Talking to ... Dickson Despommier

Dickson Despommioer

At some point suddenly they were there, the LED lights and the lettuces, the herbs and the chilies – all growing in the apartment. It was a kind of curious experimenting with something for nutritional health that turned out to also have psychologically positive benefits. Meanwhile, vertical farming may have been becoming a billion-dollar business, but its origins lie in the dark - at least until you take the time to research its origins. And if you do, you find yourself transplanted to the New York of the late 90s and into the mind of a microbiologist who’s set up a small course in medical ecology at Columbia University which becomes a long term project for a group of students in his class. That vertical faming originate in New York’s urban canyons is strange enough - and it raises the question of how the idea could have come about here rather than on some rural farm. And that’s precisely the subject of our conversation with Dickson Depommier, the ‘Godfather’ of Vertical Farming. The fact that Dickson Depommier, a microbiologist whose research interests led to an intimate understanding of the life-cycle of Trichinella spirales, the nematode worm, shifted to the issue of Vertical Farming has to do with his ecological curiosity - and the idea that the world's population should turn not toward Apocalyptic thinking, but to solving their own self-created problems. And because this generated a lot of interest among his crowd of students, he worked with them to come up with the concept of Vertical Farming, which he presented in his 2010 book The Vertical Farm. And because this idea that’s illuminated by LED lights and precisely controlled by digital technology has generated a gigantic reaction, the 83-year-old professor still follows his instincts, while still maintaining the American Society for Microbiology’s This Week in Virology podcast, has recently published a book on The New City: How to Build Our Sustainable Urban Future - the future blueprint of an ecological city.

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Monographies by Dickson Despommier

The New City, Columbia University Press 2023

The Vertical Farm, Macmillan 2010

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