An Interview with Vivien Sansour, Founder of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library

• Vivien Sansour founded the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library to preserve endangered indigenous crops and agricultural knowledge.
• The library serves as a space for cultural resistance, aiming to protect the memory and history that link Palestinians to their land.
• The mass destruction of farmland in Palestine is framed not just as a loss of food production, but as an intentional severance of the historical and ecological relationships between people and the soil.

Origins of the Seed Library

• After dropping out of an agriculture PhD program, Sansour traveled to villages to learn from elders, viewing her work as a way to honor the culture and bioculture of her home.
• The initiative began as a personal effort to reclaim childhood memories and has since evolved into a global grassroots movement supporting Indigenous people facing oppression.

The Impact of Land Destruction

• Modern Palestinian crop varieties are the result of thousands of years of creative adaptation, such as 'ba’al' crops that grow without irrigation and were named after the Canaanite deity of fertility.
• When farmland is destroyed, the specific, centuries-old relationships between soil, water, and human labor are broken.
• Sansour expresses deep frustration with international organizations like UNESCO, which she argues fail to protect heritage sites like the village of Battir from settler incursions.

Palestine as a Global Microcosm

• Sansour argues that the situation in Palestine is not an isolated event but a microcosm of the global threats posed by AI, surveillance, and hyper-capitalism.
• Citing the President of Colombia, she characterizes Palestine as a 'test run' for the volatility the rest of the world may soon face.
• Her vision is not immediate political liberation, but the creation of 'tender spaces' where seeds can grow, ensuring that future generations inherit something worth fighting for.