Part 7 – Expansion of the Bioshaft Process and the Vertical Farm Dilema

The Bioshaft® Design Process – what is it and how it came to be.

Part 7 – Expansion of the Bioshaft Process and the Vertical Farm Dilema

In the fall of 2009 I drove back from Toronto after a meeting with Joe Pantalone the city’s deputy mayor. Many ideas were swirling in my head on improving the Bioshaft design process. I was in a good mood and enjoying the autumn colors when sadness crept in. I had been driving for hours and noticed that the roadside vegetation was basically composed of two extremely invasive plants, Phragmites and Teasel. I had noticed this before but this day it really hit home. I began consciously making mental calculations of their spread. Except for a break here and there the linear connection was basically complete, a five hundred mile corridor of invasive species that spread across the landscape into wetland areas along the drive. This was an invasion facilitated by the high volume of salt used in winter road maintenance and generally polluted roadside swales that favored these plants at the expense of native species. I began to envision a possible application of my bioshaft design for elevated roadways which also led me to revisit the Chicago River bridges. 2010 proved to be a good year for exploration into the adaptability of the bioshaft. I created concepts for the drought stricken southwest part of the country and planned out how the bioshaft design process could help in alleviating the energy/water/food nexus in the favelas of South American cities. However before all this could happen I needed to resolve a few questions that only a small-scale pilot project could answer. When a few months later the Toronto election results came in confirming the end to the pilot project, I was in need of an alternative site.

I met John Edel at a gathering of concerned Chicago based citizen groups and designers where he presented his reclamation project of the Chicago Sustainable Manufacturing Center. We arranged to meet at this building to discuss my bioshaft proposal. John gave me a tour and I expressed my vision on how the bioshaft design could be implemented on site. He liked the ideas and shared plans of the building for me to work from. It took a few weeks to generate a plausible concept. I thought that now I had a good site in an area of Chicago that was targeted for renewal, John was willing to monitor the performance; all the elements were present for a good pilot project except for funding. I began fundraising presenting this work at various institutions and organizations as well as venture capitalist groups. I sought help from SCORE Chicago to write a proper proposal and learn more about business entrepreneurship and promotion of ideas. All my efforts were not rewarded, everyone said it was a good concept worth pursuing but would not invest in a pilot project. It was a catch 22 situation, without funding, a pilot project could not be built and without a pilot project I could not realistically answer the queries. I was being asked to assure success before having the opportunity to test the concept prior to any monetary investment.

In March 2010 my abstract was accepted for presentation of a poster at the Cities of the Future Conference in Boston, MA. The bioshaft concept was well received; in fact it was considered a highlight of the conference and included in a promotional PowerPoint presentation by the Water Environment Federation. It was at this conference that I learned about the difference in research approach between Northern European countries and the US. In one talk a presenter spoke of what I understood to be ‘success through failure’. They were willing to take modest risks in carrying a variety of far reaching pilot projects knowing that many may not work out. They claimed that progress was speeded up because much was learned and inferred from failed concepts as well as successful ones. No potentially good idea was cast away without a trial; a far cry from my experience of having to prove success before testing. What I was proposing was in line with the biomimicry design process. In fact I could point to the way the Earth has dealt with these issues since the beginning of this planet’s existence as proof of concept, what I was providing was a frame where these biogeochemical processes could function. The opportunity to construct a pilot project at the Chicago Sustainable Manufacturing Center slowly dissolved as John Edel became involved in the Plant. In 2012 I approached him again to have the Plant be the site for a pilot project. I met Melanie Hoekstra at a downtown coffee shop and showed her my new designs. I received an invitation to submit my drawings to them; I expressed preference of presenting my work in person and did not hear back. The Plant is being promoted as an urban vertical farm, a trendy subject of the times. I am divided on this topic; I see limited potential but numerous negatives.

In 2010 I began to focus on how the bioshaft design process could help with the urban farm movement that was sweeping the country. I did not understand what the commotion was about, I was born in a farming community where everyone grew their own food and raised their own animals for meat. The very first thing my parents did when they bought their house in Toronto was to remove all the lawn in the backyard and plant a vegetable garden. My uncle who was passionate about plants had a tiny orchard in his yard in addition to vegetables; I particularly remember a grafted combination of an apple and peach tree that bore both fruits, each on half of the canopy. He made peach wine along with grape wine. We all canned our own tomato sauce, giardiniera, eggplants and bell peppers for winter consumption. In fact Toronto has a neighborhood named Cabbage Town because historically residents grew vegetables in their front yard. However going from yard to a skyscraper was something else. We were covering good agricultural land at the city’s periphery with leap frog development and growing our food in closed controlled environments that required high energy input. Something was wrong with this picture, it was a reversal of what made sense to me. The closest association I have is the Biosphere Two experiment in Tucson, Arizona, which I visited in the 1980’s, that proved to be a failure. At that visit we met with some of the faculty at the University of Arizona where they had created a fairly sophisticated hydroponic system for growing vegetables and Tilapia. A decade later while teaching at the University of Guelph I became interested in the regenerative design work of John Tillman Lyle at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.  I used his models of sustainable regeneration in my proposal for the CARITAS drug rehabilitation program where I suggested incorporating land restoration as part of the treatment process and retrofitting the farm to the proposed models (1995).

 My negative opinions on vertical farming were confirmed and enhanced upon reading the book ‘Vertical Farming’ by Dickson Despommier. In it he describes an Orwellian mode of production where sealed environments are frequented by farmers wearing masks and clothed in sanitized suits to avoid disseminating diseases. I also wondered where the pollinators would be housed and how they would survive. I saw a great potential for corporate takeover, what better model for agribusiness than a factory food production setting. Where would the animals be housed and what about hygienic conditions and waste treatment? The amount of infrastructure needed and its maintenance would be challenging. How was the soil to be re-nourished? Where we to grow everything with hydroponics and what would the water volume required be? Do we really want to eat food grown under artificial light rather than sunlight? What repercussions could this have on the quality of food? With vertical farming we are in effect separating ourselves one degree more from the earth. My biggest concern however remained the highly anthropocentric criterion in play. If we are to dedicate much of the urban spaces to farming where can we create habitat niches for fellow creatures that inhabit the same space? Perhaps there is a way to include habitat within the urban farm organization. I designed what I termed habitat pyramids that would have water features and waste reclamation zones and accommodate habitat niches for pollinators at all phases of their life cycle and a plant matrix to mimic local ecosystems. I later expanded this design approach to my proposal of converting the voluminous parking spaces in malls into habitat function and groundwater recharge zones that included rapid transit and recreational corridors alongside small scale organic food production.

 In a 2012 meeting of the Bioneers at the University of Illinois in Chicago, John Edel presented the Plant and its intended function, an anaerobic digestor was going to be added to accommodate the organic waste and generate power for the facility. The waste produced was insufficient so the call went to neighbors to bring their waste and add it to the mix. The anaerobic digestor would produce methane that was converted to fuel. This is certainly an alternative choice. My reservations however persist especially after the presentation given by Vandana Shiva at the same gathering where she recounted the Indian farmers’ battle against Monsanto. How even against this Goliath they managed to reclaim the land and limit farm sizes so that individual families could thrive without being exploited by the agribusiness multinational corporations. This I thought was a more sound approach than the vertical farm option; a hark back to Ebenezer Howard‘s Garden City mixed with John Tillman Lyle’s regenerative system models.

Back in 2010 another challenge came to bear on my designs - Entropy - .