6 billion people live on 17 plants?
The Problem: Plants, including a critical diversity of foods are going extinct.
The Fix: Preserve a wide variety of plant life in seed banks for when we realize we really do want them.
Summary: Seed banks are very much what they sound like. They are a place to store a large number of seeds in order to maintain the genetic diversity found within a wide number of varieties of each species of plant grown for agricultural production.
The loss of agricultural diversity is directly related to the 20th century \"green revolution\" in which farmers adopted streamlined agricultural techniques to try to increase the production of food. In order to maximize yields, they chose a few high-yield crops that would grow predictably and could be easily planted and harvested mechanically. With irrigation, mechanization, fertilizers, and pesticides, farmers in developed nations could maintain control over the growing process. This greatly increased yields under these highly controlled conditions, but in the process forced out a number of natural species and increased the vulnerability of the crops. There has been a push back recently from traditional small-scale farmers who try to maintain and grow a wide variety of crops and seeds in order to survive unknown and changing soil, weather, and pest conditions.