In his book The Vertical Farm, Columbia environmental health professor Dickson Despommier argues that cities of the future might feed themselves by creating farms inside enormous, glass-walled skyscrapers where every floor is a solar-powered greenhouse. All the water in these skyscraper farms would be recycled, and the structures themselves would be designed to be carbon neutral. While critics question whether it would be possible to heat, powei light and tend skyscraper farms without wasting a lot of energy, Despommier's thought experiment is a good one. We are going to need ways to produce enormous amounts of food in cities, often indoors, and trying to figure out how wed do that in a skyscraper-or an underground cavern, for that matter-is a step in the right direction.
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