Land and People: Vertical

Thursday, July 17, 2008

Vertical

How to feed the cities? simple:

"Dr. Despommier estimates that it would cost $20 million to $30 million to make a prototype of a vertical farm, but hundreds of millions to build one of the 30-story towers that he suggests could feed 50,000 people. “I’m viewed as kind of an outlier because it’s kind of a crazy idea,” Dr. Despommier, 68, said with a chuckle. “You’d think these are mythological creatures.”" (Thanks D.)

1 comment:

Anonymous said...: Demotix- The Citizen Wire

Dear Land and People,

You're site is fantastic. We hope you might see a cross over with what we're launching!

Demotix is a website for user-generated news, and a citizen ‘wire’ service. Think of it like Flickr or YouTube, but only for original photo/video news. You tell us what is going on, we tell the worldwide web and the world’s mainstream media. As of now, www.demotix.com is live.

Why are we doing it?
We believe citizen journalism – well-managed – can be a tremendous force in political participation, civil society, and freedom of speech around the world. And we believe the media needs rescuing.

• Only four US newspapers have foreign news desks (the NY Times, LA Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal), and there are only 141 US foreign correspondents currently working today (in print and broadcast media)
• In the UK, a 2006 study of the broadsheets showed that more than 50% of the news was directly attributable to press releases
• The world’s media (over 90%) relies on the wire services – the Associated Press and Reuters – for their news. But some 80 countries, or 40% of the world’s nations, have no bureau from either agency.
The news is shrinking daily. We hope Demotix can plug that gap, and more.
We hope to be giving a megaphone to the man and woman in the street with a story to tell. We hope to be able to change the news map – bringing real, raw, original information from countries and about issues the mainstream media haven’t touched in years.

Eventually we hope that Demotix will be THE place where anyone in the world can go, in safety, to upload news – major, minor, local, cultural, political, social... We already have agreements with the Daily Telegraph, Newsweek, La Repubblica, Prospect and others – and will now supply them with a daily wire and picture feed of 'citizen' news. We have also built partnerships with Amnesty, Reporters Sans Frontieres, Witness and many others.

But we need your help. We want to do in pictures/video what you do for text. If you think there is a cross-over and you like us, please write about us, link to us, spread the news. We're nothing without contributors, and your readers are exactly whom we want to be reaching out to. We can get their news out to the world, and in the process change what news is reported. And we'll charge the mainstream media for anything they use, splitting the fees 50:50 with our contributors.

Please be in touch! Are there other ways we might collaborate?
With all thanks

Turi

Turi Munthe
www.demotix.com
cc@demotix.com; July 18, 2008 at 2:04 PM