Life on earth is facing unprecedented issues from global warming, battle, and mass extinctions. The plight of seeds is a much less visible but no less fundamental threat to your survival. Seeds are in the heart from the planet’s life-support systems. Their capacity to regenerate and adapt are crucial to maintaining our food source and our capability to cope having a changing climate.

In Uncertain Peril, environmental journalist Claire Wish Cummings exposes the tales behind the rise of commercial about Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds agriculture and flower biotechnology, nov open public interest science, as well as the folly of patenting seed products. She examines how farming communities are coping with declining drinking water, soil, and fossil fuels, as well as with new commercial systems. Will genetically manufactured and ‘terminator’ seeds lead to specific promise, as some have hoped, or are we embarking on a path of uncertain peril? Will the ‘doomsday vault’ under structure in the Arctic, made to store millions of seeds, save the genetic diversity from the world’s agriculture?

To answer these questions as well as others, Cummings needs readers through the Fertile Crescent in Iraq towards the island of Kaua’i in Hawai’i; from Oaxaca, Mexico, to the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. She examines the plight of farmers who have planted transgenic seed products and scientists who’ve been persecuted for revealing the dangers of improved genes.

At each convert, Cummings appears deeply in to the relationship between people and plants. She examines the possibilities for both scarcity and great quantity and tells the tales of local communities that are generating food and gas sustainably and offering for future years. The options we make about how we feed ourselves now will determine if seed products will continue as a generous source of sustenance and stay the common heritage of all mankind. It comes down to the: whoever handles the continuing future of seeds controls the future of life on earth.

Uncertain Peril is a robust reminder that what’s at stake at this time is nothing significantly less than the nature of the future.