Tokyo Babylon

Robert returned from his job, teaching English to employees of a multinational financial services company, in the evening. The sweat, both wet and dry, made him feel like he’d just gone for a dip in the Dead Sea.

“I am a boil in the bag meal” he said to himself. It was an old joke, almost a friend and companion.

He was under no illusions however that all the sweat was his, since he had just been on the Tokyo subway system in the middle of the evening rush hour. Standing pressed up against people around him he had almost laughed aloud at the mental image of the subway as a close order Lambada machine; an automated bump and grind device.

Around him on the train the Japanese had stared off into space, their heads angling towards a corridor of personal space which would allow them the illusory freedom to ignore that arm or that leg. Robert for his part considered it, looked down on people’s heads, blew pony-tail whisps away from his nose. Being the big foreigner he got a little more room than the Japanese would give to another Japanese.

Making his way out of the station, a Gaijin particle in the human wave that the Pointer Sisters might refer to as a ‘heated rush’ he had almost laughed again, thinking that on the Tokyo subway any man ‘with a slow hand’ would be subject to arrest or getting poked with a knitting needle. ‘Who does this hand belong to’ would cry the outraged female as the offending member was raised high. It would not be a question, despite the phrasing. Japan is an interesting country. You can almost taste the repression.

Robert stood in the shower and let Old Freddy Kreuger needle the “Tokyo Heat Island Crust” off his skin. It was an exorbitant waste of water and heat, but to Robert rising up till his head came clear of the jet, it was like coming up for air. He felt renewed. The shower was where he meditated on the world around him. A perfect balance of soothing water and socio-political frustration. Ying and Yang with a pulse action.

Teaching at a multinational financial services company was an almost visceral irritation. Oh he’d agreed to the work and by his honor he would complete the assignment, but still… The building the company had literally fortified reminded Robert of the Tyrell Corporation Building in Blade Runner; a company whose business was the production of sub-human slaves. The parallels between the movie and the firm; an engine of unfettered American capitalism, appealed to Robert’s very dark sense of humor. This sense of humor prevented him from grinding his teeth too much, but some people said it gave him sharp edges. He could almost imagine a woman sitting beside a sewing machine in some godawful sweat shop in China, churning out cash for the Firm’s clients. She would look up from her sewing machine and say “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.”

His students were nice enough in their way. They were no different from anyone else you would meet in Japan. They were not ogres. They worked to get what they wanted out of life. It saddened Robert to think of a student as being like the duracell battery that Morpheus had held in The Matrix, since they were quite literally the batteries of an engine that was chewing people up, extracting all the goodness from them like some demonic spider, before spitting them out. But like those glowing pods in the movie they seemed entirely unaware of what they had bought into.

Emerging lobster red from the shower, Robert dried off with an old towel, long since frayed and worn out from use, but like an old friend - not to be discarded. The fashionistas would have been appalled, hating the idea that men actually like their old tired clothes. Crossing the room he sat down at his laptop and dried his hair. Sitting back he navigated through the subterranean tunnels of the real world to Doug’s Drivel, a Canadian blog that was almost always thought provoking and invariably human. There he learned that lizards masturbate and about Naomi Klein and her new book “Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”.

Naomi Klein talks about how Neo-Cons, the IMF and the World Bank beat down the citizenry and imposes”reform”. It explains why every time the IMF goes into a country in trouble there are riots, so much so that they’re now called the “IMF Riots”. It doesn’t matter where they go, or what the circumstances are the prescribed treatment is always the same. Sell off stuff that belongs to the citizens, and which they paid to build, to private companies at fire sale prices. When people oppose this the tanks roll. Be prepared to be horrified.

These days so many people rail at their governments. They shout at them like they were to blame for the ills of the world, but I doubt that this is the case. The other thing they do is stop voting, which in my view is sheer lunacy.

It seems to me that the government could be the defender of the common man if only we would tell them what to do. I’m all for self sufficiency but I’m not one of these US survivalists who wishes there were no government and blows up Federal Buildings. In a Democracy the government is “our” government, if we give up telling the government what to do it will become, or has become, a lapdog of Corporations and we shall all be worse off. And that’s where we are now. In my view a government is only as good as the activism of its citizens and people get the government they deserve.

Up until now the big corporations have had a stranglehold on things like oil, gas, water, electricity but increasingly on food as well. If you don’t believe ask where you do your grocery shopping. Is it at a Walmart or a Tesco? These Corporations use the money and power they get from their business activities to press our governments to make the business environment good for them. That’s bad news for little people like you and me.

That’s why I’m all for growing stuff at home, making your own energy. It’s not because I’m some kind of hippy wanting to grow flowers in my hair. It’s at least partly because I want to be pressure proof. In a number of countries when you speak out against this or that business interest your name goes on a list of troublemakers that industries bar from employment. If you’re self sufficient they have to get really nasty to shut you up.

It’s even harder for these thugs to silence you these days with the advent of the internet. In Andrew Carnegie’s day all they needed was thugs with baseball bats and bent cops. And in those days the populace fought back by electing police commissioners and police chiefs out of their own number. Citizens have always had more power than they are led to believe. The “I know it’s wrong but what can I do I’m just one person” attitude has always sickened me. As a citizen you have power, both as a consumer and as voter. In both roles you have a lever - one for business, the other for government. Use both at the same time and you can really change things.

Both of these things are really difficult to achieve when people are set apart as individuals, but when you get community enterprises and businesses that interact with each other then it’s a whole new ball game. Choirs are louder and people listen to them.

The government is your government. If you don’t like what it’s doing get some friends together and go and harass them - it’s your duty as a citizen. These businesses rely on your custom. If you don’t like what they’re doing get a petition together or have a rally outside their headquarters. Get a blog together and have your name appear before theirs on a Google word search. Then you’ll see them become much more accommodating. Either way, if you don’t like what’s going down. It’s your fault.

My wife and I have a completely different world view. My wife is pretty tight lipped about these kind of things but today we had a bit of a breakthrough..

My wife feels that all an individual can do in the world these days is to be swept along by the system, catching whatever fleeting lotus blossoms of pleasure you can on the way to being eventually swept out to sea, and that given the strength of the flow the flailing, struggling individuals cannot be held accountable for anything they do just to keep their head above water. My wife sees herself, and other people, as individuals caught in a flash flood. The world for my wife is overwhelming.

I on the other hand come from a family line that seems genetically disposed to be bloody minded.  When I was younger  I would sit next to my dad and watch Question Time on TV with Robin Day. The program was a bit like “Meet the Press”, except it was various politicians and politically minded individuals brought together to answer questions from the public.

When politicians started using the phrases such as ‘in real terms’ my father would explain that this meant they were indeed spending more pounds on schools and hospitals, but that the extra wasn’t keeping pace with inflation so they were actually spending less, not more - since money this year was worth less than last year. He’d then tell me what they included in that additional spending; things like hospitals selling their own property and the like so that contrary to what the politician was saying they were actually spending less, a lot less than before. He told me that’s how politicians speak and you have to be on guard for sophistry of this kind.

That’s where I come from. If something isn’t right I’m damned well going to raise my voice and cause a ruckus if I can. I grew up really believing in phrases like when evil raises its ugly head it is the responsibility of all good men to rise up and beat the bullies back down. If I’m a man caught in flash flood I’m going to try my damnedest to get to a rock and hang on. If I can, I’ll climb up and try to help the other bloody minded climb out of the flood as well.

I would love to meet other bloody minded people like myself.

It was happening again. The news on the BBC internet broadcast was that another president in the dying days of his presidency had made a gesture towards doing something right for a change. It was traditional for Presidents to issue statements and adopt high ground positions on issues that to all intents and purposes would the concern of the next man in the chair. In this case it was global warming.

Robert looked out of the shower and grimaced. Even though it felt better to adopt a posture of willful blindness there were times when the world insisted on peeling back your eyelids as if to say “look”. Robert accounted himself cursed that his eyelids flipped up like those embarrassing window blinds that escape your control and hurtle upwards to smash into their mounting. Sadly, almost anything could set them to hurtling..

“Too late to save face Mr. Not that you ever cared about that…”

Robert ducked back into the shower and placing his hands against the wall, like a man told to assume the position by a hostile world, let the hot water cleanse him and untangle the muscular knots of a singular frustration. He closed his eyes, not in a desire to look away from an ugly reality, because the water was hot and his vision didn’t need to be squiggied clean by his anti dandruff shampoo. The hot shower made him guilty but he eased his guilt by telling himself that at least he didn’t drive a car. The hot water needling down his back like Freddy Kruger the acupuncturist certainly helped.

A short time later and he was ironing his suit pants on his ironing board and getting ready for work. The television lay on its table, inert and powerless, behind him. Robert hadn’t even plugged it in since he first moved into this apartment. Instead his eyes wandered over his bookshelves thinking about the ideas in them. There was Robert Kagan and his dark political vision of a world that was red in tooth and claw, where Europe was building its walls high and relying on Americans with guns. A world of haves and have-nots with its walls and guns and corps run amok.

A decision was building in him. A point had been reached where it wasn’t going to enough just to go with the flow. He could see where it was leading him and he didn’t like it.

Robert eased himself into the lift and pressed the button for the ground floor. The elevator mechanism dropped him smoothly past level after level of identical floors where only the light levels differed. Each was sterile, tiled and looking out across the Tokyo skyline. The elevator arrived at the ground floor and for a moment he felt heavier. He wondered for perhaps the 10^th time that week whether the elevator had a regenerative braking system like the hybrid cars had. He doubted it, but he was damned if he was going to take the stairs in the life-threatening boil and bubble of the Tokyo summer.

He walked out through the high tech security system doorway, which opened as he approached. He didn’t glance at the cameras over the doorway, though he knew they were there. “Fear of crime in a country where all the crime is legitimate and highly controlled” He shook his head in wonder and stepped out into the Boil in the Bag cooking method that Tokyo treats all it’s inhabitants to.

Above him the elevated expressway whooshed and whished engaged in moving people around un-necessarily. It used to be that you lived where you worked, but whatever had happened to that economy of movement it was long gone now. The city was too expensive, too polluted so people moved in and out everyday at considerable expense, creating more pollution. Nomads and pastoralists did the same but they collected something other than road toll tickets. It certainly was a strange world.

A Japanese woman rides towards him, riding on the sidewalk where it’s safe. He doesn’t see the child in the seat over the back wheel until she is almost past him. The little boy is dressed like a tiny sailor of the Kaiser. Japan can make anyone smile. If you look hard enough you can see that humanity endures even in societies that are dehumanizing. The wonder of the human spirit’s ability to say.. “I am the one and only. No, you can’t take that away from me.”

I wish I had more good things to say about Tokyo. Thus far it’s the kind of place that would drive a gaijin to drink, either that or a further stint in further education; but then alcohol is cheaper and more schedule friendly. I’ve been here 5 months and can honestly say I don’t have a single friend.  When I lived in Seoul I felt some of the same things but not to the same degree. I feel like a Vietnam vet on his fifth tour. I need to get back to a place where the people speak the same language as me. My batteries seem completely run down.

Perhaps my lack of enthusiasm comes from my reading about Japan. The book I read most was the Enigma of Japanese Power and that paints a portrait of Japanese society that’s not complementary. Which leaves me ambivalent at best. There are many things about Japan that I adore; not least the food. There’s the fact that Shorinji Kempo, a martial art seemingly designed for idealist activists, comes from here. There’s Akira Kurosawa, the legendary Japanese Director. There’s the Kimono, which has got to be one of the most beautiful things in the world. On the other hand Japan is to all intents and purposes a one party state and has been for the past 50 years. Ordinary people have seemingly no capacity to change the system. My sense of justice and fairness is utterly appalled by this.

Don’t get me wrong the Japanese people I’ve met are all very nice and well mannered, but there’s a distance that’s hard to overcome. Then there’s Tokyo itself, which is basically Seoul with better construction methods and more safety built in. It’s crowded, stand in some places and you’ll experience the wonder of seeing a canal, beneath a road, beneath a road, beneath a railway line. Under the canal there’s a subway line and possibly a road tunnel. Tokyo was flattened during the war and so aside from the signs it could be any city in the western world. It’s characterless. Some might say that’s what you get after a war, just look at a lot of German cities. However the people of Warsaw rebuilt their city the way they remembered it after it was flattened. Coming from a city that has held onto its heritage I think Tokyo is missing many of the things that make life worth living in it.

Then there’s the foreigners you meet in Tokyo. Passing by them in the street they have even less time for you than the Japanese. It’s like your white face is intruding into their authentic Shogun daydream I swear. In Seoul when you passed another foreigner as likely as not you’d get a nod of polite recognition. I have yet to receive anything like that from a foreigner in Tokyo.

I guess I should try harder, but my first impressions are not good.

Where is the CO2 coming from and how can we reduce it? This is the big argument for nuclear. They say we can’t meet greenhouse gas reductions without nuclear. As far as lies go that one is a whopper. Now let’s take a look at where C02 is coming from and I hope you’ll agree with me that the problem is one of design. Looking at the world this way the entire world is composed of people who couldn’t put up a shelving unit.

Figures from the World Resources Institute estimate that around 31% comes from heating and lighting our world, which is by far the biggest percentage. This points to a pressing need to redesign our buildings, the use different materials in their construction and different methods of lighting.

The use of light shelves, basically a reflective shelf on the inside of the window that reflects sunlight onto interior ceilings greatly reducing the need to use lighting during the day. Then of course there are skylights which funnel daylight from the roof or side wall into the room and diffuse it. A company in the UK called Ceravision has invented a lightbulb that’s massively more electricity efficient than any present bulb and which promises to last decades, which will be in production shortly. Then of course there’s the materials that houses are made from. I’d personally go for a rammed earth house since it’s cool in the summer heat and warm in cold nights, but then again I’m hopefully heading to Oz the world capital for modern rammed earth construction. Then of course there are houses built into the ground, which are likewise cool in summer and warm in winter such that heating and cooling bills are massively reduced. To me there’s something very wrong about using heat for cooking then venting it straight out the chimney. Granted you need heat to cook, but there must be a way to take that heat and use it for warming water or rooms. Passive heating and cooling using smart materials, supplemented by heat pumps to draw heat from out of the ground and concentrate it in our house also represent the way forward. There really is no need for anyone to heat their buildings with anything that vents CO2 into the environment. It’s not only good for the environment but will save every homeowner a fortune.

Another 17% comes from agriculture. There’s a lot of this that you’re not going to stop. Cattle and sheep fart methane and corking them up is out of the question. Methane is a greenhouse gas that’s 1000 times more powerful than C02. But then again there’s a lot of methane coming from shit just spread onto fields. This is frankly nuts as methane is a fuel, extracting it from shit is a cost effective process requiring only some plastic tubing, toilet plumbing and not a lot else. It’s called a biodigester and it uses bacteria to turn really nasty shit into some really wonderful products, and the bugs do it for free. When Katrina hit the US all those pig farms, the massive reservoirs of shit next to them got flooded and all that shit escaped into the rivers. Sheer lunacy. A biodigester system could provide these factory farms with all the electrical and heating energy they need. Permaculture offers the prospect of growing massive amounts of food in 3 dimensional galleries that extend into the sky.

15% comes from transportation. Some of this you won’t change in a hurry, but battery powered family cars were pleasing consumers in the US last century; that is until they all got recalled by GM and scrapped. Now a company in the US called Tesla Motors is getting ready to produce a battery powered sports car, a luxury family car in 10 years. The big drawback has always been battery charging speed and range, but battery tech is advancing in leaps and bounds. A recent development is a battery/capacitor made from cellulose. However, all that aside the most efficient to move goods from A to B has always been by rail and sea. The number of trucks in cities is a scandal. Then there’s transporting food around the planet. Why do we need to do that as much as we do? If you’re reading this chances are your burger has seen more of the world than you have on its way to your mouth.

13% comes from manufacturing and construction. A lot of this comes from the fact that we are making things from scratch instead of making things that can be recycled or refurbished to be as good as new. Caterpillar does this with industrial engines and it makes them a ton of money. There’s also the environmental benefit in that all that energy used to drag the metal from a hole in Papua New Guinea, ship it to the US for smelting, engineered into parts, assembled and then shipped to Europe just doesn’t happen. That feeds into transport emissions. Rammed Earth construction is infinitely reusable and doesn’t require the massive amounts of energy that concrete requires.

11% comes from other fuel combustion. This is so general that it’s hard to know what it refers to. Could be shuttle takeoffs?

5% comes from fugitive emissions. To be honest I have no idea what fugitive emissions might be. It could have something to do with Harrison Ford being chased all over the US by Tommy Lee Jones for a crime he didn’t commit.

4% comes from waste. Waste? Yes, all those landfills that we cover over release greenhouse gases into the environment. Half of the 136 million tons of construction waste taken to landfills every year in the USA is concrete. Another thing is that waste is basically a resource that we haven’t got processes to handle yet. Handling this is going to be big business this century. Charging people to handle their crap then making money from processing it, while generating energy from waste at the same time to fuel that process is just crying out for an entrepreneur.

4% comes from industrial processes. Toyota long ago developed a system for reducing waste to almost zero by turning their entire business that only operates when a customer presses a button. Virtually everything in Toyota is made only when it’s needed.

Looked at rationally, reducing the CO2 in each source, as well as reducing the CO2 in the linkages between each source could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 90% or more. Very few people are taking a systems approach to handling this and the first country that grasps that nettle is going to wipe the floor with its competitors and that’s because the savings you get from these measures is greater than the cost of putting them in place.

Imagine a nation that spends half what yours does on transportation? Imagine a nation where the buildings use 90% less to heat and light. Imagine a nation where agriculture isn’t fighting nature; it’s using it as free labor force to produce more organic, better quality food without paying for pesticides, fertilizer, herbicides and GM frankenseeds. Imagine a nation where shit is composted and urine is used as fertiliser. Imagine a nation where factories are placed next to each other so that one factories waste is another factories resource.

Now eventually a nation is going to do all these things. The big question is will it be yours?

This post may wander a bit. It’s not really ready formed in my mind but is coming out as I think about it. When you open a textbook of economics it will talk about people specializing in what they’re good at. I doubt there’s anything new in this since you have family names like Weaver, Smith and Carpenter, but nowadays the problem with specialization is that for most people there’s so, so many things that we don’t have a clue about. Specialization has narrowed our skillset and horizons to such a degree that outside our own little envelope we’re basically helpless. Helpless in the most fundamental sense of being able to provide ourselves with our minimum physical needs; food, drinking water, shelter, warmth and clothing.

I have to wonder if this a good idea. We place so much trust in those who provide these services to us but most of us no next to nothing about how they do it and what the consequences of their processes might be. I have written before in my post about building a better crapper that most of us have no idea where our bowel movements go and no particular desire to learn; that’s one consequence of specialization - it’s someone else’s problem. The other consequence of specialization is that you place yourself directly into the cash economy with no fall back position. The problem with that is that as markets (I call them Magoos) become increasingly interlinked you could through no fault of your own find yourself too costly, badly placed geographically or simply surplus to requirements. In that case what do you do?

This has been on my mind recently. It came to me while I was reading about rammed earth construction and how ordinary people like you and me could build a really good house mostly with our own hands and at very little cost. One house was built by a Australian comedian with no building experience. It also came to me when I learned about permaculture; a lot of which concerns designing carefully then watching your land grow into productivity without needing the hand of man. A laymen like myself could do that. The more I read the more I come across age old methods and new ideas that are lowering the skill threshold to becoming more secure in our lives. What could I do with a maintenance free, fully paid up house and a maintenance free forest garden? What would this do for cashflow?

The flip side of the coin, specialization wise, is boredom and cost. Our bodies were made for work and walk past any gym complex and you’ll see specialists in shorts and sweatbands running on their little hamster wheels. At such times I am reminded of the Talking Heads song “Road to Nowhere”. It’s amazing to me that an industry was born out people who wish to run without moving, work without producing, staring into space, listening to their I-pods so that they are mentally separated from where they are and what they are doing. Having become brain specialists we’ve let our bodies atrophy, our waistlines expand and our lifespans contract. Then of course when you want to do something outside of your specialization you have to pay out hand over fist, because let’s face it, hiring specialists doesn’t come cheap.

So I find myself wondering about all the things I could do in my leisure time that would be fun and interesting but also pile up enduring benefits. I’m a big fan of designing hard in the early stages of doing things since it doesn’t matter what you do, doing something on the fly is pretty much guaranteed to give you a bad result.

If you’re reading this and you think you could be a member of a multidisciplinary team to build a self-sufficient world within a world which is definitely not so, then please drop me a line. I believe everything good in life comes from two wellsprings, the first one is thought and the second one is working with other people.

I sometimes have to wonder about the editorial staff of The Economist. In the space of a few pages the Economist talks about how nuclear energy will be needed to supply electricity in an increasingly carbon fearful world and then follows it up with articles on biomimetic buildings that have the capacity to make all their own energy and super efficient lightbulbs.

The situation is analogous to calling for higher ladders while walls are falling down. It is left to the reader to ponder what the rather obvious contradictions mean. How can one be authoritative about the need for more power and equally authoritative that we are entering an era when power is being taken out of the equation. When you consider that hydrogen is on the verge of being produced by nothing more exotic than titanium alloys and ethanol from cellulose is another close contender you have to think that private investment in nuclear now will leave a lot of people out of pocket in the very near future.

Personally I don’t think the market can be trusted with the atom. The market is like Mr. Magoo with a flamethrower. For those of you who didn’t grow up with American cartoons Mr. Magoo was an incredibly short sighted old man who caused chaos and destruction wherever he went thanks to his extreme myopia; none of which ever came back to bite him on the ass. Corporations and the like have their lawyers and political donations to look out for them. You and I are rather less fortunate.

So why this push for nuclear generation? Here’s why? A nuclear plant in the US operated at 102% efficiency for a period of 18 months. They were selling electricity on the deregulated Magoo (read market) for 7.3 cents per Kwh but the cost of production was a mere 0.98 cents per kwH. The generator was rated at 1500MW. So 1500 * 1000 * 24 hours / day is about 227 million dollars a day (before taxes). Now keep in mind that neither you nor I can construct one of these monsters, and that they are likely to be run by such icons of industry as Enron and you have I think a number of compelling reasons why the math doesn’t add up for the ordinary man in the street.

Additionally, it also doesn’t really make sense for The Economist to be blowing the trumpet of nuclear power, or should that be warning siren? I am reliably informed that markets work best when there are many suppliers and many customers; exactly the kind of thing that you would get from people making their own power in their homes and gardens. While the monster reactors in the Economist Article would make fine additions to the Monster Machines appearing ever more regularly on The Discovery Channel it is just a tad monopolizing, isn’t it? Ever played Monopoly when someone else owns the board? How did it feel to be on the shitty end of that stick?

Better design can reduce our power consumption by around 90% with improved quality of life both as a result of changes in our immediate environment and in the global environment as a whole. Why then can’t we makes these monsters go the way of the Dinosaurs? Well it’s likely because the nuclear industry is too expensive to let die. They’ve got so much crap lying around from their old reactors and materials that really the only thing to do from an economic standpoint is to keep the whole system ticking over with new construction. This is a potato that’s hot for centuries and no-one wants to get left holding it.

Nuclear power shall continue so that power built by the few, run by the few, for the enrichment of the few, shall not perish from this earth.

I believe the key to a self sufficient home is to build with what is close to hand and to integrate it into the surrounding environment so that natural material and energy flows work with the building not against it. The eventual goal being to produce energy and material surpluses out of the house. I do not think that I am being unrealistic in this. The difference between designing to take advantage of free energy and material flows is probably very similar to the difference between cycling uphill and cycling downhill. Your design will dictate which one of those directions you will move in.

The tech is already available to get us there. Another thing is that though you will have to go to the bank to get finance for this as time goes on and you put your work into your self sufficient home your costs will go down and your cashflow will increase. Instead of transferring your heating gas to your window to the outside air, design it so you don’t need heating in the first place and so convert that loss into dollars to pay off your mortgage faster.

Financially the killer is loss of cashflow. Maintain your cashflow and your savings will accumulate, such that every project that you undertake after that will be financed out of your own pocket and you can tell your bank manager what you think of him. This is at the foundation of the Toyota Production System; a system that has ensured Toyota never needs to borrow cash or lay off workers in lean times.

I hope this will be an interactive series of posts, since to construct a house like this will require a great many system components to operate in synergy with each other to the benefit of the system as a whole.

Now if I were to build this house in East Timor then I would have to think about how to build it and power it first.

The Belononio Oven, which runs on rice husks seems like the way to go. It utilizes a waste product, rice husk, which is generally dumped by the side of roads. If you burn it then people downwind develop breathing problems. It’s a waste product for most people but not for people who have the tech to hand to be able to convert it into a resource. The Belonio Gasifier when combined it with a stirling engine would amount to a combined heat and power unit; the basis of a miniature production facility. As far as I know only a Danish company, Stirling Danmark (Website: http://www.stirling.dk/) has explored this possibility, but when you consider that the Belonio gasifier is basically a furnace radiating heat into the air whilst producing gas for a burner you have to consider that there should be some better way of putting that heat to use, perhaps a steam engine/turbine. I know the Israelis developed a low pressure steam turbine which they have successfully used with solar ponds. it produces power from water temperatures below boiling point. If I had an electric vehicle then I’ve already got the basis of several businesses.

Apparently many farmers mix rice husks back into the soil, but the problem with that is silica content of rice husks is high, which means it acts like those little packs of silica crystals you get in food packages which say “do not eat” on them. Being a dessicant means that it attracts and traps water molecules, which is why you find it in packs of foods which normally absorb water. What that does is compete with plant roots for water, not something you want.

Now I have as much Rice Husk Ash as I can use. Rice Husk Ash can replace up to half the Portland Cement component of concrete so anything I build with concrete will be cheaper now. Incidentally it will also be better since Rice Husk Ash also makes concrete more water resistant. Then again there is a rock called Tufa which the Romans used when they were still building with bronze tools. It’s light, easy to cut, hardens slowly on contact with air and is freely available on East Timor. If I want something earthquake resistant then I’d better use bamboo. Luckily bamboo grows easily in East Timor. So with a little portland cement bought in and the rest obtained through cultivation or scavenging I’ve got the basis of a house and all it would need is some detailed plans to work from since the Belonio furnace keeps my power tools topped up. Now here’s a thought if RHA concrete is non porous and tufa is porous what effects can you get when you add water?

So my Belononio stove would be the basis for two businesses, either Rice Husk Ash or Rice Husk Char, both of which I can use for building, growing or selling. Rice Husk Ash I can sell to builders undercutting cement producers. Rice Husk Char I can sell to farmers, though it is likely that they would quickly make their own. Straight away I’m looking at flexible production from by stove, which product does it make sense for me to make within the current market conditions? I have the choice, which improves the resiliency of my system.

Of course as soon as farmers started seeing me using their rice husks as a business material they would start charging me for it, but that’s not all bad. Since if you have a computer and electric vehicles your house would be at the base of a rice husk delivery business taking it from the countryside to the cities. So you’ve moved from a rice husk product facility to a rice husk transportation facility using a portion of the rice husks to carry more rice husks into the city. Of course you’d then carry the rice husk ash to a company that uses it such as a cement or steel plant. Business upon business, upon business.

Now what can we use hot water for? Well several thoughts come to mind immediately; sterilization, washing clothes and cooking. The first is very useful for mushroom production, since you need to ensure that only the mushrooms you want to grow actually do so since mushroom spores are everywhere. The second means that you can run a kitchen and a laundry out of your house without paying for energy.

Add on other sources of electricity and you could run your battery power car for free. Imagine that, a rice field powering your transport system. The payback period on such systems tend to be short after which you’re in a situation of not paying for many of the inputs that your competitors are.

So, at the moment we have a house which operates as a laundry, a mushroom farm, a concrete additive business, an electricity generating station, a char production facility for terra preta and a kitchen. None of it is particularly high tech.

So with rice husks we’ve pretty much got our energy needs and soil fertilizer problems sorted, we’ve developed a business that we run out of our house.

Now what if you have some land next to your house? Well obviously you’ll want to grow things there both for your own consumption and also to sell on the market. Now the price that you sell at is going to bear some relationship to what the market will bear and your production costs. If selling it does not meet your production cost then obviously you wont do it.

Now contrary to popular belief small farms are much more efficient in their use of resources than large farms. A system designed organic farm would be much more efficient by several orders of magnitude. In an age where an increasing number of consumers want to enter into a relationship with the people who grow their food so that they can know where their food comes from and how it is made there are many possibilities for even small producers to find a niche to operate in.

An industrial farm is basically one huge field, filled with one plant, sprayed with chemicals and tailored so as to be harvested by machines. That makes whatever comes out of a commodity basically; like coal from a mine. Industrial farming operates like a factory and that’s what you get- mass production. There is only rule to farming of this nature and that is produce as much as you can as cheaply as you can whilst leaning on the government to subsidize your crop up the wazoo. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. Nature doesn’t like zero biodiversity and basically goes after it like Elliott Ness after Capone. If you’ve seen the movie The Untouchables you’ll know what I’m getting at. As the world’s next sexiest man Sean Connery’s character said..

“You wanna know how you do it? Here’s how, they pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue! That’s the Chicago way, and that’s how you get Capone!”

The natural equivalent is. Man produces new strains of seed, new pesticides and herbicides. Nature comes back with a rot that the new seed has no resistance to, improved bugs that munch on crops with the spray acting as salad dressing and herbicide resistant plants. Now the problem is if you spray more and more it ends up in the drinking water and starts killing the crop that you’re trying to grow. It’s an arms race and nature isn’t the one spending more and more money fighting it.

So in my next entry I’ll talk about what I’d like to see on the land to support me and mine, my community. I’d also mention how to link this to sanitation so we can go from dumper to bumper crops..