According to Dickson Despommier the revolution may not be televised, but it will be blogged about.<br /><br />Dickson Despommier:One of the big issues there is where does the energy come from to powerup a huge indoor farming operation? So in the middle of the Arizonadesert the sun supplies everything. They don't grow food at night. Sothey don't use grow lights. They don't have to. They get an abundantamount of sunlight, and because it's double-skinned glass, it'sinsulated from the outside, so if the temperature goes to 120 theydon't care, and in the winter if it goes down to minus 10 they don'tcare. It's still 75 to 80 degrees inside their horizontal greenhouse.All right? No one has ever done this up, because there are engineeringchallenges as well as some economic challenges, but it's mostlyengineering. If you grow food indoors in these big buildings how muchenergy will it consume versus in fact how much might it even generateby the parts of the plants you don't eat. You can recycle that and getsome of that back at least. So that was the fifth year's projects forthe 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 weshouldn't behave as a single species and not as 194 different speciesis because we are a single species, and our brain is basicallyengineered the same way regardless if you're an aborigine living in themiddle of the Australian desert, or if you're an IBM executive up inRye, New York trying to find out what the next alternate power sourcemight be. The fact is that if you could connect those genomes togetherinto a single thinking unit that's six point seven billion inputs withabout a hundred trillion neuronal connections per input I don't carewhat the problem is. I don't care what the problem is. It's solved in aminute. It's not solved in an hour. Now I can give you examples ofwhere that actually works on a small scale: The International LadiesGarment Workers Union. It's a wonderful example of a cooperativity[sic] among a group of people that agrees at a common end we are goingto behave together. We'll take pay cuts. We'll get pay raises, but noone loses their job, and we'll all produce clothing as the end of theday. That's our job, and that's what we're going to do. The engineeringcompany 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 everyother engineer's problem, and there's a blog and they go on the blogand say "You know, I don't know how to do this. I didn't have this inschool," or "This has never been encountered before. Help." And 15people will go on the blog and say you know what? The next day theproblem is solved, so they never say "I can't do that. It just can't bedone. It will never fly. It will never float." You put that word "Itwill never blah-blah-blah-blah-blah." Next. I have somebody elsesitting here. I don't want to talk to "It can never..." I want to talk to"When can you...?" That's what I want to hear. When can you build me avertical farm? And so I've heard that from about eight places. Four ofthese places are for real, and one of those places will be first. Can Itell you which one that is? No I can't because I don't know yet, and ifI did I wouldn't tell you. So we have a lot of money sitting out therewaiting to get involved in this because they have sort of ignored theconcept of profitability, and they're concentrating on need. I thinkprofitability will follow need. So when people see how good their foodis and how abundant it is and how readily available it is, the switch--I will never eat anything grown outside. I can't trust the outdoors. Ican't control it. Everything you want is controlled indoors and I thinkmarketing will be a no brainer once it starts. <br />Recorded on: 6/10/08
