The concept of “vertical farming” seems more fitted for a sci-fi novel, or maybe a project in Dubai.

The tall, skyscraper-like structures set in urban areas would grow enough produce to replace traditional farms. Instead of growing tomatoes in the Midwest and shipping them to New York City, burning valuable fossil fuels and contributing to global warming along the way, farmers could raise vegetables in these towers only a few miles from the corner stores in the city.

One proposed device, the Omega Garden Carousel, takes up 150 square feet of floor space, but its output could equal 1,500 square feet of farmland.

Dickson Despommier came up with the concept almost a decade ago, and he’s been championing it ever since. He list many advantages to vertical farming, including year-round crop production, plants protected from severe weather, no need for pesticides or fertilizers, and less stress on farmlands, among others. He estimates 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.

Dr. Despommier is a professor of public health at Columbia University, and joins Word of Mouth for the next installment of our "next green thing" series.

(Image and design by Chris Jacobs)

In the world of social insects, the lowly termite gets no respect. Sure, ants and bees have their champions and are lauded for their social cohesion and industriousness. Termites, on the other hand, are the bane of homeowners everywhere. They eat up about $11 billion in U.S. property each year. Some species also have the rather unsocial habit of snapping the heads off of invading ants.

But termites may have gotten a bad rap. With rising oil prices, their ability to turn wood waste into fuel has sparked the interest of researchers, who have struggled to turn wood and grasses into biofuels. As part of our “next green thing” series, we wanted to find out whether we could harness the termite’s efficiency, to run our economy on sawdust, lawn clippings and old magazines.

Lisa Margonelli is a fellow at the New America Foundation, writes about global culture and the economy of energy, and is the author of Oil on the Brain: Petroleum's Long Strange Trip to your Tank. Her article "Gut Reactions" appears in the September issue of The Atlantic Monthly, and she agreed to lead Word of Mouth into the mysterious third gut of the termite.

(Photo by Steve Ryan)

As Americans try to live greener lives, many are looking to buy or build more sustainable homes. Green-building now accounts for more than 10 percent of the country’s overall housing market, and that’s expected to double within the next 5 years.

The trend is also generating new interest in one eco-friendly housing concept that’s been around for decades. For our Next Green Thing series, reporter Shannon Mullen reports on a new community in Peterborough that’s based on the “co-housing” model. That’s short for “collective housing,” a group-living concept that originated in Denmark in the 1960s, and arrived in the U.S. in the ‘80s.

Peterborough’s new community is called Nubanusit Neighborhood and Farm, and it’s about two-thirds complete. The homes there are insulated with seven inches of cellulose, made from recycled newsprint. They’re also wired for solar water heaters and powered by locally-processed wood pellets. They are chock-full of environmentally-friendly and energy-saving features, built to the U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy Environmental Design – or LEED standards – a universal rating system for green buildings.

Neighborhoods like Nubanusit also have communal facilities where residents can share group meals, throw parties, even put up overnight guests. That way their individual homes can be smaller, and thus more environmentally friendly.

Sustainability has always been at the core of co-housing, one of many reasons Nubanusit’s founders liked the idea. Now real estate developers are catching on, seeing the concept as a way to capitalize on the green building boom.

Craig Ragland runs the Co-housing Association of the United States. He says 20 years ago there were 40 of these communities nationwide, and that number has at least tripled in just the last decade.

Until now most co-housing communities were founded by small groups of people. But now real estate developers are playing a more prominent role as the green housing trend gains steam. Ragland says co-housing prices vary widely by geography, but also by community. And the ones that are more sustainable also cost more to buy into.

In the Nubanusit Neighborhood the cheapest unit is 346-thousand dollars – that’s for an 11-hundred square foot, 2 bedroom apartment. The highest-end home, also the largest and the greenest, is a 19-hundred square foot single-family for sale for 624-thousand dollars.

Nubanusit co-founder Shelly Goguen Hullbert acknowledges that some people are priced-out by the high cost of the homes, and she says that’s the hardest part of the project for her. But she points out that 45 percent of the price of a home covers co-housing’s other costs, like the neighborhood’s 70 acres of land, the planned organic farm and dairy, the common house, all the design and permitting, the infrastructure and its engineering. She says residents are trying to come up with a way to privately subsidize a couple of homes to bring the prices down.

That’s worked for some other co-housing communities in New England, including one in Boston’s Jamaica Plain neighborhood. In Vermont, some residents of the Cobb Hill community paid more for their homes so lower-income families could pay less.
Some limit the sustainable features they design into their homes to keep them affordable, but that’s one corner Nubanusit residents refuse to cut. All the houses have either the highest or second highest LEED ratings possible.

Shelley adds that some of the neighborhood’s homes will only use $700 worth of heat and hot water for an entire year – an amazingly low figure – but owners have to be able to be in the financial position to put that money in up front, then reap the benefits over time.
When construction at the Nubanusit Neighborhood wraps up this fall, there’ll be 29 homes there. Half of them are already sold, and the new residents are anticipating their first winter in a long time with smaller heating bills.

Reporter Shannon Mullen visited the community in Peterborough. Click the “listen” button at the top of this story to hear her piece.

(Images from the Nubanusit Neighborhood and Farm website)

We begin today with a look at a new tick in green architecture. "Sustainability" has been the buzz word as architects and builders incorporate natural materials and use less energy and natural resources in new buildings. An eco-friendly stamp of approval was created in 2000 called "Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design," or LEED, to help streamline the process. But designers of some recent high-profile projects, including Renzo Piano, designer of The New York Times’ new building in midtown Manhattan, have decided to forego LEED in favor of their own version of green design.

Joining Word of Mouth with more is William Bostwick. He writes about art and architecture for Metropolis, Dwell and other publications. His article on LEED and green design appears in the July/August issue of GOOD Magazine.

The inhabitants of the Danish island of Samsø used to produce 11 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per person annually. They heated their houses with oil brought in on tankers, and imported electricity via cable, generated by burning coal.

That was a decade ago. Now the community of 4,300 people produces enough clean energy to export.

Elizabeth Kolbert is staff writer for The New Yorker, and wrote about her visit to Samsø to find out what an island about the size of Nantucket might teach the world.

This segment is part of Word of Mouth's Next Green Thing series.

(Photo by Nicky Bonne)