Positive Sustainability: sustainable sustenance

June 17, 2008

verticle farm We all may want our cars, our homes, our computers and our jobs, but there is one thing we can all agree we need: food. Unfortunately, in the world today, food is highly problematic — from a global perspective, it’s expensive, it’s unfairly distributed and its production is an environmental disaster. Statistics detailing the extent of food’s many problems are easy to find, but so far, solutions to this global plight have proven elusive.

There does not yet exist a simple, out-of-the-box solution to the food crisis. For the future, however, both a class at Columbia University and a small non-profit in Kansas are working on two fundamentally divergent solutions that could change the face of cultivation forever: vertical farming and Natural Systems Agriculture.

By the end of this year, more than half of the world’s population will live in cities. Advocates of vertical farming propose that food production should follow this demographic transition into the urban environment, with the food of the future grown not in fields, but in skyscrapers. While the idea might sound at first a tad ludicrous, Dr. Dickson Despommier and his students in Columbia’s Medical Ecology class are convinced of its potential.