*high-pitched excited screaming* | Initial Impressions of "On Such a Full Sea" by Chang Rae Lee

Aquaponics!!!

To those of you unaware of what the word means, it is a reference to the same farming system presented in On Such a Full Sea - the fish tanks connected to the vegetation growth platforms. It's a system which combines the biochemical cycles of aquaculture (raising aquatic organisms) and hydroponics (non-traditional agricultural methods, usually involving the direct immersion of root systems into a nutrient solution), into a single symbiotic process in which the individual systems' waste products are used as resources for the other. Basically, you take fish poop and use it to fertilize plants, and in the same process, clean the poop water for the fish.

It's also one of my favorite things in the world - I've spent over a year now conducting research on aquaponics, initially just studying the science behind it, but exploring aspects of it such as it's commercial viability and sustainability as my research progressed. In fact, this term, I'm conducting an IP/Abbot Grant to build an aquaponics system right in Gelb. As a disclaimer, the system described in Lee's novel was never explicitly defined as an aquaponics system, but given the context of food production and the physical set up of the system, it was a reasonable assumption to make.

So why is it significant? First, it's a testament to the speculative aspect of the novel - industrial agriculture, the current norm of food production, is really really bad. Not just in the sense that it's bad for the environment, but also in the sense that we no longer have the resources to sustain production to the point where it can support our rapidly growing population; space and water are two of the greatest limiting factors preventing further industrial growth. Aquaponics has been introduced as a sustainable and commercially viable alternative - it uses less resources, is more space efficient, and concentrates production by simultaneously supporting two streams of income (fishies and veggies). Of course, our agricultural problem still exists because the predominant infrastructure of agricultural production remains industrial - the cost of changing that system is much too high. But the popularity of aquaponics has grown immensely - many smaller or private farms are utilizing it, and it's being incorporated into nontraditional farming spaces, such in abandoned warehouses and buildings in dense urban areas. Dickson Despommier, a professor at Columbia University who popularized the idea of vertical farming, envisioned a future in which every city had it's own skyscrapers dedicated to aquaponics, hydroponics, and aeroponics, easily supporting the growing populations in an environmentally sustainable way while conserving space and resources. There have even been cute little systems created that can be attached to household aquariums, plastic fittings with space for an herb garden that rest on top of a glass tank. "On Such a Full Sea" proposes a future in which aquaponics is the predominant form of food production (as far as we know). This is hugely exciting for me, as someone who loves aquaponics, because it's not at all a ridiculous idea. It's speculative in the sense that it doesn't employ some foreign, high-tech solution to producing food, but instead a technology that exists today, but has simply yet to become the norm. If you're still not convinced that aquaponics is the way of the future, it was also used by the protagonist in the recent popular movie "The Martian" as the primary form of food production. On Mars.  Trust me guys.

Okay other impressions. In "On Such a Full Sea", the society in which Fan lives is incredibly hard to describe: on one hand, B-mor seems like a utopia - everyone is happy, everyone has a place in society, everyone does their jobs. Darker undertones reverse this image however - the happiness is replaced with complacency and ignorance as people begin to disappear and no one seems to question the society around them. Yikes. Another thing that stood out to me was the whole race/culture aspect - also hard to describe. The mix of geography, cultural elements, and physical descriptions of people totally jumbled my visualization of the described future - it reminded me in a lot of ways of San Fran Sokyo, in "Big Hero 6".

Exciting stuff.

Guys seriously if you're interested in aquaponics or just want to learn more about it just talk to me or message me or whatever, I'm literally obsessed.