Silent Running

Watched this on a friend's recommendation. If I remember correctly, the tone of his recommendation was that this movie came out of the 70's eco-hysteria movement, was worth watching along with a few others, and that were were in a new cycle of eco-hysteria that wasn't wholly based on logic. I believe the term he used for the film genre was actually "eco-disaster flicks".

I'd like to talk to him more about that, but without even analyzing the legitimacy of that position, I think it does point out a definite emotional tone in some eco-art and imagining of an eco-challenged future.

Anxiety.
Despair.
Nostalgia.

"Silent Running" is pretty amazing. The last bits of Earth's forests are taken into outer space in pods attached to a space fleet. At great cost, the fleet is maintained by 3 knuckleheads and 1 crazy treehugger. The U.S. eventually can't afford it anymore so they tell the crew to blow up the pods and head on back home. Treehugger loses his shit, kills the other crew members, and tries to keep the pods going. I won't give away the ending.

Garden City

Catching up with a great article and slideshow about vertical farming and produce-friendly urban planning.

"Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, hopes to make these zucchini-in-the-sky visions a reality. Dr. Despommier’s pet project is the “vertical farm,” a concept he created in 1999 with graduate students in his class on medical ecology, the study of how the environment and human health interact."

My favorite argument for vertical farming on his website - "We cannot go to the moon, Mars, or beyond without first learning to farm indoors on." The website is also a multi-sourced portal for designs and project submissions from all over the world. Here's one actually conceived for the Gowanus area.