Sting is famous for his involvement with the Rainforest Foundation, which he co-founded in 1989 with his wife Trudie Styler. The foundation seeks to protect the Amazon rainforest from deforestation. Well, last month the music legend played a benefit concert for the organization.
But Sting’s eco-friendly activism does not stop there. He is also involved in other environmental causes such as supporting sustainable food – which is the inspiration for the artist’s next production: Sting is producing a film about Vertical Farming.
Sting and manager Kathryn Shenker, the project’s partner, purchased the film rights to:
The Vertical Farm: Feeding Ourselves and the World in the 21st Century. The book written by the concept’s proponent Dr. Dickson Despommier, a professor at Manhattan’s Columbia University, is set to be released in October by Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Press.
Vertical farming is a system of farming in which food is grown within tall city buildings as quite an effectual means of using land and a way to get fresh food to the local residents.
The book describes the system as such:
“Imagine a world where every town has its own local food source, grown in the safest way possible, where no drop of water or particle of light is wasted, and where a simple elevator ride can transport you to nature’s grocery store—imagine the world of the vertical farm.”
Sting says that the film will document the first vertical farm to be constructed in a major U.S. city. The movie will be shot in Newark, New Jersey.
Last week, Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago made the announcement that he is also supporting plans to establish a vertical farm in Chicago. In a building near Milwaukee’s former historic stockyards, at a conference last week, Daley spoke of his vision of organic foods grown the year-round.
Actually, the Chicago Sustainable Manufacturing Center is working with the Illinois Institute of Technology on a vertical farm called The Plant. The plan, located in an old meatpacking plant, will develop a vertical farm including farming Tilapia and then recycling the wastewater from the fish tanks for the plants in the building.
Vertical farming proposals have actually been much talked about throughout the last decade, as an agricultural solution for world hunger in the 21st century created in high-rises as a sustainable form of urban agriculture.