Pie in the Sky (or Thereabouts)

The cottage weekend, complete with zero internet connection, was wonderful, with nary a craving for the web or its dark succulence. I can unplug, I am still capable of that, and its with great adoration for my friends that I realize this: you lot are better than the internet, and you know what deep praise that is, from one geek to several others.

It does occur to me that I’ve been very techy over the last couple of weeks. This is primarily because I’m a technophile, and also because reading tech blogs begets more tech blogs where one has the appetite to follow such things. Today I diversified my Firefox search engines and also my passwords, then I stepped back from the keyboard, grimaced a little, and decided I need to try something different for now. Then my technical support job buried me in problems for the afternoon, and I received a little perspective.

Anyway. As a kind of medium for getting from the technological to the everything else: have you heard of Vertical Farming?

The idea is brilliant, and represents such a deadpan obvious move that everyone I’ve mentioned it to has given some variation of the same response: why haven’t we been doing this already?  From the project site:

The concept of indoor farming is not new, since hothouse production of tomatoes, a wide variety of herbs, and other produce has been in vogue for some time. What is new is the urgent need to scale up this technology to accommodate another 3 billion people. 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.

The crossover appeal, in political terms, is enormous. Here is a concept that will not only strike terrific blows for sustainability, urban beautification, the purification of cities’ air and water, and the resolution of the global food crisis, it will speak to the conservative element in presenting powerful means to enhance existing urban centres, continue strong economic development, stimulate virtually every industry there is, and stabilize nations’ supply of foodstuff. There are so rarely those technologies that hit a sweet spot like this, presenting such massive potential to fill such important roles, and my enthusiasm for it is riding high.

The project, which has a fabulous website replete with media, designs, and essays, so resounds with my politics and love of technology that I’m practically frothing at the mouth to see these implemented and I’m not taking any time to be critical. As I try to do with everything though, even once I get carried away, I try to ask myself what the problems could be with such an initiative, and I find it difficult to do so in this case even after clearing my vision of excitement.

It’s assumed that these Living Skyscrapers will be built in urban areas, either where cities already exist or where they’re expanding to, so the most intuitive criticism, that we need to curb expansion all together, is a moot point. Building up instead of out is the most environmentally friendly strategy for the urban landscape, and has been for some time. So long as planners and politicians don’t use vertical farming as a license to pave over ecosystems with abandon, this makes environmental sense. The idea that they’re not feasible can be thrown out quite easily: the technology, by the project’s own admission, has existed for ages, with vertical farming representing a project of scaling and improvement, not innovation. Moreover, the things could be beautiful, and could transform sections of busy cities into hanging gardens with the very concrete benefit of filtering air and water for all citizens. The owners and operators of these facilities could reap massive profits, albeit strictly in the long term. The project sets out plainly that making these buildings as cheap as possible is one of its top priorities, and it’s good that they do, since I’m sure the cost of even an efficiently constructed skyscraper will require at least a few years worth of crops to get back.

That’s the beauty of the hothouse though, they don’t depend on the seasons and can produce constantly. The thing that I’m most concerned about is the maintenance of the soil in these facilities, which could give any farming project a dangerously short life span. I haven’t gotten into the details of the technology too closely, but monitoring and using best practices had better be a top priority. I’ll bet that they are.

The real danger I see in this project is some municipality or another half-heartedly embracing an implementation of it somewhere, giving it mediocre support, seeing it fail, and thus stigmatizing the idea wholesale. In any case, I’m keeping tabs on the movement, and quietly holding a terrible hope that it will blossom.