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15 April 06
Many inventions can contribute to a planetary management that recognizes both the fragile balance of an ingenious, divinely designed mothership Earth, and the challenges posed before humanity to bare survival on the endangered life forms, including ourselves.
Fortunately, a cornucopia of solutions were and are developed by ingenious minds constantly. Particularly, around the beginning of the 20th Century, r-evolutionaries like Nikola Tesla (fluorescent lights, wireless communication, radio, induction motor, Tesla coil transformer, and polyphase alternate current system and more than seven hundred other patents), Victor Schauberger (water research, turbine models, energy), Silvio Gesell (finance and land reform), Rudolf Steiner (agriculture, architecture, health care, culture, education, spirituality, finance, science, natural law), Sri Aurobindo and 'the Mother' (liberation movement in India, humanity's next evolutionary steps, philosophy, spirituality, concepts of the future city Auroville), R. Buckminster Fuller, "Bucky" Fuller (1895-1983), philosopher-inventor-designer. Was awarded twenty-five U.S. patents, authored twenty-eight books, and received forty-seven honorary doctorates. Inventor of the geodesic dome, campaigned his entire life for responsible conservation of the earth's resources to avoid ecological disaster. He emphasized technological efficiency by insisting on getting "more with less", coined the term "Spaceship Earth", and is considered one of the founders of the environmental design movement. And Jim Starry (born 1937)
Solutions
The Child's Environment - Called "Can Do - Nothing Can't be Done"
by Jim Starry (excerpt from a letter dated June 24, 1998)
My father's a straight 4.0 out of Drake University. Incredible capability in mathematics, he was a teacher. Yet somehow he deciphered that the educational system based on memory wasn't working. So, I remember starting around five years old, taking things apart for him. At 55, sitting across from him, I finally recognized he never questioned my capability of accomplishing anything. By this time we had a huge machine shop, invention lab, in the basement of an old mansion, which was the creation space for anything. I recognized at 55, while working on an invention, that most probably he always knew the answers but quietly walked me through the jungle of my own mind to make me feel as if I'd discovered it on my own.
All the listed solutions for a better planet are ultimately my father's creations.
1. Airport would save $80 billion a year in US fuel.
2. Mass transit using your personal automobile as a module, so when you get there you still have your car. Attains a 20:1 efficiency over the current systems.
3. Auto emissions control device which uses Boyles and Charles Law (rate of expanding gasses) to so dramatically reduce auto emissions that you can literally drive your car to clean the air. If the auto is under mass use, it is powerful enough to function in the environment, with proper engineering it can be driven to clean the environment.
4. A vertical armature electric motor with field density of 10:1 which allows one device to be a motor, a brake, a clutch, a transmission so that your vehicle is powered with an efficiency with rapid acceleration of 3:1 over the conventional automobile.
5. Community design to begin to reduce the time in your automobile, to increase time with family.
6. Uniform Building Code currently has design dysfunction of the planet.
7. Home construction at 1/3 of the cost per square foot, demonstrating heating and cooling retention to dramatically increase comfort, both economically and environmentally.
8. Changes for existing structures demonstrating heating and cooling efficiency to dramatically reduce utility costs.
9. Septic designs for rural communities that eliminate any toxic interchange with groundwater.
10. Waste treatment facilities that regenerate the purest water on the planet.
11. Water purification using a very simple design that is touted to remove 1/103 micron viruses at 40,000 gallons/month. A gift of this system has been made to the King of Thailand as it uses no electricity and can be used in third world countries.
12. Feedlot system for large communities that creates organic meats without use of steroids, antibiotics, etc. (bringing back the free range).
13. Demonstration of a wind generator which collects energy convectively, conductively, and with radiation collection to attain an approximate 42% efficiency.
14. Shopping mall design where people work, live, are educated, motel services, child care, etc. so that driving becomes a non-necessity.
15. Environmental university, the first in the world, where people are taught the problem and the solution; are trained in building home structures which don't pollute; are trained in distribution, communication with their own community, the state, and the world, so on graduation they have numerous job offers.
The next four chapters are #1 - how to get you involved; #2 - how to get your government involved, #3 - how to cause your involvement to cause the involvement of others, and #4- - an earth doll where the legs are the trees, supporting the body, which is the globe, the arms are porpoises for the spiritual information, and the head is the sun, the energy of the process. Inside the earth doll, which may be worn as a backpack, is a videotape with solutions, an audiotape with music to teach the child to sing to his parents the lyrics of possibility, and with this a book that the parent will read to the child, that reinforces that solutions are easy, and that the new children of the future can be allowed to dream again.
03 August '05
In a never-ending quest, Jim Starry is monitoring various sources to connect to, to inspire or get inspired. He recently came across an article by Jim Folger in the NRDC-magazine Onearth. The 'National Resource Defense Council' in their Summer issue 2005 draw the attention to:
'Blueprint for Disaster?' - The buildings in which we live and work turn out to be the nation's largest source of global warming pollution [a whopping 50 %!]. Fear not: A renowned architect has a new design.
http://www.nrdc.org/onearth/05sum/livgreen.asp
My own research
in sustainable architecture brought a few mind-expanding results.
Two self- or group-build experiments are located in the USA:
One is based on ancient beehive-shaped Superadobes, see
http://www.calearth.org
the other on Buckminster Fuller structures,
http://www.icosavillage.net (?)
Another environmental-friendly architecture is using simple brick
presses with basically the local earth, eventually enforced by
some cement. Located in the future city Auroville (located in
Southern India near Pondicherry, but belonging to humanity
according to its charter, and sanctioned by successive Indian
governments!) there is the Auroville Earth Institute. Their
website is: http://www.earth-auroville.com
Beginning with 2006, they were very busy to build flood-,
earhquake- and cyclone-resistant homes for many of the 10.000
Tsunami survivors of the Auroville-bioregion.
And as proof that Auroville (see above) indeed has to be reckoned with, here is an article from
Auroville Outreach July 2005:
Jana Dreikhausen, an Aurovilian architect and town planner from Germany, won an important award at an International Conference on 'Ecological Architecture and Environment in the Tropics' held earlier this year in Semarang, Indonesia.Prof. H. Frick from Soegijapranata University in Indonesia had invited 41 speakers from around the world, including as far afield as the USA, Iran, New Zealand, Japan, Germany, Taiwan, Austria, Malaysia, Switzerland, Indonesia, Britain and the Netherlands, to share their research and experimental work relating to ecological architecture and the environment. Their contributions created a broad picture of the multi-level aspects of global ecological and sustainable awareness today, and its intellectual and applied interpretations in the different countries of the world. Jana, however, was the only speaker to end up with an award at the conference, receiving a standing ovation for a highly rated residence designed and constructed by her in Auroville.
Giving the background to the award, Jana explains that today many architects, both Western and Asian, are jumping on the popular bandwagon of claiming to be "ecological" and "sustainable" in their work. However, their interpretation of those words varies around the world. This has lead to the development of evaluation methods for assessing sustainability as a step to bring the trendy expression "sustainable" away from its often only superficial interpretation to a more complex and specified understanding. Jana won her award for integrating the full range of today's sustainable building ideas into a single innovative design, which included using all natural elements such as sun, wind, water and geothermic; the location within the city layout in relation to vegetation and water bodies; the landscaped topography of the plot; and the invention of a ventilation system to give a response to the tropical climate. In the latter, the building layout for her residential project was created around her specifically designed passive cooling concept, which is based on suction accomplished through scientific research in collaboration with a sailing boat designer, using a computer simulation of her design to show the building as a boat without wind.
Taking into account the full circle of sustainable factors, Jana was given her award based on the fact that her architecture project was evaluated by Prof. Dr. Michiel Haas from The Netherlands as achieving an exceptionally high sustainability benchmark of over 350 out of 500. (According to his developed evaluation technique, based on a benchmark of 100 for conventional buildings, even in countries like The Netherlands, sustainable buildings normally reach today only a benchmark of 140 out of 500.) Congratulations to Jana, who in being so recognized has not only answered the challenge of creativity for innovations in sustainable architecture, but has also helped put Auroville on the worldwide sustainability networking map.
