Pittsburgh Permaculture

But the prospects of designing chemical plants for industrial scale chemical processes seemed far less interesting than the chemical events that occur in biological systems.

-Paul Berg, Biochemist and Professor Emeritus, Stanford University

Just the other day, I was lying at home, recovering from a bad bout of aikido the night before. I had decided to watch Blue Vinyl, a documentary on the horrors of the vinyl industry (this is one of those movies made in the early 2000′s that everybody has already seen so I opted to watch it alone). Anyways, in the movie, the people kept referring to the factories as plants, which is nothing unusual (my dad is a chemist in the food industry and often went to plants as a regular part of business) but I couldn’t get the question of how factories, the driving force of the industrial revolution, came to be known as plants.

Continue reading Plants, Factories, and Farms