Vertical Farming : The Solution For Water Shortage

After reading a book and watching a movie, I realized humans think we are kings of the world, that our hold on this planet is eternal. But it's not true. There are many catastrophes, man-made and otherwise, that could befall us and wipe us from the face of the Earth.  The Earth would eventually recover.  Humans won't get that chance.  One of the lessons of The Road is that we need to protect both our environment and our sense of

Aquifers are suffering from declining water levels, saltwater intrusion, and inadequately replenished fresh groundwater. In some areas, demand for potable water exceeds available resources. Fresh water supplies are being compromised by the ever-increasing demands of energy production, agriculture, and industry. In turn, these essential activities are threatened by decreasing water supplies. Globalization is eroding the U.S. lead in supplying water technologies and international competitors are making significant inroads into the U.S. marketplace. The traditionally low cost of water (and low profitability for the private sector) coupled with the perceived risks of investing in new and unproven technologies are preventing the commercialization of world-leading research and innovative technologies. Threats to America's Water Supply The water supply of the United States, as well as the entire world, is currently facing a number of different threats. They in turn threaten the health and economic well-being of the citizens. These threats to the water supply include: increased demand by energy production, agricultural run-offs, leaching of radioactive materials and heavy metal, depletion of aquifers, contamination of

So, I offer this statement in the belief that universal human dignity and a thriving biodiverse planet are not only achievable but also inherent. It is my hope that these words raise awareness and help people live a reflective and intentional life by committing to the processes, already underway, to mitigate the climate change. Unfortunately, debates, conferences, and discussions about the environment have too often been dictated, dominated, and manipulated by the extremes, and the dogmatism of fossil fuel companies, which in turn fuels bigotry. I hope this statement advances and improves the quality and tenor of the dialogue about how to protect the environment in the 21st century. From there, we take action to leave this world better than we found it. But now is the time to take bold and unprecedented! “The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.” Abraham

Did you know that there are 13 species of animals who we may have to say goodbye to in 2015, or an estimated 2.2 billion tons of waste is yearly dumped into oceans? There is no need to research the litany of environmental changes; news such as global warming, air pollution, or resource scarcity that choke environmental problems to appear daily on TV screens and in newspapers. Even with these particularly cautions, many of us are still facing environmental catastrophes with overly optimistic attitudes, ignoring how serious the matter is. This form of the unrealistic expectation is similar to the blind development in our technological society that engenders a series of environmental and economic problems. Paul Ehrlich, [1] a Stanford University

As a resident of the United States, imagine the nation 's future without water. Land terribly dry and brown with hardly any plants growing. Laws being put in place that would fine you for using too much water and people fighting over what remains of this extremely important resource. Each group trying to persuade the other that their need for water is greater. Well, if you are a resident of California, this is already happening. Farmers, people, and environmentalists all want the water to be used for different things, the only problem is, there isn’t enough. The current drought has continued for about five years now, with extremely high temperatures and a lack of precipitation. While personal hygiene, common comforts and the fish

The Anthropocene is an era increasingly defined as, current and beginning with homo sapiens becoming the dominant force upon Earth’s ecosystems, geology, and climate. Human activity has had and continues to have a measured effect, in major extinction events. Scientists believe this will increase in severity as a consequence of climate change (Thomas et al., 2004; Root et al., 2003). Minter (2012) discusses the traditional westernised desire humans have towards manipulating and controlling the environment. As humans strive to become ‘masters of nature’, we threaten the integrity of the organic systems we live off. Putting a low collective value on our ethical responsibilities with respect to our consumer behaviour could very well lay the flagstones on the path to our own extinction on this planet.

Since climate change unfolds over long periods of time, we tend to overlook the dangerous outcomes; we focus and react to immediate, urgent events instead like our kids or bills. Although scientists have agreed that climate change has significantly altered the atmosphere, we still don’t have a majority of the population taking action. We need to restraint ourselves from using fossil-fuels and fracking before we reach an irreversible tipping point and to protect our way of life, our children, and future generations (Keya Chatterjee, Disruption video). Global warming is determining every aspect of our lives, and if we don’t acknowledge this environmental issue and take action, we will not live, we will die. Alternatively, a post-carbon environment is definitely within our grasp, with 100% renewable energy sources. A change to friendly energy doesn’t mean economic instability; we’ll still have job opportunities installing solar panels and wind turbines, for example. Although we need political will from world leaders, in order to establish this transition, we as individuals must take action and get

United States’ President Ronald Reagan once said, “Preservation of our environment is not a liberal of conservative challenge, it’s common sense (Ronald).” Although throughout history countless of prominent figures in society have set the issue of the well being of our planet as a top priority, the majority of the world population has come to ignore it until now, when it has directly affected their lives. Around the entire globe, droughts, floods, food shortages, poverty, and the overall deterioration of our planet. Although larger developed countries, such as the United States and China, have taken numerous small steps to improve conditions within their own countries further steps must be taken to preserve the only planet the human

Imagine a dying world, where organisms and resources are rapidly vanishing and the life-sustaining environment converts into a danger zone for its inhabitants. Imagination is not required for creating such a world because humans are currently constructing one. As a result of human activities, Earth has been transformed and a new geological age called “the Anthropocene” has been seriously proposed. The Anthropocene will witness the necessity for all walks of life to face numerous, new challenges as climate conditions deteriorate and resources deplete. In order to confront the ecological problems brought by the Anthropocene, communities must be resilient and this resilience must rely on collective decision-making and frugality. Moreover, there

The debate of whether humans as a species are destroying their planet and violently pushing life to extinction has only intensified in recent years. But evidence has proved what we don’t want to hear time and time again – humans, and our actions (direct and indirect) are heavily involved in the extinction of flora and fauna species across the globe. We carelessly dump enormous amounts of c02 into our atmosphere, leading to ocean acidification and global warming that kill millions of animals and plants, and continue desecrating fragile ecosystems and habitats, resulting in the slaughter of now-rare life forms. We tamper with our climate as if it is a rather interesting puzzle piece, not the planet that supports our own existence.

The future of our planet has been a great concern for the global community for many years. In their article ‘Can a Collapse of Global Civilisation be Avoided?’ Paul and Anne Ehrlich explore the current ecological and socio-cultural trends that they believe, if left untreated, will lead to the inevitable collapse. Unlike past civilizations, the modern global community has the knowledge, skills and technologies to solve the several pressing issues Ehrlich presents in this article. So what are those issues?

This book is the story of an opportunistic approach to remedy and adapt to the drastic changes humanity has caused to the Earth while also embracing the role humans play in the Anthropogenic era. Humans will always continue to build environments, but the concern now is how are we going to build better environments. These issues will challenge humanity and question our values. How we build the environment around us in the future will be based on whether or not embracing the Anthropogenic era will indeed lead to a sustainable planet or just be a quick fix to the deeper issues of human behavior that have led us astray from maintaining a sustainable planet.

With just little changes in our daily life people could help improve the situation. If citizens started taking shorter showers, closing our faucets while brushing your teeth, recycling water bottles and other objects we’ll start to notice a difference. Although there are other options such as desalinating the water from the sea, cleaning sewage water, and expanding water in outer space. It would cost billions our dollars and it would just hurt our economy ,rather than benefit it. Another solution that is economical would be to expand our reservoir system and save water until

50 years of innovation and urbanization, we were blinded by the city lights and smokes that we do not seem to see the importance of taking good care of our environment, especially the nonrenewable sources. The consumers’ needs quickly became wants, and for the producers, wants simply mean profit, and profit is money. Money is everything to people nowadays. We would resort to everything that could provide us even the littlest amount of money, no matter what the repercussions would be, thus, the destroying of the resources. We are slowly killing the planet but we cannot see it because we are too busy trying to get things we believe we need. It is said that the earth’s weight is still the same as it was first created. Come to think of it, we do give and take with the nature, we take its resources, invent something useful that we consume, but we give it back as waste and

The concept of growing food in a 30 story high building, which takes up few square acres, to enable people the potential to grow produce is absolutely fascinating. This concept can be related to that of spatial scale as mentioned in a previous lecture. It is able to reduce the amount of land needed to farm, yet still feed thousands of people. Not only that but it reduces scale in terms of imports. In Canada, we do not have the outdoor climate year round to produce fresh produce, therefore in the winter months we rely on imports from other countries to meet our demand. With vertical farming technology it will be able to reduce the spatial distance of food production and food consumption through promoting a more local way of getting groceries.