Early Tuesday morning the front doors of the Harold B. Lee Library opened wide to welcome its newest tenant: Suzan the orangutan. Jeff Harris, director of the BYU “Ark” project launched in 2008, confirmed that she is happily adjusting to cage #2545 on the 8th underground level of the complex next to her male counterpart Rick, and that her arrival marks the completion of the 8 year initiative of the library to gather and preserve all forms of life in preparation for the end of the world.

“Cats, dogs, whales, fire-breathing ants, man-eating flies.. you name it, and we’ve without a doubt sent our greatest scientific minds to covertly hunt it down in a jungle somewhere in the world and pump it full of tranquilizer darts until it accepted its divinely appointed role of repopulating the post-apocalyptic world.” Jeff explained, guiding us through just a small portion of the vast damp underground corridors of the Harold B. Lee library that make up what will one day be “the only hope for the survival of mankind.”
But collecting a pair of each of Earth’s 8.7 million species was only a small part of the library’s concentrated 8 year “save the earth” endeavor. Attempting to honor Harold B Lee’s dying wish that the library become “a place where the saints can flourish and outlive a decade of solar flares, giant meteors, tidal waves, giant volcanoes and zombie hordes that most certainly will accompany the last days,” the Library staff concurrently began assembling a ten year store of food.

“It really began sooner than 2008 even. Days after Ezra Taft Benson spoke in 1974 on food storage we were throwing left over cougar tails and pizza crusts into a mini-fridge in the back of my first-floor office. We all were asked to participate.” Retired librarian Vanessa related, shuffling through a pile of faded photographs depicting early attempts to begin the library’s journey to the stronghold it is today, “I could never have imagined then that the half-eaten frosted mint brownies I decided to save could possibly end up in the now two square mile freezer six stories underground off the west corner of our university’s library. Some nights I can almost picture my grandson there, surviving nuclear war off all those hard years of work.”

Thanks to the visionary leadership of Jennifer Paustenbaugh and other senior librarians preceding her, Susan the orangutan and Vanessa’s grandson won’t have to wait out the five years it will take for radiation to blown off of campus in a state of ignorance and boredom. Coincidently the staff of the library have also been obsessively hoarding more than 6 million books over the 125 years since the organization’s foundation in 1892. They are stored on an absurdly excessive system of shelves over 98 miles in length. Some have from time to time pointedly questioned the administration’s approach of spending valuable resources on “wasteful” literature collection and preservation while earth sits of on the cusp of complete destruction.

“We felt compelled. Some would argue that that is the main purpose of a library.” Mrs. Paustenbaugh commented briefly when we reached out to her.

Walking through the expanse of the massive and critically important BYU structure, full of history, sweat, tears, and now every conceivable kind of living animal, one can almost hear the library’s motto echoing down the halls: “Learning by study and also by faith… and if everything goes down the toilet you better get here quick because we can only seat about 4,600 of you comfortably.”