Dickson Despommier On The Transition to Vertical Farming | Big Think

Dickson Despommier On The Transition to Vertical Farming

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

According to Dickson Despommier the revolution may not be televised, but it will be blogged about.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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."

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Dickson Despommier:

One of the big issues there is where does the energy come from to power

up a huge indoor farming operation? So in the middle of the Arizona

desert the sun supplies everything. They don’t grow food at night. So

they don’t use grow lights. They don’t have to. They get an abundant

amount of sunlight, and because it’s double-skinned glass, it’s

insulated from the outside, so if the temperature goes to 120 they

don’t care, and in the winter if it goes down to minus 10 they don’t

care. It’s still 75 to 80 degrees inside their horizontal greenhouse.

All right? No one has ever done this up, because there are engineering

challenges as well as some economic challenges, but it’s mostly

engineering. If you grow food indoors in these big buildings how much

energy will it consume versus in fact how much might it even generate

by the parts of the plants you don’t eat. You can recycle that and get

some of that back at least. So that was the fifth year’s projects for

the students. I’m no fool. I don’t know the answers to these questions.

I parasitize their brains and oh, I was going to say the reason we

shouldn’t behave as a single species and not as 194 different species

is because we are a single species, and our brain is basically

engineered the same way regardless if you’re an aborigine living in the

middle of the Australian desert, or if you’re an IBM executive up in

Rye, New York trying to find out what the next alternate power source

might be. The fact is that if you could connect those genomes together

into a single thinking unit that’s six point seven billion inputs with

about a hundred trillion neuronal connections per input I don’t care

what the problem is. I don’t care what the problem is. It’s solved in a

minute. It’s not solved in an hour. Now I can give you examples of

where that actually works on a small scale: The International Ladies

Garment Workers Union. It’s a wonderful example of a cooperativity

[sic] among a group of people that agrees at a common end we are going

to behave together. We’ll take pay cuts. We’ll get pay raises, but no

one loses their job, and we’ll all produce clothing as the end of the

day. That’s our job, and that’s what we’re going to do. The engineering

company of ARUP, A-R-U-P, is a fabulous example of how to behave.

There-- I don’t know how many engineers they have on their staff.

They’re in 37 different countries. Every engineer can access every

other engineer’s problem, and there’s a blog and they go on the blog

and say “You know, I don’t know how to do this. I didn’t have this in

school,” or “This has never been encountered before. Help.” And 15

people will go on the blog and say you know what? The next day the

problem is solved, so they never say “I can’t do that. It just can’t be

done. It will never fly. It will never float.” You put that word “It

will never blah-blah-blah-blah-blah.”

Read the full transcript at