the birds, the bees and the flowers up the wall!

Just the other day someone asked me if I’d heard about Vertical Farming. I said I had but wasn’t too thrilled about it.

“Why?” he exclaimed surprised.
“Uh, because it is trying to correct a problem originally created by ourselves.”
“How is that? Doesn’t it make sense that people will not have to go far out of the cities to get their needs filled?”
“That does make sense but it is a stop-gap solution. The question that we really need to ask ourselves is what has driven us to live in such tall structures, what has driven us to live in such a congested manner and what has driven us humankind to be one of the largest numbers of inhabitants on earth?”

The truth is that we have really overcrowded the earth. There are billions of us digging into the crust of the planet, ‘de-treeing’ the forests and ‘dam-ming’ the rivers and the oceans in the name of progress. We are converting everything into wrought iron, plastic and mortar and then piercing it into the heart of the earth and erecting structures which shoot miles into the sky in defiance of nature and natural forces. We call them skyscrapers and we think that is “oh' so smart of us as a civilization.” How far away is that kind of thinking compared to inventing electric saws to chop down trees or throwing sticks of dynamite into the ocean so the fish will pop out of it dead and murdered.

Every time we as a race and as a society have taken a decision we have believed it to be the smartest decision ever. When we split open an atom we thought that was a scientific breakthrough until it was also used as atom-bomb to kill thousands. When we conquered the oceans we believed that to be an achievement until the waste and spills from our tankers began to poison every single inhabitant that lived in the waters. We are thrilled at being able to fly from one continent to another at breakneck speed not realising that that just gets us doing the digging, the de-treeing and the dam-ming much faster and much more globally. Somebody has to just stop and ask. ‘Why? Where are we going with all this activity? What is the higher purpose? What is the universal vision?

Is our long-term goal to be the most populated species on earth? Is our purpose to smelt plastic, metal and mortar into horrendously vertical constructions, pump up the rivers onto the 141st floor so we can wash our hands after nibbling on frog-legs and celery plucked from the farm next door? Einstein was wrong when he helped us unleash nuclear power but he was right when he said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

Mankind’s intentions are essentially good but mankind’s decision making is dependant only on the intellectual, emotional resources available to it from the environment and that which is true in the present moment. All wisdom is gained in hindsight by connecting the dots backwards. Very rarely have we practiced creativity and creative thinking which is not demand driven, which is not circumstantial and reactive.

I am not offering answers because I do not have any. I am just raising questions and inviting caution before we coerce our flowers and fauna to scramble up on horrendously vertical skyscrapers. I am inviting long-tem concern, thinking in systems and a refrain from applauding our own thinking and actions before we drive the birds, the bees and the flowers up the wall again!