The Seeds Came Back Out of the Ice

In Norway sits the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a safe place to store backup copies of the world’s crop seeds. A research center called ICARDA kept a seed bank in Aleppo, Syria, with about 150,000 cereal, food, and feed samples from more than 100 countries. From 2008 to 2014, they deposited duplicate copies in the vault. Then civil war forced them out of Aleppo. In September 2015, for the first time ever, seeds were withdrawn from the vault: 38,073 samples in 128 boxes, shipped to Lebanon and Morocco. They were sown that November. By 2016 they had harvested fresh seed, and in 2017 more than 20,000 samples went right back into the vault. Somebody saved seed in good times so there’d be bread in hard times. That’s what faithful sowing looks like. You plant for a harvest you may need later, and the harvest gives you seed to plant again.

Chuck Feeney Gave It All Away While He Was Alive

Chuck Feeney co-founded Duty Free Shoppers in 1960 and became a billionaire. Then he did something almost nobody does. He set up the Atlantic Philanthropies in 1982 and two years later transferred all his business assets into it, and for years he gave the money away in secret. Forbes called him the James Bond of philanthropy. Over four decades he gave away more than $8 billion to education, health, and other causes, including nearly $1 billion to Cornell, the school he attended on the G.I. Bill. He lived simply, and in 2012 he estimated he’d set aside about $2 million for his and his wife’s retirement. In 2020 the foundation closed its doors because it had given everything away. He died in 2023 at 92. He liked to say, “It’s much more fun to give while you are alive than to give when you are dead.”