HIGH RISE AGRICULTURE PROPOSED
JEREMY COOKE, BBC - Downtown Manhattan is hardly a place you would associate with agriculture. Rather, with its countless restaurants, cafes, shops and supermarkets this is a place of consumption.
And so every morsel, every bite of food New Yorkers munch through every day must be trucked, shipped or flown in, from across the country, and across the world.
Now though, scientists at Columbia University are proposing an alternative. Their vision of the future is one in which the skyline of New York and other cities include a new kind of skyscaper: the "vertical farm".
The idea is simple enough. Imagine a 30-story building with glass walls, topped off with a huge solar panel.
On each floor there would be giant planting beds, indoor fields in effect.
There would be a sophisticated irrigation system.
And so crops of all kinds and small livestock could all be grown in a controlled environment in the most urban of settings.
That means there would be no shipping costs, and no pollution caused by moving produce around the country.
Energy would come from a giant solar panel but there would also be incinerators which use the farm's waste products for fuel. All of the water in the entire complex would be recycled.
5 Comments:
The unfortunate downside to this type of building becoming popular is that it will tend toward fostering the idea that it's somehow okay to just keep on raping the surrounding natural environment; after all, we're not really killing Mother Nature--we can keep her 'alive' indefinitely in giant glass greenhouses, under artificial life support.
Soylent Green, anyone?
I've not thought about it carefully enough to have a complete opinion yet.
What's true, I think, is that seen in isolation designs like this are a good idea for a world in which energy is expensive and the majority of Earth is needed by Earth for respiration and similar.
Of course your pessimism has a lot of support from history. My question would be: can we make the future be both different and attractive enough that nobody will want to continue the self-destructive behaviors of (what will then be) the past?
I'd like to think that might be the case; but it is true that I'm a pessimist where the ability of the human race to learn objetively from past errors is concerned; and thus, I'm not overly hopeful that that will be the case.
We know that livestock can be raised in such places, they're called CAFO's. Clearly whoever is dreaming up this idea has never spent anytime around one. Or, more than likely they are the kind of person who does not regularly think of living stock, but rather, terms of protein units. X amount of space can yield Y quantities of protein. Qualitative concerns never enter the equation. It is not imaginable that sufficient animal protein can be humanely produced in such an environment.
The stench of even small CAFO operations carries for miles. Who's going to want to live around that? There are also the issues of deadly accumulations of copper, zinc, and arsenic from the wastes generated by animals raised in close confinement.
Make less humans, not more buildings.
I'm not sure fewer humans / better buildings are mutually exclusive.
Also, I'm not sure why you think raising non-humans for food would require CAFO conditions.
If we begin honestly accounting for all the costs of some outcome such as a steak/chops/chicken dinner on the table, I suspect we might quickly come to do what most Asians do: switch to mostly-veg diets. A diet heavy in non-human flesh is quite expensive on a number of levels, including environment, money, personal health, and even karma.
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