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Feeding the World in the 21st Century
by Dr. Dickson Despommier
When Columbia professor Dickson Despommier set out to solve America's food, water, and energy crises, he didn't just think big - he thought up. Despommier's stroke of genius, The Vertical Farm has excited scientists, architects, and politicians around the globe. These farms, grown inside skyscrapers, would provide solutions to many of the serious problems we currently face, including: allowing year-round crop production; providing food to areas currently lacking arable land; immunity to weather-related crop failure; re-use of water collected by dehumidification of the indoor environment; new employment opportunities; no use of pesticides, fertilizers, or herbicides; drastically reduced dependence on fossil fuels; no crop loss due to shipping or storage; no agricultural runoff; and, many more.
Vertical farming can be located on abandoned city properties, creating new urban revenue streams. They will employ lots of skilled and unskilled labor. They can be run on wind, solar, tidal, and geothermal energy. They can be used to grow plants for pharmaceutical purposes or for converting gray water back into drinking water. In the tradition of the bestselling The World Without Us, this is a totally original landmark work destined to become a classic. With stunning illustrations and clear and entertaining writing, this book will appeal to anyone concerned about America's future.
"Despommier has quickly become the central figure in what could be a worldwide revolution." - Scientific American
"Nobody has ever dreamed as big as Dr. Dickson Despommier." - New York Magazine
"Despommier's ... ingenious idea ... could ultimately ease the world's food, water, and energy crises." - The Huffington Post
"Dickson Despommier is a futurist, an architect, and an intellectual in the same vein as Leonardo da Vinci, I. M. Pei, and Buckminster Fuller. Vertical farms will be remembered as one of the preeminent breakthroughs of the early 21st century, and Despommier will be remembered as the man who brought them to us." - Josh Tickell, director of Fuel, winner of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival Audience Award for Best Documentary
"This book makes the case that urban agriculture can go vertical as well as horizontal, putting all those expanses of pretty glass to some actual use!" - Bill McKibben, author of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet
"Cities of the future must generate their own food supply. Dickson Despommier's elegant, simple answer for achieving this goal is vertical farming. Welcome to the third green revolution." - Peter Diamandis, Chairman of the X Prize Foundation and Co-Founder of the Singularity University
This information about The Vertical Farm was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Dr. Dickson Despommier spent thirty eight years as a professor of microbiology and public health in environmental health sciences at Columbia, where he has won the Best Teacher award six times, and received the national 2003 American Medical Student Association Golden Apple Award for teaching. His work on vertical farms has been featured on such top national media as BBC, French National television, CNN, The Colbert Report, and The Tonight Show, as well as in full-length articles in The New York Times, Time Magazine, Scientific American, and The Washington Post. He recently spoke at the TED Conference, Pop!Tech and the World Science Festival and has been invited by the governments of China, India, Mexico, Jordan, Brazil, Canada, and Korea to work on environmental problems. He has been invited to speak at numerous national and international professional annual meetings as a keynote speaker, and at universities, including Harvard and MIT. He is one of the visionaries featured at the Chicago Museum of Science and Technology. Despommier lives in Fort Lee, New Jersey.
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