Humans have spread out over the planet like a fungus, eating up resources and overcrowding the available land. As this trend continues, we’ll need to start thinking vertically.
Patrick Blanc is probably not a well-known name in your part of the woods, but that’s probably just because the majority of his work is outside of the United States, in places like Belgium, Malaysia, Qatar, and Australia, just to name a very few. Blanc’s entire methodology involves what he calls the “Vertical Garden”. He uses special plastic-coated aluminum frames, synthetic felt, and a customized irrigation system to train plants to grow straight up walls.
Not only is the effect strikingly beautiful, it gets people thinking about the potential of all that mostly unused vertical space. Aside from skyscrapers, there is so much space just going empty — not to mention the availability of underground spaces.
An old First American saying goes “Treat the earth well; It was not given to you by your parents, It was loaned to you by your children.” It is our children who will inherit the land upon which we’ve built our horizontal civilization, and as they grow older, they’ll need to learn to take advantage of every possible resource they can. That includes being creative with available space. The Earth is very nearly at its tipping point, beyond which there may be no return (some say we’re already past it), so further exploiting the vanishing wild spaces is out of the question. Building vertically in both directions seems like the wisest choice for habitation. If we can start getting our kids interested in this new mode of thought, they will grow up and build taller and deeper, and make the most of their quickly disappearing land.
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