You Can’t Drink Oil
As a news feature reported in 2008, “The United Nations predicts that severe water shortages affecting at least 400 million people today will affect 4 billion people, more than half of humanity, by 2050” (www.pbs.org/newshour/extra/features/US/jan-june08/water_2-11.html). It is often stated that water is the new oil. I still have trouble with this one, since we need to drink 2.3 liters of water each and every day, but drinking oil? Well, I think what they really mean to say is that water is becoming more scarce by the day, and someday it may be even more valuable a resource than oil is today. It’s also good to remind ourselves that more than 70 percent of the world’s available freshwater is used to grow our food, an activity that renders it unfit for drinking. The world has to find alternatives to current water uses through the application of more efficient technologies, or we will suffer the consequences in the form of civil unrest and open warfare.
Cities are by far the biggest consumers of drinking water, turning it into black water (a combination of feces, urine, bathwater, runoff from storms, etc.) that each urban center then needs to handle and dispose of safely in order to prevent contaminating the local environment with its own waste. In the past, not being able to do so meant certain disaster for its citizens. Fecally contaminated drinking water has been responsible for outbreaks of cholera and dysentery, in which millions of lives have been lost. In the late nineteenth century, proof that many diseases were caused by microbes was closely followed by the invention of sanitation technologies that took advantage of this new knowledge, putting an end to horrible living conditions associated with an unclean environment in most European and North American cities. However, victory came at an enormous price, in terms of both dollars spent and human labor. New York City is a good example as to the extremes to which some urban communities have elected to go in order to ensure a safe and reliable source of drinking water. It will also serve as a case study here for what it might do to reverse its propensity for increased water consumption by recovering its grey water.
The Croton Reservoir and aqueduct system was designed to bring clean water to New York City to replace Collect Pond in lower Manhattan, a veritable cesspool of vile brown-colored liquid that was used by both people and draft animals. Started in 1837, the Croton system took five years to complete, revolutionizing city life in Old Gotham once and for all. One of the many benefits of an abundant freshwater supply was that the city need never again burn to the ground. Epidemics of cholera and dysentery also faded away shortly after its completion. As New York City’s population burgeoned over the next fifty years, the city needed even more water, so a series of projects involving the construction of underground tunnels was conceived to bring water from much farther away, from the Catskill Mountains around 120 miles northwest of the city. Both branches of the Delaware River, the Schoharie River, the Esopus River, the Rondout Creek, and the Neversink River were dammed, and multiple tunnels were dug, a civil engineering feat that even the ancient Romans would have been proud of. Today, the reservoir system contains nearly 580 billion gallons. It had better, because 8.3 million New Yorkers consume an astounding 1 billion gallons of water per day. After using it for a variety of purposes, the city processes the combined sewage at fourteen treatment plants scattered around its five boroughs. The black water is then shipped by boat to Ward’s Island, where it is dewatered by industrial-size centrifuges. The sludge part is processed further, removing the water and heating it to kill off all microbial life. It can then be powdered and used as fertilizer. The grey water created by the centrifugation process is returned to each treatment plant, again by boat, treated with chlorine, then unceremoniously dumped into the Hudson estuary. That’s a lot of time and energy spent to move around boatloads of…well you know that rude word. Mostly, the biggest concern is the expense of the scheme. It generates little in the way of income (fertilizer aside), burns lots of fossil fuel, and wastes huge quantities of potentially valuable water. Scolding New York City for its wastrel habits seems a bit harsh, however, since nearly all cities, regardless of location, behave similarly. In fact, Washington, D.C., discards far more grey water than New York.
The Clean Water Act was created in 1972 under Richard Nixon’s administration to put a stop to the dumping of untreated municipal sludge into the estuaries and oceans. The enforcement of its many regulations lies with the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA requires that each community be solely responsible for discarding its wastes in ways that do no harm to the environment. As might be predicted, the implementation of modern waste-management practices has proven economically difficult for most cities to execute according to the letter of those laws, and equally expensive to sustain. Despite many helpful government-sponsored incentive programs that share the cost of converting older treatment plants into modern ones, U.S. cities collectively still spend billions of dollars each year disposing of liquid municipal waste. It’s high time that we embrace the concept that these products of our own metabolism have intrinsic as well as economic value, and reverse that trend. To quote a tired old phrase, we need to turn lemons into lemonade.
For recovering the liquid part of black water, higher plants have the answer. As explained earlier, plants obtain their nutrients by pumping water through their roots, up through their leaves, and eventually transpiring it out into the atmosphere. Remediation of grey water could easily be accomplished by taking advantage of the enormous amount of transpiration that could occur inside vertical farms constructed expressly for that purpose. Dehumidification of the indoor air is all that would be necessary to get back the water we produced by eating and drinking. Can this idea actually work? Is it practical? How expensive is it? Would anyone in his right mind really drink water he knew came from a waste-treatment plant? As of this writing, there is no vertical farm devoted to water recovery, so predicting how much one might cost and how practical the idea actually is is hard to judge. However, social marketing of the general concept has already been accomplished: In Orange County, California, an initiative dubbed “from toilet to tap” is an example of recycling that emulates the best qualities of an eco-urban environment. For around $500 million, the city of Santa Ana constructed a processing plant that takes all the liquid in its municipal waste stream and recycles it. The people in that part of California, when asked, flatly refused to even consider drinking the water that came right out of the processing plant, even though they were well aware that there was no threat of a health hazard in doing so. The idea of drinking their own wastewater was, in their words, “Repulsive.” (I’m glad the scientists working on the International Space Station didn’t voice a similar objection or there would be no space station, but that’s another story.) The citizens of Santa Ana instead chose to use that water to recharge the local aquifer, and then draw it out of the ground. The final filtration step was the earth itself. In contrast to that very elaborate—and, I might add, expensive—scenario, collecting transpired water from a building devoted exclusively to that process would be simpler, more direct, and most likely far less expensive. In addition, the plants would feed off the dissolved nutrients in grey water and grow. Harvesting excess plant material at periodic intervals would allow for the generation of energy by incineration, yielding an added bonus to the overall process. When it comes to whether this kind of vertical farm is practical (i.e., economically feasible), I would counter with, what expense would you go to in order to ensure a sustainable source of clean drinking water? Digging City Tunnel No. 3 under the state of New York’s countryside to bring more water more efficiently to Gotham is a $6 billion plus solution that will be completed in 2020. I’d be willing to bet that making the vertical-farm water-recovery plan work would cost considerably less, it would be up and running light-years sooner, and, finally, it would be a local industry that would also help to clean the city’s air by its very nature of being engineered by the plants.
Indoor Drugstore
The human species has been around for some two hundred
thousand years, and over that time, due largely to geographic separation, we divided up into many cultures. Virtually all of them evolved a common set of survival tactics based on essential needs. Securing a reliable food supply was one of those, which this book has addressed from many perspectives throughout the last seven chapters. Dealing with illness was another aspect of life that all cultures had to grapple with, or else succumb to the forces of nature. Survival meant that they were either lucky, or that their immune systems were diverse enough to ward off the offending pathogens. Another possibility was that they had somehow stumbled upon something that aided in the healing process. When an individual became sick, attempts to alleviate suffering and identify the cause were natural outgrowths of our newly acquired ability to consciously reason through a given situation, and our propensity for altruistic behavior. Healers in those early settlements became the sages of their communities. In what must have been an arduous, gut-wrenching set of “preclinical” trials, using whatever they had at their disposal, humans gradually invented the science of therapeutics.
In the beginning, all healers had to rely on was the natural world. In many places this is still the case; witness the use of animal poultices (pieces of flesh or skin from either a fish, bird, amphibian, or mammal applied to an area of inflammation, such as an infected wound) and a plethora of herbal medicines, many of which were taken orally. What’s more, in the majority of cases these natural products actually worked. In the case of animal poultices, scientists have isolated and studied the active ingredients. Most animal tissues contain a set of small peptide molecules related to the antibiotic gramicidin. These molecules can be routinely isolated from saliva, tears, urogenital secretions, frog skin mucus, and a variety of other sources. Quinine, a cure for malaria, and salicin, a pain reliever related to modern aspirin, are both plant-derived products still in use today. The short list includes digoxin, paclitaxel, reserpine, vinblastine, morphine, and many others. One can easily imagine how they all became incorporated into the shaman’s repertoire of therapeutic agents. Both animals and plants of a given locality played important roles in defining the spectrum of active compounds derived from them. Because of the ready availability and abundance of plants compared to wild animals (and ease of capture, too, I might add), many cultures derived a remarkable number of useful drugs from herbs, shrubs, and woody plants that now comprise an extensive natural pharmacopoeia. Growing essential herbal plants from all the major cultures in a vertical farm devoted to that purpose would be most welcomed, especially in light of the fact that shortages of drugs encourage unscrupulous dealers to manufacture fake substitutes and flood the market with them. In addition, many of these plants are rare and may be harvested to near extinction in the name of humanitarian causes, leaving no options for treatment.
In 1828 Friedrich Wöhler synthesized the first organic molecule, urea, and set the world of industrial chemistry on its way. The modern science of dye chemistry, in turn, led the way to the establishment of the commercial drug industry around the nineteenth century. Aspirin is a synthetic form of acetylsalicylic acid. The Bayer Company in Germany synthesized it in 1897, and from that point on revolutionized the way medicine was practiced. The parent compound of acetylsalicylic acid is found in the leaf of the white willow tree (Salix alba), and has been known for its pain-relieving properties for centuries by native peoples wherever this species occurs. The pharmaceutical industry, founded on the same principles of drug discovery as those pioneered by Bayer, soon became a major economic force in the early twentieth century Industrial Revolution, and remains today as one of the major driving forces in the technosphere. Before there were standardized drugs available, all therapeutic agents had to be derived from natural sources, mostly from higher plants. According to the World Health Organization, of the 252 drugs considered as basic and essential, 11 percent are exclusively of plant origin, and a significant number are synthetic drugs obtained from natural precursors. All of the parent plants, save for those derived from trees, can be grown efficiently in a controlled environment. In addition, there are a few drugs that are derived from plants that the world routinely runs out of each year. One of them is artemisinin, which is the only effective treatment for those infected with drug-resistant malaria. Derived from the herb Artemisia annua, which grows wild in parts of Thailand and China, it is a drug in great demand, especially when world supplies get low. Dr. Facundo Fernandez, a professor of chemistry from Georgia Institute of Technology, conducted surveys of samples of artemisinin in 2009 by applying mass spectroscopy to confirm the contents of each vial of the substance. He found that the majority of them were devoid of any antiparasitic drug, and concluded that as a result of this chronic shortage, there is a brisk trade in fake artemisinin. Instead of the real drug, containers of bogus artemisinin were composed of a pain reliever like acetaminophen or ibuprofen, agents that treat only the fever part of malaria’s symptoms. Of course, the unfortunate user does not know this and assumes he or she is getting better once the fever breaks and the pain is gone. Tragically, many victims of this scam die due to the lack of specific treatment. Illegal drug trafficking in artemisinin can be prevented by growing the plant in the vertical farm.
The Indian subcontinent is home to at least seven major religions and three systems of traditional medicine, one of which is the Ayurveda. The Ayurveda recommends 315 herbal medicines listed as essential drugs, with more than forty-two hundred currently registered plant derivatives. This ancient medical system was first created some five thousand years ago, and over that time has recommended the use of more than seventy-five hundred different plants for virtually anything that can afflict humankind, from infectious microbes to psychological problems. The term “ayurveda” translates roughly to “life sciences,” and it continues to this day as the main reference for therapeutics from that vast region of the world. Cultures indigenous to Asia, South America, and Africa also have extensive lists of plant extracts for treatment of all human illnesses.
Energy In, Energy Out
Biofuels are best defined as combustible by-products of plant metabolism, such as oils used in biodiesel products, or microbial fermentation products of sugars derived from higher plants such as ethanol. Biodiesel can also be made from oils produced in lower plants like algae. In this case, specially constructed vertical farms would be needed. The production and use of biofuels have received much attention from big agri-business, with many brands of gasoline now boasting a 15 percent ethanol content at the pump. Brazil generates more than 30 percent of its automobile fuel by fermenting sugar pressed out of sugarcane, and is the world’s largest producer of ethanol. Ethanol produced from corn can also be made by a chemical fermentation process. The upside to biofuels is that they are carbon neutral. Burning them generates carbon dioxide that is then captured by the plants and made into a potential biofuel product. On the negative side, the price of oil has forced farmers in many regions of the world to switch to corn and sugarcane for fuel production, lessening the amount of land devoted to food production. This has, in turn, resulted in higher food prices and food shortages in some places. Despite this, energy experts predict that clean-burning biofuels will eventually replace most of the fossil fuel–based petroleum products used in today’s combustion engines. One solution to the land-use question is to grow all biofuel-producing plants in vertical farms.
The Portable Vertical Farm
Making food available for everyone is the big idea behind the concept of producing food in the vertical farm. In particular, people who are forced to migrate away from their place of origin due to war, civil unrest, or natural disaster would benefit most from having access to them. Clean water and a safe source of healthy food are the two things that the vertical farm can easily supply. In addition, displaced people need to settle somewhere in which good sanitary practices exist, or they may suffer even more insult than they did in the place they escaped from. Establishing a portable version of the vertical farm would apply to a number of these cases
. Materials now exist—graphite composites for structural units, transparent lightweight window materials (e.g., ETFE), and the like—to make this initiative feasible today. Fast-growing, iron-rich leafy vegetables (spinach, kale) would be first-line crops, followed by a variety of root vegetables, protein-rich beans and grains, and the like, depending upon the ethnic preferences of the groups in question. Just as the MASH (mobile army surgical hospital) units, implemented first during the Korean War in 1951, revolutionized the practice of combat-zone medicine, portable vertical farms (PVFs) will restore the nutritional status of perhaps millions of disadvantaged, displaced people.
chapter 9
Food Fast-Forwarded
When you’re finished changing, you’re finished.
—BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
The concept of a disruptive technology is simple: It disrupts the present and jump-starts the future. The vertical farm has the potential to do that by advancing agriculture to a place in history it has never before occupied, one of true sustainability. But as with all new ways of doing things, there are some fairly hefty boulders in the middle of the road that need moving first. To begin with, bringing a vertical farm into reality, even a prototype, will require many elements to come together to permit its maximum expression. I am convinced that there already is a worldwide critical mass of political will, social acceptance, clever engineering, great designs, and science-based controlled-environment agriculture to coalesce the concept of vertical farming into a highly efficient food-producing building. When up and running, vertical farms will be yet another example of how the human species can solve problems that they themselves have created. Urban agriculture will lead the way to the establishment of a global network of functional food production systems situated directly in the mainstream of a crowded world, allowing for the repair of many of the world’s damaged ecoystems. Despite all the enthusiasm for the concept, however, other problems will require immediate addressing if it is to succeed.
The Vertical Farm Page 16