HIOW: New York Sun Works

New York has been doing some heavy lifting on sustainability. Given that cities consume 75% of the world's energy, it would only seem to make sense, and its good to see Bloomberg and NYC leading the charge here.

New York Sun Works has created the Science Barge, which combines environmental education and sustainable agriculture. I'm not very fond of the name, but the underlying idea is pretty cool. The barge is a zero-carbon hydroponic farm, producing local organic produce in the city.

Urban gardens have been around forever, but they compete for space with for-profit development or affordable housing, and often lose.

But local food production is a hackable idea, truly something the community can own, modify, and share. In the industrial era it made sense to separate production from distribution, but local and distributed methods of producing life's staples are seeming wise in the emerging energy/sustainability economy. Fuel costs and weather instability are driving produce prices through the roof, and much of that produce can now be produced locally using new techniques for much less money.

Cities aren't exactly agricultural epicenters. Food and water are shipped over hundreds, even thousands of miles to reach urban areas, and that consumes a massive amount of processing and transportation fuel, which in turn contributes excess carbon dioxide to Earth's atmosphere. Traditional agriculture, too, consumes energy and large amounts of water, and despite the popularity of organic food, toxic pesticides are still in wide use. And since the world population is continuing to grow rapidly, Caplow explained, it's going to get worse. "As our city grows with new people and new buildings, it will place increasingly huge demands on the countryside for food, for power, and for water," he said to the crowd.

New York Sun Works estimates that there is enough roof space in NYC for roof gardens to supply all the food needs of New Yorkers. This is a bold statement, given that it takes an area the state of Wyoming to do so, but I'm impressed they did the math.

This barge is a metaphor for us and for the future of this planet," said Adrian Benepe, the parks commissioner. "We can float together, or we'll surely sink together."

It leaves me with a strong impression that a little creativity and entrepreneurial activity could see a network of roof gardens take root and flower.