“There is no despair in a seed. There’s only life, waiting for the right conditions – sun and water, warmth and soil – to be set free. Everyday, millions upon millions of seeds lift their two green wings.”

– Janisse Ray, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food

On your next trip to the library, why not check out some seeds?

That’s right: Don’t take home books or movies, which have to be handled with care and returned quickly; take home seeds, which you can cover with dirt and return in a year or so, after you’ve altered them.

Get your seeds at a “seed library,” an institution that lends or shares seeds (as opposed to a seed bank, which merely stores them).

For example, BASIL, the Bay Area Seed Interchange Library, is a project of the nonprofit Berkeley Ecology Center. The website describes BASIL as “a library of vegetable, herb and flower seeds freely available to the public. Patrons check out seeds, grow them, let some plants go to seed, then return those seeds to the library to share with other gardeners.”

BASIL also organizes “seed saving classes and seed swaps to help farmers and gardeners conserve genetic diversity and take an active role in breeding ... crops (adapted) to our local climate.”

Participating in a program similar to BASIL’s in your own community is your opportunity to help counteract the dangerous trend of diversity reduction in the world’s seed stock. Notice that BASIL invites you to take two actions: (1) preserve the seeds of plant varieties that may be endangered by the increasingly centralized control of the world’s seed supply; and (2) breed new, locally adapted varieties to help insure against changing climate and growing conditions.

Any dedicated gardener can partake in and derive joy and satisfaction from these activities. But if you’re a novice, you’ll need to learn some skills to properly preserve seeds from your fall harvest, and especially to breed plants.

What? Your community doesn’t have a seed library to help you get started?

Fortunately, you have online access to free resources including educational and seed-sharing websites and forums. A good place to start learning is the Seed Savers Exchange website, www.seedsavers.org. This widely respected, nonprofit organization has facilitated the saving and sharing of “heirloom” (traditional) seeds since 1975. Its services include a seed-sharing exchange, free webinars, blogs and other instructional material and an online store for seeds, gardening supplies and books published by the exchange.

Perhaps the Exchange’s best-known book is Seed to Seed: Seed Saving and Growing Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners by Suzanne Ashworth and others. Seed to Seed covers the nuts and bolts of maintaining varietal purity, proper seed harvesting, processing seeds for storage, pollination techniques and so on.

There are plenty of online resources and books, so you won’t lack instructional material. But you also have another option: If your community doesn’t have a seed library, start one at your ecological house.

www.your-ecological-house.com. Philip S. Wenz, who grew up in Durango and Boulder, now lives in Corvallis, Ore., where he teaches and writes about environmental issues.