Action Alert: Save the Seeds!

Rare collection of berries and fruits to be bulldozed making room for luxury housing.

The issue: The world's first seed bank is currently slated to be ripped from the ground to make room for a housing development. Russia's Pavlovsk Experimental Station is a federally-run field collection of over 5,000 edibles and ornamentals, all of which are difficult to breed from seed and many of which aren't stored in any other location.

This living seed bank survived the 900-day siege of Leningrad in WWII when twelve Russian scientists protecting the site starved to death rather than eat from the collection. Now, as massive droughts and wildfires decimate farmland across the country, Russia's Housing Development Foundation (RHDF) is poised to "repurpose" this irreplaceable source of agricultural biodiversity. Read more.

Take action: Sign the petition from the Global Crop Diversity Trust urging President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin to revoke the decision of Russia's Supreme Arbitration Court which ruled in favor of the RHDF.