Dickson Despommier On Food Security | Dickson Despommier | Big Think

Dickson Despommier On Food Security

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Dickson Despommier reassures us that vertical farming is ultimately safer than traditional farming.

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Dickson Despommier:

I am a microbiologist/ecologist by training, and for 27 years I conducted laboratory-based research on molecular aspects of intracellular parasitism funded by NIH. I also teach courses in the medical school and in our school of public health (e.g., Parasitic Diseases; Medical Ecology; Ecology 101). Many of them deal with parasitism and its effects on large segments of the poor that live in the tropics. Controlling soil-based transmission cycles of helminthes that cause significant health problems throughout the world is of prime importance to me.

I left the lab in favor of working on more globally relevant projects that address some these important problems. Since it is generally agreed agriculture is solely responsible for so much environmental disturbance and serves as the interface for the transmission of geohelminths, one area of focus of mine has been on how to raise food without further encroachment into natural ecosystems.

I have established The Vertical Farm as a theoretical construct to look at the possibility of agricultural sustainability within cities. The idea grew out of a class project to measure the effects of rooftop gardening in New York City on reducing the dome of heat that develops over us each year. From that original idea, I expanded the concept to include urban agriculture and finally to multi-story indoor farming. I have given this project to my students in my course, "Medical Ecology."

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What risks are involved with growing food indoors?

Dickson Despommier: The only risk of raising food period, is that somehow you’ll lose it. So if you design an urban landscape that included a single giant indoor farm, and something horrible happened to it like someone decided to

just blow it up well that’s tragic. You can’t have your whole food supply disappear all in one shot, however, it happens all the time. We call those hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, floods, insect pests, bacterial diseases, viral diseases, food insecurity is the rule. Not food security. Remember it’s an ecosystem out there that we’ve disturbed and it’s getting even with us. It’s trying to get back to where it was. We did that to them. If we did that to them, then it’s like the little Dutch boy trying to hold back the flood by sticking his finger inside the dike, eventually the water will win. I can tell you right now. This little Dutch boy grew up and watched the whole damn

thing change back to the way it was because the Dutch realized the water table is rising. They’ve going to give the Zuiderzee back to the ocean. They don’t need these dikes any longer, right? There’s another country that wants to farm vertically. And in fact Holland and China have an agreement now to invent urban agriculture. I had the privilege of being at that meeting last year so I know that on the books now there are many, many, many groups working on this process, so what we need to do is combine forces into research institutes, based on these

prototype buildings for various crops to make sure that we know how to monitor for diseases. We treat our crops like we treat ourselves. We

care about what the temperature is inside. We care about our comfort zone. We know what their comfort zones are. We can’t control them

outdoors but we can certainly control them indoors, so why haven’t we done this? What’s missing? And I know what’s missing. The Courier and Ives prints and the adbills [ph?] and the traditional farmers. We think that’s natural but basically it’s only been around for about 15,000

years. That’s not very natural in terms of evolutionary process, so since we are evolving, let’s evolve to the next step. The next step is

take control over the things that you really need, and then diversify them. Once you’ve learned how to do it in a small scale, connect them

to restaurants, schools, hospitals, senior citizens. Diversify the whole thing so that no matter what would happen your food supply is

still safe. Now, there’s an Israeli designer for an apartment complex in which the gray water is separated from urine and feces. We can’t do

that here, but they’ve designed buildings now that you can do that for. They take all the gray water and use it in hyrdoponic farming. Every

apartment has a hydroponic farm.

Question: Why can't we do that here?

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