Sublime

John Todd, the venerable systems ecologist best known for his work on environmental remediation. In 1969 Todd founded the New Alchemy Institute and began to design microecosystems, self-contained plant communities inside greenhouses. Using them as small-scale prototypes for larger real-world projects, he revolutionized how we approach solving envir

None of the people reading this book will relocate to Mars; all of us will continue to eat staple grain crops grown in soil on large expanses of agricultural land, rather than in the skyscrapers imagined by the proponents of so-called urban agriculture; none of us will live in a dematerialized world that has no use for such irreplaceable natural se

The farmer can then design a farm so that pests are minimized. This starts with crop diversity, but it also means providing habitat for a diverse group of beneficial insects, predatory birds, and mammal predators.

Erect a wind turbine or solar plant in every town

The water used to grow food inside could even be recirculated and used again and again, provided that nutrients are replaced at the same rate that they are taken up by the hydroponically grown plants.

The process itself uses around six times

Add in the reduced spraying that could come from developing virus- and fungus-resistant crops—predicted to be about 91 million pounds—and

bungalow half digested by blackberries and English ivy.