Vertical Farm Project w/ Dr. Dickson Despommier
Not too long ago, Andy Mannle (editor of Arcwire) and I dropped in on Dr. Dickson Despommier up at Columbia University’s medical school to talk about his Vertical Farm Project.
But wait a minute, you might be saying, why in the world would the man behind something like the Vertical Farm Project be up at Columbia’s medical school?
For starters, Dr. Despommier is a microbiologist/ecologist by training and Professor of Public Health in Environmental Health Sciences at Columbia. Secondly, he has a keen interest in parasitic diseases and soil-based pathogens. Thirdly, the man is a modern visionary — brilliant and animated, though lucid and grounded. Columbia would do well to staff Despommier figures wherever they can.
According to the Vertical Farm website, by the year 2050, nearly 80% of the Earth’s population will reside in urban centers. At present, throughout the world, over 80% of the land that is suitable for raising crops is in use. Add to these accounts that the human population is (conservatively) projected to increase by about 3 billion people by 2050. Barring other figures and factors involved for the sake of simplification, let’s just say that this is going to be a big damn problem. Thankfully, a plucky microbiologist is concerned enough to take action.
Thus, the Vertical Farm Project: a vivid proposal to raise food without further encroachment into natural ecosystems, as well as an ambitious, intuitive systems design for urban food security in our modern age.
From the VFP website:
It took humans 10,000 years to learn how to grow most of the crops we now take for granted. Along the way, we despoiled most of the land we worked, often turning verdant, natural ecozones into semi-arid deserts. Within that same time frame, we evolved into an urban species, in which 60% of the human population now lives vertically in cities.
The time is at hand for us to learn how to safely grow our food inside environmentally controlled multistory buildings within urban centers. If we do not, then in just another 50 years, the next 3 billion people will surely go hungry, and the world will become a much more unpleasant place in which to live.
An entirely new approach to indoor farming must be invented, employing cutting edge technologies. The Vertical Farm must be efficient (cheap to construct and safe to operate). Vertical farms, many stories high, will be situated in the heart of the world’s urban centers. If successfully implemented, they offer the promise of urban renewal, sustainable production of a safe and varied food supply (year-round crop production), and the eventual repair of ecosystems that have been sacrificed for horizontal farming.
Many thanks to Dr. Despommier for taking time out of his busy schedule to blow all of our minds. Looking forward to your comments Interweb.
Text by Curtiss P. Martin, clean technology editor at ScribeMedia.org
Inteview conducted by Andy Mannle, editor at Arcwire.org
Video edited by Michelle Maher, associate producer at ScribeMedia.org
[Technical Note] Any of you would-be interviewers using a wireless lavaliere mic would do well to advise your subjects to turn off their Blackberries or at least take them out of their pockets during the interview.
Reason being that both of these devices often operate on the same frequency, yielding some nasty fuzz that isn’t encountered until post-production. That’s right, audio sounds good going into the camera, but sounds mighty bad coming out on the tape.
Luckily, we have someone like Michelle Maher in our wings who contributed a noble effort, winding her way around these problems and improving the good doctor’s dialog to acceptable standards.
Not everyone has a Michelle in their studio though, so let this be a warning and an anecdote for your interviewees — if you value what’s coming out of your mouth as much as we do, please take a break from your Blackberry ;^)
Curtiss P. Martin grew up in a geodesic dome on the side of a mountain in Southern Appalachia. Now he serves as ScribeMedia's clean technology editor in a tall building in downtown Manhattan.
Excellent perspectives. However, think of how ludicrous the idea of spending millions on building a high tech skyscraper in Darfur right now. Idealistic but the effort would present an unacceptible image and create conflict..in short, a fiasco. Better to build it where it would not create conflict (just send food to eat to Darfur for the time being)…such as in Astana, Kazahkstan, perhaps in conjunction with one of Norman Foster’s incredible tent-pyramids, or perhpas in Michael Bloomberg’s NYC…where the demand would support it long enough to work the bugs out of it.
PS..the tower is nice but a pyramid would open up an environment within’ that would be a point of social interaction, thereby creating a benefit beyond just food. Cheeers.
hello, the majority of the images of this video are drawn from the site http://www.eco-tower.fr. Unfortunately nobody indicate which is the real authors of this project: soa architectes, a French architecture agency.