Full disclosure: I’m a city girl. I’ve spent most of my life it cities, clocking the majority of it in San Diego. And even though I’m stuck in this one-horse town pretending to be a metropolis, that’s Tucson by the way, I still keep up with what’s going on in the big roiling cauldrons of humanity.
It’s no secret that our world is in trouble because of CO2 overload caused by a huge amount of human activity. In fact, we just hit 410 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere. But it’s the reaction that got me thinking.
An offhand comment by an old friend in the area piqued my interest. San Diego had taken up an initiative to add more trees. A whole lot. And I learned that San Diego wasn’t the only one. A lot of cities and businesses in partnership are doing their part to fight climate change with trees and urban farms, with plenty of incentive.
With our ever changing city landscapes, and the incorporation of these new biomimicking and agriculturally useful designs, cities of the future could be very different than we’ve been imagining in science fiction. Instead of sleek, sterile chrome and glass as far as the city line, we could be seeing forests of buildings covered in forests. Hobbit homes in our sub-arid deserts. A suburb in the great oaks. I can’t even imagine what else off the top of my head. Maybe the fantasy genre was a little closer to the true of our future cities than the science fiction one. Oh my.
Still, a cool Hobbit hole sounds great on a hot day like today, without the money spent for the air conditioning. And greener too.
T.A. Creech
Science in the pursuit of Fiction.