Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre(4)
You can’t ask people to give up personal, tangible comforts for some ethereal ideal. That’s why communism failed. That’s why all those primitive, hippie, “back to the land” communes failed. Selfless suffering feels good for short crusades, but as a way of life, it’s unsustainable.
RYSSDAL: Until you invented Greenloop.
TONY: Again, I didn’t invent anything. All I did was look at the question through the lens of past failures.
RYSSDAL: You’ve been very critical of previous attempts…
TONY: I wouldn’t call it critical. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for those who came before me. But you look at those huge, government funded eco-cities like Masdar*2 or Dongtan.*3 Too big. Too expensive. And definitely too ambitious for a post Sequestration*4 America. Likewise the smaller, Euro models like BedZED*5 or Sieben Linden*6 are nonstarters because they depend on punishing austerity. I liked the Dunedin*7 project in Florida. It’s comfortable and manageable, but it just doesn’t have any wow, and this…
RYSSDAL: We should note that Tony is gesturing to the houses and land around us.
TONY: Tell me this isn’t the definition of “wow”?
RYSSDAL: Is the story true about you hijacking a Cygnus corporate retreat and pitching the project only after you’d hiked them up here?
TONY: [Laughs.] I wish. They knew a sales pitch was coming, and they knew it had something to do with a plot of land that the federal government was planning to auction off to the private sector, but they didn’t hear my proposal until we were standing…actually…on the very spot we’re standing now.
RYSSDAL: And nature did the talking.
TONY: And me. [Both laugh.] Seriously, like Steve Jobs playing the orchestra,*8 my orchestra is this land. When you’re here, surrounded by it, connecting to it on a visceral level, you realize that that connection is the only way to save our planet. That’s been the problem all along, destroying the natural world because we’ve created so much distance from it.
I asked my friends at Cygnus to imagine two different endgames for this soon to be privatized land. Clear-cutting by a Chinese timber company or…or…the minimal footprint of a micro-eco-community that personified the new Green Revolution. Six homes, no more, ringing a common house in the top-down shape of a turtle, which, according to some Native American beliefs, is the foundation on which the world is built.
I described how the Tlingit-style houses would look like they literally grew right out of the forest.
RYSSDAL: Which you can see now.
TONY: Exactly, but what you can’t see is that these homes are all built from 100 percent recycled materials. Wood, metal, insulation are recycled blue jeans. The only new material is the bamboo for the floors. Bamboo’s really important to the planet. That’s why you see it growing all around the neighborhood. Not only is it one of the most versatile and renewable building materials ever, it also helps to sequester carbon. There are also what you’d call “passive elements,” like the giant floor-to-ceiling windows in the living room that allow you to warm or cool the whole house by raising or lowering the curtains.
But passive elements only go so far. When it comes to active, green technology, we’ve got it all. See how the roofs have this bluish-purple tint? Those are solar panels. Peel and stick, like old-fashioned wallpaper, and “triple junction” so they can harvest every photon on a cloudy day. And those converted amps are stored in Cygnus’s patented battery that not only fits invisibly into a wall, but is 13.5 percent more efficient than the competition’s.
RYSSDAL: Suck on that, Elon Musk.
TONY: No, no, I love Elon, he’s a good guy, but he does have some catching up to do.
RYSSDAL: Like the solar profit program?
TONY: Exactly. If you harvest more energy than you need, why not be able to sell it back to the grid? And I don’t mean a rebate like in some states, I mean sell, for cash, just like the Germans have been doing for almost two decades. That’s not technology, that’s just good business, making money while you sit on your ass.
RYSSDAL: And speaking of sitting on your…
TONY: I was getting to that. The houses don’t just harvest sunlight, they also collect methane gas from, wait for it, your own poop. Again, nothing new. Biogas has been used in developing countries for years. Even some American cities are tapping into the deposits from their own landfills. Greenloop’s taken all that hard-won experience and kicked it up to American suburban standards. Each house is built on a biogas generator that breaks down what you flush. But you don’t see it, or smell it, or even have to think about it. Everything is regulated by the Cygnus “smart home” system.
RYSSDAL: Can you talk a little bit about that system?
TONY: Again, nothing new. A lot of homes are getting smarter. Greenloop’s just gotten there faster. The central home program is either voice or remote activated, and with a constant eye toward energy efficiency. It’s always thinking, always calculating, always making sure you don’t waste one amp or Btu. Every room is riddled with both thermal and motion sensors. On the highest efficiency setting, they’ll automatically shut down all light and heat to every unoccupied space. And you don’t have to do anything more than just live the way you’ve always lived. You don’t have to sacrifice an ounce of comfort or time.
RYSSDAL: And that goes back to the same political will that allowed Washington State to change its solar energy policy.