Anything But Population
August 28, 2009
by Phil Cafaro
An interesting article appeared this past Monday, on the op-ed page of the New York Times, written by Dickson Despommier and titled A Farm on Every Floor.
Despommier begins: “If climate change and population growth progress at their current pace, in roughly 50 years farming as we know it will no longer exist.” And a little later: “population increases will soon cause our farmers to run out of land.” He also discusses the problem of worldwide water shortages.
Enter “vertical farming”: farming in buildings in cities, rather than out in the rural landscape. Such farming, Despommier claims, will be super efficient in its use of water and fertilizer and other inputs; and super nonpolluting in its outputs. It will beautify our cities, and allow us to turn over vast areas of the hinterlands back to nature. Despite the nonexistence of a single “vertical farm” anywhere in the world, the author is quite bullish on the idea; so bullish, in fact, that he has started a business to build vertical farms.
In itself, there might not be anything to say against someone building a “vertical farm,” and maybe a lot to say in its favor. What’s interesting is the author’s assumption that the answer to population growth, global climate change, and rapid loss of farmlands to sprawl in the U.S., is to move wholesale to farming in buildings.
The loss of traditional farms hardly seems to give the author qualms. Nor does the question of whether we want to put our food security eggs in this untried basket.
Halfway through the article, we find this bland statement: “Fish and poultry could also be raised indoors” –- as if CAFO’s (confined animal feedlot operations) were not in existence already, with all their tremendous harms to animals and the environment.
This article raises interesting issues in environmental ethics. One is how far we want to go in creating an ever more intensively managed and humanized world. Another is how far we are willing to search for technological solutions to such problems as population growth, before we summon the wisdom to tackle them directly, through changes in our own behavior.
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect of the article is where it is published, on perhaps the most coveted editorial space on the planet: the op-ed page of the New York Times. The Times would never turn over this much space to anyone advocating for stabilizing the U.S. population, or for reducing immigration levels as a means to do so. Nor would its editorial board admit openly and honestly that mass immigration is set to add hundreds of millions of people to America’s population over the next hundred years.
Yet it will, and through the efforts of groups like Progressives for Immigration Reform, the truth will get out. So through articles such as this, the Times is working to prepare progressive readers for the idea of a much more crowded and managed future. Whether this is seen as a good thing, or as inevitable, the message is that we can deal with any challenges that come up. Little matters, like the loss of a huge percentage of our current farmland, or less water running out of the Rockies, due to climate change.
Farms in high rises. What other changes will we be asked to accept, in the brave new world that mass immigration will bring to the United States? Will they really make our lives better? Are they worth the risk?
