Patrick Blanc’s Vertical Gardens

Patrick Blanc’s Vertical Gardens:

I know we spend a lot of time feeling like the future is almost inevitably doomed, so let me inject some optimism into your day.

Here is a vision of what the world will look like if we can just make it through the next 10-20 years.

Everything here is based on stuff that already exists–stuff that, in fact, is already being implemented in many locations around the world.

We’ll live in fantasy elf-style cities, where our very buildings will be wrapped in walls of gardens. It will help us cleanse our water and our air, support wildlife and support us, with food grown on our very own houses and nurturing, soothing flowers and greenery everywhere we go. Furthermore, it will be energy-efficient, using greenery and soil to help regulate the temperature of our buildings.
Electrical grids will be re-imagined, and will become able to respond
adaptively by shunting energy where it’s specifically needed, becoming more energy-efficient and safer from disruption. Consumers who produce more energy than they need will be able to make a profit by selling their own energy back into the grid, opening the way for energy entrepreneurs and citizen experimentation for new energy production and transport technologies.
With the grid able to support them and solar storage batteries becoming readily available, solar panels will embedded conveniently into spare surfaces and hooked up to storage batteries in our basements, generating a large portion of our society’s power for us right on the spots where we need it.
Because of these things, we’ll need fewer power plants. And for those we build, we’ll be able to choose energy sources that are more sustainable and less polluting.
As resources like fuel and labor become more expensive, supply chains for all kinds of things will shrink and revert to local or regional. Farmer’s markets will return and locally-crafted goods will take pride of place in grocery stores. Products will become more cost-effective and fresher, and less energy can be spent on transporting and keeping them. As a happy side effect, society will thus become less vulnerable to disruption from violence, economics or natural
disasters.
As a result of shortened supply chains, we’ll see a return of mom-and-pop stores and locally owned businesses. Franchising may become a popular model for things besides fast food, allowing local business owners to buy a ready-built business model and brand while owning their own store.
We’ll be surrounded by ecotechnology, in the form of urban wetlands that will comprise our water purification systems and protect low-lying cities from storms and flooding, rain gardens that will catch run-off from our streets and purify salt and pollutants before they reach the water table, and porous pavement that will enable rain to filter down through layers of stone back to the earth instead of flowing into stormwater lines. We’ll cultivate urban food forests and edible habitat gardens in our parks, which will cleanse the air of pollutants, buffer the heat and noise of our cities and provide us with freely accessible food in the form of nuts and berries, fruits and vegetables. Wildlife will be able to find a home right alongside us. Even for those in the heart of the city it will be possible to access and even grow your own nutritious fresh produce in community gardens and urban farms.
As monoculture farming is recognized to be unhealthy and impractical for most locations, and water becomes a more coveted resource, our farm systems will decentralize and diversify. More emphasis will be placed on diversifying crops and choosing crops that are suited to local climates, reducing the need for water and the threat of crop disease, decreasing the need for chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and fungicides, and making crops healthier for pollinators and consumers. (They will probably be more expensive to grow than monoculture, though, offsetting some of the cost savings mentioned above.)
All of these changes will result in the consumption of less water and energy, creating a more sustainable society in general.