Hippie Survivalism

Another picture of the New Alchemists, circa 1973. It had fallen out of its own book, and I just found it tucked into one of my art books.

The text on the rest of the page reads: We find that there are resources, often in the strangest places, as we become less concerned with high energy and more concerned with diverse wholes. If we are willing to change the way we live, tghen we can begin to restore and reconstruct. By passing through the portals of nature, we can begin to work with or through her so that the scares begin to heal. The path will involve the three strands of practicality, science, and a wisdom that is philosophical, even mystical. Separately change cannot come about, but perhaps... and this is only perhaps, together the world will begin to sing.

It is easy to begin. The Ark and the Backyard Fish Farms reflect wholistic and small-scale thinking, and although they are early explorations into man in nature, they will help give confidence and directions.

Time is not on our side. Hence the urgency and tone of the "Journal" (The Journal of the New Alchemists). To some, like Odum (Howard Odum, a biologist and one of the few sensible members of the WWII generation), our survival is at stake; should they be proved wrong, we will stand to gain. If they are right, there can be virtually no alternative that is not hell, until the living order of the earth's mantle is restored.

To The Ark

The Ark, circa 1973, a large, super-insulated greenhouse. Inside is a designed ecosystem that grows protein and vegetables, and that purifies water.

This was almost forty years ago. Why are we still knee deep in big muddy?

Solar Arson

I've always wanted to live in the country so I could do stuff like this.

Exposition: Notice the guy's wearing welding goggles. What looks like orchestra seating on the tilted board is a lot of plain old mirrors aimed at the point where the thing is burning.

Steve Baer wrote a story once in which demonstrators carrying pocket mirrors simultaneously reflected the sun onto the police station and burnt it down.

Proof Of Concept At New Alchemy

Circa 1970.

Aquaculture Under The Dome

More vintage New Alchemy Institute.

Ark Interior: New Alchemy Institute

http://www.thegreencenter.net/

Compost At The New Alchemy Institute

Composting seems almost mundane, knowing that the dome in the background shelters a pond with a designed aquatic ecosystem, and the blades on the windmill are fabric sails, sewn by the New Alchemists. These guys were pioneers. They'd be pioneers today.

More From Inside The Ark

This is another picture from the New Alchemy Ark. Buckminster Fuller said somewhere -- probably in Critical Path -- that we'd survive because we demanded the technologies that could save us.

I want to eat breakfast in a space like this!

http://www.thegreencenter.net/

Picnic At The Institute

Is it a picnic or an al fresco meeting? Either way, a pause in the most honest labor of a generation: investigating ways that humanity can support ourselves on our income.

Contemporary New Alchie Photo

These are fish tanks in the Ark as it is now. Color Photos of the Ark are courtesy of Earl Barnhart, former and current New Alchemist, and current resident.

http://www.thegreencenter.net/

Notice the plants floating on the tank surfaces, and the pipes between tanks. Both work to keep the water clean. The plants take up fish waste through their roots. water from the tanks will cycle through filters and pH-balancing media (gravel or shell).

Inside The Ark

What do you want? What do you have? These are fiberglass tanks -- about adult human height -- full of fish. Humans dump in grass clippings, and grass carp eat that. Algae grows on fish manure, and tilapia eat the algae, while mirror carp keep things stirred up. Maybe there are some bluegills to get rid of any hungry baby fish the others might pop out. Protein for crap! This 35-year old picture of ecological food production is from the New Alchemy Institute.

John Todd For Nobel Laureate

This is the young John Todd, the genius behind the New Alchemy Institute. One of the smartest things the world could do would be to give him the Nobel Peace Prize.

Methane Science Fair Project

Here’s a high school science fair project for a student whose parents own a feedlot, a video camera, and a fire extinguisher. Your very own methane digester, made out of inner tubes.

The plans came out of the hippie movement (New Alchemy Cell) in 1973. Stephen Gaskin said that roach clips were the height of hippie technology, in a lot of the towns he visited. Not so Falmouth, Massachusetts. You could see if the folks here still have a copy for an energetic kid. There were some New Alchemy papers online there as PDFs today (good science fair ideas, too), but not this one. If you strike out there, get in touch with me.

(This is the first of three posts for this date.)

New Alchemy Strategy

Two pages from a comic I drew in 1986. It was based on an ecological design swiped from the New Alchemists. Back then midwestern places like my home town were hurting. (I think they still are, but the pain is even further removed from the decision makers.) I hoped that I was spreading the word that strategies existed for real and permanent revitalization. Everybody I knew, and a lot I didn't, got a photocopy. I never built one of these either.

John Todd: Making The World Safe For Itself

John Todd came to me via the Whole Earth Catalog, and its subsequent incarnations. In 1969, Todd, his wife Nancy Jack, and other colleagues like Bill McLarney founded the New Alchemy Institute on Cape Cod, and that organization catalyzed my hippie fantasies.

I believed that madness like segregation and the war in Viet Nam happened because we lived wrong, and what we needed was experiments in how we might live so as to avoid war and oppression. These people were living my dream! They were collaborating with like-minded people to turn waste into food. They had gardens, wind turbines, passive solar heat, methane generators, and they were recycling garden wastes through these big, interesting-looking fiberglass tanks full of fish. They were ending the war by creating wealth.

Like a lot of hippies, I was wondering, “Why aren’t we doing something like that here.” I wasted a lot of time waiting for New Alchemy-Midwest to materialize.

Todd went on to design systems for cleaning polluted bodies of water, living machines which turned the sewerage in small towns and ski resorts into salable bait fish and decorative plants, and an Ocean-Going Pickup, an inexpensively manufactured small sailboat for third world fishermen. Todd won the 2008 Buckminster Fuller Challenge grant for his proposal, “Comprehensive Design for a Carbon Neutral World: The Challenge of Appalachia.”

Challenge of Appalachia is a plan for repairing existing damage from coal mining, managing ecological succession to reforest the area, and building ecologically sensitive industries and other institutions to afford citizens comfortable and self-reliant livelihoods for generations to come. The idea is that this would spread, and in his proposal, Todd says they have a similar project in operation in Cost Rica.

I was at a permaculture discussion once, in which somebody said, “If John Todd doesn’t get a Nobel Peace Prize, there’s something wrong.” You can quibble about theories and strategies, but peace prosperity and stability are only going to come to stay where people have learned to live as part of the planetary ecosystem. John Todd is somebody who has spent forty years building reproducible examples of how that can be done.