New Year Message 4
The many individuals, groups, enterprises and organizations that are now working to bridge the digital divide and supply greater access to the resources of the internet are our natural allies in our purpose to work with those in our opensource community that are struggling with poverty, hunger, deprivation and exclusion (the plight of the majority of the world's population) to establish a Grass Roots initiative to help families and communities onto a path of social development and progress out of these conditions into a prosperous and sustainable life. The renewable resources that will thus become available through the application of our opensource methods are the free and abundant resources of nature, harmoniously amplified by the "built environment", which mimics nature and is based on ecological life support systems that are building integrated. The Knowledge Communities? all around the world that have the material means must undertake to learn how to implement a pattern for sustainable living and quickly take action to propagate these patterns widely and freely so that the damage (the majority of harm originating from the so called "developed" nations) to the planetary ecological life support system can be alleviated and the probable future of carrying capacity collapse and a massive "die-off" of humanity will be avoided. (See http://www.dieoff.org/)
The network of Eco Centers will be our principal tool to quicken our pace through the learning curve towards sustainable living and livelihoods. We need to quickly arrive at major breakthroughs in our ability to do more with less per person. We need efficiency gains to be realized of 10 to 100 times and the same in respect to cost reduction. Such efficiency gains will make it feasible to supply energy requirements through renewable energy resources. This is not only a technical problem but a spiritual and social transformation that will change our personal core values, our perception, world view, and manifest new financial and economic mechanisms and communication and collaboration skills. I believe that all the capacity required is available though some technologies are in embryonic stages of development. We see vestiges of these new patterns and relationships and as soon as we begin to act together we will witness an era of rapid evolution and innovation that will build a foundation for sustainable living.
It is important that we not think that big business and government will produce these results - only grass roots collaboration can get this job done. Many interest groups must now come together to synthesize a complete pattern of closed ecological life support, where our built environments - our homes and communities - will become "living systems" capable of producing (for local consumption and recycling of all bio nutrients) all the needs of residents, including food, water, energy and sustainable resources on a self reliant basis. As our Eco Villages and networks of sustainable communities gradually expand they will gradually encompass all the social, technical, manufacturing, commerce, travel, trade and recreational activities that must be transformed into ecologically sustainable and planet healing enterprises.
This is not utopian thinking or idle dreaming. Our goals can be achieved through an action plan that can be implemented immediately and we will see simultaneous initiatives by multitudes of persons, groups, enterprise and organizations - and one of these is the solaroof community. As the founder of the solaroof community I have dedicated my efforts to building an opensource initiative through which I may widely disclose and rapidly develop my own inventions for transparent solar structures, which can be applied to all kinds of buildings but have an inherent adaptability to solar greenhouses or "controlled environment greenhouses" for growing plants that can yield a harvest that exceeds field production by 10 to 20 times or more. The benefits of increased productivity and quality are further enhanced by a reduction of cost for heating and cooling by a similar factor of 20 times or more. These same controlled environments are ideal for personal comfort, well being, nutrition and providing favorable conditions for the expression of our greatest potential and development.
Solaroof eliminates the extensive use of land for agriculture and agroforestry and fisheries since the solaroof approach creates the ideal intensive gardening and plant culture conditions at the roof level of all human habitats and infrastructure such that no "gray" zones would exist and if, gradually all human settlements and travel arteries were to be built or renewed on this concept, then the projected 10 billion population peak of the planet can be sustainably supported; requiring no more area than the currently urbanized "gray zone" sprawl cities. Solaroof relies on the power of water working (Blue) and plants (Green) the method that I have called the Blue Green solution. The controlled ecological life support processes can be entirely operated on current solar income based on primary energy conversion by Photo Synthesis? (PS) of plants and bio systems and by Photo Voltaics? (PV) using efficient structural envelope integration of amorphous solar cells (or other emerging technology for direct conversion of solar radiation to electrical energy).
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