EP. 4 - What's Up With Vertical Farming, Land Destruction, a $62bn Aqueduct
EPISODE 4 - What's Up With Vertical Farming, Land Destruction, a $62bn Aqueduct
State of Vertical Farming
Plants and mammals are essential molecular manufacturing factories. Trillions of times per second, molecules are made according to DNA’s recipe. Right now, almost all biologically-based drugs are made in massive vats of mammalian cells (money kidney cells, Chinese hamster ovaries)…you can’t make this up. Plants are a much safer, faster, and more flexible way to produce medicines and vaccines. One day, farms will manufacture a wide variety of molecules, personalized to you.
Land Use Change: Nature Destruction on Steroids
“720,000 square kilometers of land surface has changed annually since 1960 – an area ‘about twice the size of Germany’.” What a devastating and tragic loss of landscape. On the other hand, this land use change has sustained the unrelenting growth of humanity.
My contention is the following: land-use change is the most destructive of humans’ impact on nature. And that agriculture is responsible for the vast majority of this land-use change.
From the environment’s perspective, the world has seen many temperatures, but it has yet to encounter a species as destructive as ours.
China’s $62bn Aqueduct Project
China poured more concrete in the last three years than the US did in the entire 20th century. China is urbanizing at an unprecedented rate. To supply its drier western and northern regions, China has spent $62 billion to deliver water from the wetter southern regions.
The US appears almost dormant in its pursuit of mega infrastructure projects. Roads, dams, the electrical grid, and public transport all seem to be withering over time, and under the weight of a growing population. Access to power, water, and food are primary to a population’s flourishing. Let’s lead, not lag.
