Open letter to Honorable Mr. President Medvedev of Russia

Please Save Pavlosk Experiment Station!
UN Biodiversity Year should celebrate Vavilov Institute heroism, not see destruction of this legacy.

The Pavlovsk Station houses a huge collection of unique and diverse apples, strawberries, cherries, raspberries, currants and many more - more than 5,000 varieties in all. The Pavlovsk Station matters because humanity needs crops to survive. As the climate changes, and new threats to existing crop varieties appear, the ones we have now need to adapt, and the diversity found at the Pavlovsk Station provides this adaptation potential for a broad range of fruits and berries. We need to grow new breeds of all kinds of crops - grains, fruits, vegetables - to feed ourselves and our children. To do that, we need the rich diversity of characteristics like those found at Pavlovsk. It's one of the oldest collections of fruit and berry diversity in the world, and the largest in Europe.

I beg of you, please do not destroy this precious resource for a housing development!

I wish you much health and prosperity and I hope you will do what is right for the Motherland, and Earth and its people.

Sincerely,
Charlie Resilience
Ottawa, Canada

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Dear Reader,
In case you are not aware, the background information can be found here:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/worlds-biggest-collection-of-berries-and-fruits-faces-axe-2011015.html

I was made aware of this by Cary Fowler, Executive Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/cary-fowler/kremlinrussia-stop-the-de_b_659123.html


Excerpt from Independent.co.uk article "World's biggest collection of berries and fruits faces axe" By Michael McCarthy, Environment Editor

Botanist who died for his beliefs

*Nikolai Vavilov (1887-1943) was a Russian botanist and one of the first scientists to try to establish the origins of crops such as wheat. While working on his theories he made expeditions to various parts of the world and brought back seeds of other plant varieties which could be used for crop improvement; his collection of seeds in Leningrad (now St Petersburg) became the world's largest.

*The collection survived the German siege of Leningrad during the Second World War, even though one of Vavilov's assistants is said to have starved to death while looking after it – surrounded by edible seeds which he declined to eat.

*By then, however, Vavilov himself had fallen foul of Trofim Lysenko, the agronomist who became director of Soviet biology under Stalin and founded his own unconventional theory of genetics.

*Vavilov was arrested in August 1940 and died in prison in 1943. Today, his memory is honoured and the Vavilov Institute in St Petersburg maintains one of the largest collections of plant genetic material in the world; the Pavlovsk station's collection is part of this.