jewish National Fund, which coordinates tree planting throughout the country, allowing anyone (even people outside of Israel) to fund the planting of a tree—one for $18 or three for $36.
Imagine a monstrous building embedded in the ice and snow of a Norwegian island in the Arctic Circle. The building resembles something out of
The
Empire Strikes Back
—perhaps an entrance to the secret Rebel base on the ice planet of Hoth. Like the Hoth base, the structure is designed to hide important things from danger. But unlike the
Empire
storyline, the things being protected are not people.
They’re seeds.
The building? It is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the world’s largest repository of these potential plants.
There are about 1,400 seed banks throughout the world, each keeping a set of seeds of flora of their regions. The goal of these seed banks is to make sure that we can replant virtually anything that would otherwise be lost to antiquity, be it due to disuse, natural disaster, war, etc. So long as there are seeds in the seed bank, there is always a chance for renewal.
But although a lot of seed banks exist, not a lot of duplication was considered when assembling them. Plants indigenous to only one region may have had their seeds “backed up” only in that area’s seed bank—if anything were to happen to the region, the seed bank could be destroyed. Though uncommon, this is not unheard of; as the
Associated Press
noted, seed banks in both Iraq and Afghanistan were casualties of war, whereas one in the Philippines was destroyed during the 2006 typhoon there. Recognizing that localized seed banks were inadequate, a number of NGOs worked with the government of Norway to create the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
The vault, costing a total of $9 million, is less than 1,000 miles from the North Pole. Built into a sandstone mountain, its entrance leads down a nearly 400-foot corridor into where the vaults themselves are situated. The location was chosen because it provides an unusual combination of environmental factors. First, there is little to no tectonic activity in the area, making an earthquake extremely unlikely. Second, the vault is situated so far above sea level (more than 400 feet) that even the melting of the ice caps would keep it out of reach of floods. Finally, the permafrost in the area helps keep the vault cool, allowing the seeds to stay preserved for an extended time even if the vault loses power. It’s called, colloquially, the doomsday vault—and for very good reason. If everything were to go wrong, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault may actually be the one thing that survives.
As of March 2010, there were roughly 500,000 different types of seeds in the vault. The goal is to store up to 1 million seed types, in hopes of covering the diversity of offerings the plant world has to share.
BONUS FACT
In Arizona, Pima County’s public library system not only lends out books—it also “lends” out seeds. The “seed library” gives “borrowers” seeds to plant in their own gardens but asks that when the seeds grow into crops, the “borrowers” collect seeds and return an equal or greater amount to the library. The seed library notes that “there are no due dates or overdue fines” for the seeds.
Throughout the ages, governments seemingly have tried to ban everything—other than death and taxes, so the saying goes. But the administrators of the Norwegian village called Longyearbyen in Svalbard are trying to change that, at least insofar as death is concerned.
Longyearbyen has a population of roughly 1,500 to 2,000 people. It is one of the northernmost places on Earth with any semblance of permanent residents. Located 78.22 degrees north, it is well within the Arctic Circle. Polar bears roam everywhere and, as one would guess, the temperatures never reach what most people would consider “warm.” That point led to the ban on dying.
Before the ban, like anywhere else, people in Longyearbyen buried their dead. That makes sense—over time, the bodies of the deceased will decompose. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, so to speak. But the words “over time” mean something different when you hit extremely low temperatures. And that can be dangerous—if not fatal—for the people who are still alive.
In 1917 a flu strain hit Longyearbyen, leading to the deaths of a number of residents, who were buried in the town cemetery. Thirteen years later, someone discovered that burying the dead in Longyearbyen was a really, really bad idea. As the BBC reported, the bodies in the cemetery weren’t decomposing. The cold earth had preserved the corpses and, as an unfortunate side effect, had also kept the influenza strain alive.
There is no reason to believe that anyone was infected by the resurrected influenza, but regardless, its discovery provided a warning to the town officials. Disturbing the ground in which a person was buried could trigger an outbreak of any communicable disease that afflicted the deceased at his or her death. Such a disease could spread rapidly throughout the island settlement. Realizing that Longyearbyen, quite isolated from the rest of the world, had no way of handling its dead—and the risk to the living—its leaders simply declared that dying was not permitted in the town.
Enforcement, of course, cannot be carried out via punitive action—“don’t die, or else!” is a strange ultimatum, to say the least. Longyearbyen “prevents” people from dying in a few ways. The cemetery closed in 1930, accepting no future burials. The population is generally kept young, which makes sense regardless, given the climate. And though Longyearbyen doesn’t by itself sound like a great retirement spot, the government drives the point home even more clearly—there’s no elder care housing in the area.
If you fall deathly ill? The local authorities will airlift you to the nearest regional hospital, which is two hours away.
BONUS FACT
Longyearbyen is home to both the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS) and a lot of polar bears as well. These beasts are savage and do not take kindly to people. So when a student, faculty member, or staff member enters UNIS, he or she goes right to class—riflery class, that is. Everyone at UNIS is trained in the use of a rifle to defend themselves from the polar bears.
In many European (and American) cultures, it is traditional to light a fire on Christmas, and, specifically to use a “yule log”—a very large, hard log that can burn for hours on end. In 1966, WPIX, a television station based in New York, took the yule log to the airwaves. For a few hours on Christmas Eve, WPIX forwent advertising and their regular broadcasting schedule. Instead, WPIX went to Gracie Mansion (the official residence of the Mayor of New York) and filmed seventeen seconds of a yule log burning in the fireplace. A looped version recording became WPIX’s Christmas Eve programming that year—and, incredibly, was a ratings success. Until 1989, WPIX made a point of broadcasting the commercial-free yule log for two to four hours every Christmas Eve.
This commitment to firewood is nothing compared to what happened in Norway.
In 2011, a Norwegian man named Lars Mytting wrote a book titled
Hel Ved
, or, in English,
Solid Wood: All About Chopping, Drying and Stacking Wood—and the Soul of Wood-Burning.
It sounds like any one of a billion titles you can find on Amazon, immediately making you wonder who would buy such a thing. With only about 5 million people in Norway altogether, it would not be surprising to hear that Mytting sold only five to ten copies of his book—if that.
In reality? He sold 150,000. His treatise on firewood was a bestseller.
Then it became a TV show. In February 2013, NRK, Norway’s public broadcaster, explored turning the book into a series but opted instead to make it into a twelve-hour, same-day extravaganza. For four hours, the broadcast, according to
The New York Times
, aimed to “get to the core of Norwegian firewood culture”—1.2 million households in the country have either wood stoves or fireplaces—while “sawing,” “splitting,” “stacking,” and “burning” firewood.
That, apparently, was the less interesting part of the program. For the next eight hours—eight hours!—NRK broadcast a fireplace, with logs burning. Unlike the WPIX yule log, though, this wasn’t just a few minutes or seconds of film, looped. It was live television, not recorded, and of course, the fire had to be tended. During the eight hours of log burning, caretakers of the fire added and rearranged wood in the fireplace, keeping the blaze roaring throughout. Viewers were captivated, with an estimated one million people tuning in at some time during the broadcast. That’s 20 percent of the country’s population.
Sadly, not everyone was pleased with the show. Within the first few minutes of the Friday night broadcast, Mytting started receiving dozens of complaints via text message. The objection? Half wanted the wood stacked bark-up, the other half bark-down.
BONUS FACT
A twelve-hour show on firewood may seem strange to those of us not in Norway, but NRK has a history of curious programming. Gawker tells us that other specials popular in Norway, but unlikely to find a significant U.S. audience, include 134 hours of coverage of a cruise ship traveling up the Norwegian coast toward the Arctic and an eight-hour train ride from Oslo to Bergen.
During the ninth season of
Seinfeld
, George goes to his parents’ house around Christmastime to celebrate a Costanza family tradition—the made-up holiday of Festivus. Festivus had a handful of traditions, including an aluminum pole instead of a Christmas tree, Festivus miracles (because what’s a holiday without miracles?), dinner (of course), and two proper-noun events: the Feats of Strength and the Airing of Grievances.
The holiday, originally proposed by scriptwriter Dan O’Keefe, was based on O’Keefe’s own experiences growing up. His family had an ad hoc celebration around Christmas as a way to relieve the tensions often associated with the Christmastime buildup. Both the Feats of Strength—a series of wrestling matches—and the Airing of Grievances aim to do just that, only in the fictional world of Jerry Seinfeld and his dysfunctional group of friends. Although many people have adopted Festivus as a tongue-in-cheek celebration since its first-time broadcast on
Seinfeld
, the holiday is fake.
Except, in a sense, in a small province in Peru.
The Peruvian province of Chumbivilcas, nestled in the Andes, is home to about 75,000 people. The population is rural and generally very poor; many speak the native language called Quechua, as the inhabitants of the area are still strongly linked to the culture of the Incan time period. Although Christianity has taken hold in many areas, traditional customs often have endured. One such custom is Takanakuy, which in Quechuan translates to “when the blood is boiling.” On December 25—yes, Christmas Day—residents in the area dress up in traditional costumes and take to the street, dancing. Afterward, they gather in a field and beat each other up.
Two at a time—although often, things get out of hand—people with grudges engage in a bare-knuckled boxing match loosely refereed by a plainclothes member of the local authorities. As reported by Reuters, women and even children are allowed to step into the proverbial ring—the only limitation is that one can only square off against someone of the same gender and of similar age.