Inside the underground vaults of the Turkish Seed Gene Bank (TSGB), seeds of popular field crop varieties and their wild relatives lie in wait. Kept frozen at -18 Celsius, they are cared for by thirty conservation scientists, plant breeders, and technicians who are civil servants employed by the Turkish state. The TSGB is no ordinary institution: founded in 2010, it is not only the crown jewel of the Turkish biodiversity conservation bureaucracy, but also the physical embodiment of an authoritarian environmental politics that seeks to nationalize nature and naturalize the nation through the sovereign ownership and management of plant life.

Conservation policies at the TSGB (see Figure 1) are informed by histories of bioprospecting in Turkey as well as a desire to invest in competitive climate futures. Well-traveled stories of stolen varieties, persistent reports of foreigners caught at the border with endemic species, and lingering anxieties about civilian initiatives such as seed exchange festivals are part and parcel of everyday work. And together they shape an unorthodox approach to biodiversity conservation: while Turkey is a longtime party to the Convention on Biological Diversity, the TSGB rejects almost all outside collaboration and access and benefit sharing requests. The prospect of loss, which has defined the trajectory of plant biodiversity from Turkey to the West in the modern era, weighs so heavy that it shrouds every foreign inquiry in a cloud of doubt.

What this technoscientific dream of control essentially brings about is a type of power that exists in potentia, a latent, frozen capability some have called “cryopower” (Friedrich 2017; Peres 2019). And for this potentiality to preserve its potency in the long term, conserved seeds must maintain their viability in frozen storage, which hinges on forms of labor and care that generally remain hidden from view. Seeds’ journey into seed banks typically starts with collection expeditions, followed by standardized processes such as cleaning, drying, viability testing, and packaging. After seeds are placed in cold storage, conservationists continue to care for them by ensuring that they maintain an acceptable viability rate. This often takes the form of periodic germination tests, which, depending on the viability threshold that is implemented, either call for the regeneration of the samples in question or confirm that they can go back into cold storage.

This type of work does not only require certain forms of expertise but is also bound up in personal practices and ideologies of care. Anthropologists who have worked in seed nurseries and seed banks note that the relationship between conservationists and seeds have an unmistakable affective dimension (Chacko 2022; Chao 2018), and that conservationists’ personal investments in seeds’ wellbeing may or may not overlap with the broader interests of the institutions that they belong to. Similarly, the TSGB’s conservationists grapple with the fact that the seeds under their care may never be part of evolutionary biosocial lifeworlds again or shared with other institutions for the creation of plant-human socialities otherwise. Much like the seeds under their care, however, the responsability of the TSGB staff is muted via the ever-present threat of political persecution, which befell around 300,000 civil servants after the failed coup of 2016 and changed the makeup of the TSGB along the way. The prospect of losing their careers in civil service looms large for the bank staff, as they feel obligated to defend the bank’s policies in front of diplomatic guests as well as at national and international meetings.

If the work that is done at the TSGB can be defined as the maintenance of seeds’ latent potentialities, this work is never the product of conservationists’ labor alone: it is always collective, relational, and more-than-human. Vegetal labor (Palmer 2024) is not only intrinsically intertwined with human labor inside a multispecies assemblage like the TSGB, but also essential to its functionality. The value generated at a seed bank cannot be conceptualized without accounting for the work that seeds do in cold storage, after all. The problem is that what happens in the after care, in the frozen temporality when seeds lie in wait inside the vaults, still remains difficult to theorize. How do we anthropologically take account of the inertia in which plant life is arrested, the long moment that we assume is pregnant with latent capitalist value? How do we make sense of the work that appears as stillness, the animation that feels like a lack of response, the relation that feels like non-relation?

Frozen storage aims to preserve the long-term survival of seeds by removing them from their lifeworlds. It is an insurance policy against radical environmental change, food insecurity, and demographic shifts. Unlike in-situ conservation where seeds respond to environmental factors and human care and are part of social and evolutionary processes, the responsability of seeds in cold storage is held in abeyance. They act as frozen stand-ins for species in the wild, and they are mostly valued for their genetic potentialities: for the types of resistances they may offer against draughts, floods, rising temperatures, and changing soil conditions. The value created inside the TSGB is the product of a multispecies, relational form of labor that keeps these potentialities alive via the suspension of the responsabilities of seeds and conservationists alike.

I would like to suggest that the arrestation of life is a key feature of an authoritarian environmentalist politics that seeks to engender economic and geopolitical benefits via the management of life processes. Not unlike the Faustian bargain that Turkey struck with the European Union in 2016 to arrest in place the lives of millions of refugees headed to Europe in exchange for six billion euros, seeds inside the TSGB’s cold storage rooms remain arrested in place in the hopes that their latent potentialities endow Turkey with an advantage in competitive climate futures. Legitimized by the legal framework of international biodiversity conservation that grants nation states sovereign powers over nonhuman life, the TSGB’s protectionists policies do not represent a novel failure of conservation or disregard for common multispecies futures. They are but an exercise in the biopolitics of climate change.