Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: busy

Check out the SkyFarm!

Here is a fascinating article about the SkyFarm, a plan for a building that would be essentially a vertical farm. The details might need tweaking, but the concept is sound. This has the added advantage of creating some new green-collar jobs too.
Tags: community, gardening, good news
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  • 6 comments
seticat

seticat

November 30 2008, 03:55:42 UTC 12 years ago

Good idea. One of the local 'big businesses' basically roofed their corporate office building in green. Weyerhaeuser is one of the world's largest pulp and paper companies, and the world's largest private owner of softwood timberland - their main office is just up the freeway from here - in Federal Way, WA.




The plants you can see aren't foodstuffs, but they certainly could be. It could be considered a good start.
eniastoa

eniastoa

December 1 2008, 20:58:15 UTC 12 years ago

It doesn't surprise me that Weyerhauser would do that ... it's far easier than changing the sorts of practices described in Strangely Like War.
corivax

corivax

December 2 2008, 00:30:08 UTC 12 years ago

The ecologists I work with consider Weyerhauser the best of the timber companies. Damning with faint praise there, I know. :)

In the last ten or so years, laws have shifted so that it's much less profitable to be vertically integrated. So most timber companies have split into pieces. One company owns a mill, another owns land, another has loggers who cut on that land, etc.

Weyerhauser is the last major timber company with vertical integration and their own land. They're the only ones with any reason to try and take care of the land, because they want to be able to harvest from it multiple times. So they're the only big company that consults ecologists or bothers to replant, because it makes economic sense to them to get the most value out of their land.

The shell companies that exist only as tax shelters holding land buy forests, clear cut them, and sell them cheaply (for a tax break, since the value of their land-assets have decreased with all the trees missing) to buy more land. They don't have any financial reason to take care of the land.

I suppose Weyerhauser will break up eventually. The shell companies make more money.