Halfway between Norway and the North Pole in the chilly waters of the Arctic Ocean lie the Svalbard Islands. On one of the largest, called Spitsbergen, sits a state-of-the-art facility dedicated to one of the most urgent undertakings for today’s warming world: ensuring the future of agriculture for the global community.

That little-known facility is called The Svalbard Global Seed Vault. It is owned and operated by the Norwegian government and supported by The Crop Trust, an international group dedicated to the protection of global food security. The scope of The Seed Vault’s mission is staggering: that is, to conserve the diversity of agricultural crops worldwide and to prevent diversity extinction due to climate change, natural disaster, or war.

The Seed Vault’s underground storage facility, tunneled 394 feet into the rocky layer beneath a permafrost-covered field, has the distinction of housing the world’s largest collection of seeds. Just this past February, 50,000 were deposited for safekeeping. With a storage capacity of up to 4.5 million crop samples, the vault is on the path to becoming the world’s largest repository for conservation ex situ of worldwide plant diversity. According to the organization’s website, “the seed vault offers fail-safe protection for one of the most important resources on earth.”

In the emotionally powerful video below, narrator and plant-diversity conservationist Cary Fowler takes us on a journey into the history of agriculture and then urges us to reconsider and reset our priorities in terms of food production.

Setting those priorities in the right direction has never been more controversial nor more urgent now that Donald Trump is enthroned in the oval office. Trump’s take on security and Fowler’s are worlds apart. Think about it. Will Trump’s proposal to increase the military budget by $54 billion create a more secure world? Will we truly be more secure when one takes into account the human cost and negative impacts of paying for Trump’s boondoggle with decreased funding for foreign aid, food programs, and climate-change research?

Or will we be more secure if we acknowledge the reality of climate change and take the necessary steps now to protect the world’s most fundamental resource: our food supply. Watch this extraordinary video and learn that the answer to that question is unequivocal.

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If you had $600 billion to invest in various businesses, how would you do it? Would you only invest in companies that provided a fair wage for factory workers? Or maybe only businesses that were environmentally friendly? The answer most of us would choose is whatever would make the most money. (Which would probably rule out fair wages and being environmentally friendly.)

Thankfully, Norway isn’t like most of us. Being fortunate enough to have a low population and high reserves in oil, the country has been flush with cash. So much cash that their government has a $600 billion pension fund to invest in various enterprises. (To put it in perspective, that fund is the largest single investor in Europe and the third largest in the world.) And how do they invest it? In companies that don’t violate “humanitarian principles” and “fundamental ethical norms.”

That sounds nice, but what does it really mean? For starters, Norway doesn’t support cluster weapons or landmines. Which means it had to divest from several American arms manufacturers. Companies that produce tobacco aren’t funded either. Other corporations have been removed for illegal logging, river pollution, and environmental abuses. There’s even a watch list for companies like Siemens, which is accused of gross corruption. (In most cases, Norway’s central bank tries to mediate concerns with the business before divesting.) The other big company that Norway has severed ties with is none other than Wal-Mart. In 2006, Norway purged itself of $430 million worth of shares from the retailer. The reason? Serious and systematic labor violations in numerous countries. As of 2012, the fund has stopped doing business with 40 corporations. Instead of sweatshops and pollutants, that money is being spent on things like solar panel production, and renewable energy research.

For a more capitalistic viewpoint on the Norwegian Fund, you should read this wikileaks memo. It was sent between diplomats who were fretting about whether or not ethical investing would hurt American companies. (Unless you’re Wal-Mart or a tobacco baron, it really hasn’t.)

Most of us don’t have that kind of money to invest. But we can decide to follow the Norwegian example and advance human rights and ethics with where we shop. By supporting the companies with good business practices, we punish the ones who misbehave. It won’t completely stop corruption, sweatshops, and environmental offenders, but it will cut into their bottom line. We should do business like Norway.

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