Link day
Downtown Manhattan is hardly a place you would associate with agriculture. Rather, with its countless restaurants, cafes, shops and supermarkets this is a place of consumption.
And so every morsel, every bite of food New Yorkers munch through every day must be trucked, shipped or flown in, from across the country, and across the world.
Now though, scientists at Columbia University are proposing an alternative. Their vision of the future is one in which the skyline of New York and other cities include a new kind of skyscaper: the “vertical farm”.
The man who farms water — the most inspiring story I’ve read in quite some time! I saved this one to study his methods:
While traveling through Southern Africa in the summer of 1995, I heard of a man who was farming water. I set out to find him without much of an idea of where I was going. Soon I was packed in a colorful old bus roaring through the southern countryside of Zimbabwe…
Can you believe this? Banana trees in the middle of the desert!
Demand for water is doubling every 20 years, outpacing population growth twice as fast. Currently 1.3 billion people don’t have access to clean water and 2.5 billion lack proper sewage and sanitation. In less than 20 years, it is estimated that demand for fresh water will exceed the world’s supply by over 50 percent.
Water scarcity is not just an issue of the developing world. “Twenty-one percent of irrigation in the United States is achieved by pumping groundwater at rates that exceed the water’s ability to recharge…
This is a fairly serious situation. As I’ve mentioned before, you can’t live more than 3 days without drinking water, and lack of water for cooking, washing and cleaning poses health hazards as well. We’ve been lucky in the US for the most part, but I just talked to a woman the other day who had to leave her rural property due to lack of water. That’s why I get so excited about what the man in Zimbabwe is doing.
Someone asked me why I link to liberal sites sometimes. That’s because it’s difficult to find conservatives who are talking about environmental issues! If you find a good website, send me a note and I’ll check it out.
Well, that’s it for today. Hope your weekend is restful. 
October 14th, 2007 at 12:54 am
Great post! I’m right there with you, I have been criticized jfor being “green” and conservative as well. To me, it’s a no brainer, “conserve”-ative, right. The two are a perfect match. Living simply to me means resposibility for yourself and your family, much like the man in the article, with is with his family. He didn’t wait for the government to fix his problem, he took initiative and solved the problem for himself. That is conservative in my mind. Again, what a great post! Your not alone.
October 17th, 2007 at 5:21 pm
“He didn’t wait for the government to fix his problem, he took initiative and solved the problem for himself.”
Exactly.