Toward the new garden of Eden: a university professor becomes a reluctant revolutionary of hope

Dickson D. Despommier did not mean to become a revolutionary, or to plan the future of a city. He just wanted to be a scientist. Born in New Orleans and raised in California, he caught dragonflies off his mother's clothesline and put them in big mason jars, where he would watch them trying to will themselves out of the jar. He gathered snakes. He poked at nature and explored in the way that any child might do, trying to find, if not truth, amusement. Those days of fumbling with life led to a career studying parasites and, in particular, the tiny roundworm Trichinella spiralis, which lurks in undercooked pork or game. Trichinella reproduces in the intestines of those who eat it, which, in and of itself, is not really a problem. The problem is caused by the migration of baby worms out of the gut and into muscle tissue, be it a bicep or a heart (where they wait for their chosen human to be eaten by yet another host). It is these traveling worms that can cause disease and even death. To Despommier, Trichinella was a terrible and worthy adversary. But it was also, in the elaborateness of its sinister ways, fascinating, elegant even. Despommier spent twenty-seven years with this worm, becoming an elder statesman of parasitology even before he was elder. Then in 1999, at the age of fifty-nine, he found himself in a new situation. He could not get funding, not from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, or anyone else.

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Then Despommier asked a new question. What if we turned whole buildings into farms? What if we used hydroponics and made abandoned buildings into a new kind of living habitat and grew vertical farms, up walls or even inside walls, in the way that forests grow vertically? Until this point, Despommier had played a passive role in the students' endeavors. If the National Science Foundation had funded him at that point, he might even have abandoned his class midstream. It did not, and so he kept teaching the class, more involved at each stage. He looked up at the buildings around him in Manhattan. They were filled with human bodies and the species that lived off of them--worms, mites, bacteria, and flies--but the buildings did not give back, not life, anyway. They just took. Each day, thousands of pounds of food and millions of gallons of water were shipped and carried up elevators, staircases, and pipes, and near-equal amounts of waste were dispatched down toilets. Each building sucked the juices out of the land outside the city, sucked at the land around the world.

Author: Rob Dunn