Oh, Give Me a Home!
© 1992, Benjamin Robert Taylor

To those uninvolved with or unaware of the environmental movement, the exploitation of resources might seem to be the very pinnacle of the amerikan way of life. Certainly our expanding population cannot live as the more than five hundred nations of the aboriginal inhabitants of this continent did, as ecologically harmonious agrarian hunter-gatherers. Today there are not nearly enough buffalo left with which to build tepees for a quarter of a billion people!

In nineteen fifty-four the legendary scientist, scholar, teacher, philosopher and futurist Bucky (he always said, "Call me 'Bucky'") Fuller went before Congress to present a plan that would have provided every man, woman and child (then) living in the United Snakes with a completely autonomous solar powered seven room geodesic dome home - at a cost of under twelve thousand dollars each. His domes were being erected from pole to pole as shelters for military radar installations and his plan called for them to be mass produced using methods developed in the aircraft industry during World War Two. Half a generation later, at the end of the nineteen sixties, thousands of hippies would adapt the dome as a symbol of their hopes for shelter that was harmonious with the environment and cheap to build. A fatal combination of poorly thought out "kits," a lack of practical homebuilding experience and unclear leadership, due at least in part to almost perpetual drug abuse, gave Bucky's domes a reputation they are undeserving of. Modern dome kits, some of which Bucky himself helped to develop, use common materials with practically no waste and are simple and rapid to erect. Although such prefabricated kits did not exist when he appeared before congress to present the plan, Bucky suggested that kits be prefabricated using aircraft grade aluminum. He also proposed that they be powered by photovoltaic "solar panels" like those already being used at the time by Bell Telephone to power transformers in remote locations and that they utilize composting toilets like those being used in many Scandinavian countries.

There were several reasons that the general public was never made aware of Bucky's plan. Second among them was a veritable "full house" of Congress with small (and some not-so-small) fortunes tied up in real estate that simply had to be resold to agencies like the Tennessee Valley Authority for hydroelectric production. The fact that the photovoltaic systems and composting toilets that Bucky's proposal depended on were new technologies might have been reason enough to scrap the plan, but the trump card was the need to build nuclear power plants to produce the cold war panacea of fissionable plutonium at any cost.

No sacrifice was too great for the amerikan people to make in the name of charismatic folk heroes like Louisiana's Huey P. "the Kingfish" Long (who wound up being assassinated by a former Nazi agent, of all things!) and the vast sums of money invested solely on the basis of the "insider" information those heroes represented. That had been the fifties. Today such shenanigans are not looked upon as kindly as in those long gone days. The sixties spurred a new wave of awareness in the need for affordable, equitable and ecologically harmonious housing - as well as an intolerance of those who would abuse the privilege of power. Status quo amerikans of the sixties - and the seventies - might turn a blind eye to the C.I.A's (now admitted) marionette-like manipulations of minds as lucid and acute as Iran's Shah Pahlevi, Spain's Generalissimo Franco, Panama's Manny Noriega and "Papa Doc" Du Valier of Haiti, but if an amerikan politician had been implicated in, say, a break-in, for example, that amerikan politician would likely have been forced to resign in order to avoid impeachment.

First Kennedy's Peace Corps and, a decade later, Jimmy Carter's Habitat for Humanity renewed hopes that Uncle Sugar might one day deliver on Bucky's promise of energy independence. Then came Reaganomics and with them came the head of the C.I.A. (who had proven inept at running the Philippines, Panama, Haiti and Iran!) to run this very U.S. of A. Once again, the protection of oil cartels' interests and the wholesale production of plutonium were prioritized ahead of public housing or health care.

As the public's awareness of problems such as the storage of radioactive waste grows, however, so does the outcry denouncing the seeming shortsightedness of the political machine that brought nuclear fission into our everyday lives. In Florida, F.P.L's longstanding policy of housing radioactive waste in fifty gallon drums in the hallways of their Turkey Point facility now seems to be on the verge of costing the taxpayers of that state nearly half a billion dollars in the guise of a new containment facility. Taxpayers should not be the ones to shoulder such a financial burden - our monies can be better spent.

Using F.P.L. as an example, we can see how every reactor site in amerika could be made obsolete by saving amerikans millions of dollars; F.P.L. serves fewer than five million single family residences in the Dade Broward metroplex. Each and every one of those homes can be upgraded to total energy independence with photovoltaics ("solar panels"), sodium battery banks and sine wave inverters. All of these are existing and proven technologies that are readily available and can be installed by any licensed electrician with the greatest of ease. Buying only the best and most expensive equipment and providing for far more power than the average home would require, energy independence for Dade County could be achieved at an average cost of fifteen to twenty thousand dollars per home! Simple math, then, shows us that the expenditure of a mere hundred million dollars (or four hundred million dollars less than the Turkey Point cleanup) would eliminate the need for F.P.L. to remain in business.

If such a plan of action were to be suggested in earnest, F.P.L's board of director's response should be pitifully predictable; first they would play upon the emotions of the ignorant, bemoaning the presumed loss of jobs the plan would bring about. Other than their own self imposed tasks of money grubbing, though, the loss of jobs would be minimal. If the solar scheme is ever implemented, technicians now required to maintain the nineteenth century labyrinth of overhead power lines - the mortal danger of which we are reminded in daily public service announcements on teevee - would be kept equally busy installing, maintaining and upgrading individual home power plants. The only difference would be that the independent contractors could charge less and make more than in their present arrangement as employees of the current (pun intended) power company. A central grid would still need to be maintained for applications such as inner city office buildings and high rise yuppieminiums, although rooftop installation of ten kilowatt wind turbine generators would be only slightly more complicated than putting up solar panels on single family residences.

The fact that the proliferation of nuclear power facilities in the United States was little more than a ploy by which our government sought to produce an abundance of fissionable plutonium to fuel the cold war machine cannot be overlooked. Equally difficult to ignore is the fact that more than sixty percent of the power produced at Turkey Point comes not from the fission reactor, but from the burning of bunker C fuel oil - which is shipped in by barge through the once pristine waters of Biscayne Bay National Park. With more oil wells capped off in the state of Texas than there are producing wells in Saudi Arabia and more wells capped off in Alaska than there are producing wells in all the O.P.E.C. nations combined, odds are that the oil being used at Turkey Point is foreign. The need for nuclear power plants seemsnot to have been the only hoax our leaders have conspired to perpetrate against the amerikan People.

Whether most of them know that the plant at Turkey Point uses oil as well as plutonium or not, in the wake of Hurricane Andrew's assault on the facility, almost all of the residents of Dade County were made frighteningly aware of the fact that Turkey Point is also located in a tidal flood plain. Had the hurricane carried a storm surge, the effect would certainly have been catastrophic, whether oil or plutonium was being used at the time. All that saved South Florida from a disaster far worse than the effects of the storm itself was the speed of the hurricane, which was too great to build up the ocean swell characteristic of storms of such magnitude. Such a wall of water would have levelled the reactor (as well as everything else in its path).

The cold war is over, by all accounts, and the need for a nuclear arsenal was a questionable necessity to begin with. The time to altogether prohibit the shipping of petroleum products through environmentally sensitive areas is likewise long overdue. If our politicians are responsible for perpetuating the great hoax of our perceived dependance upon conglomerates such as F.P.L. and Exxon, then we must seriously consider replacing our politicians en masse. This is not a call to arms - it is a call to reason! Ideally, in a democratic society, an informed populace should be allowed to vote on any such issue. As taxpayers, the choice between spending five hundred million dollars to keep paying electric bills and paying one hundred million dollars to eliminate electric bills once and for all seems an easy one. Why, then, are we not given this choice?

As a former C.I.A. director who became vice president, then president of the United snakes said when the Soviet Union collapsed, "The evil empire is dead." After three consecutive Republican administrations, amerikans just said "no" and the evil empire is at least no longer in control of this nation. It's finally time to forge ahead. Numerous manufacturers of prefabricated geodesic homes (based on Bucky's original design) now offer consumer direct, credit card approved sales programs for these energy efficient, hurricane and earthquake resistant dwellings. Photovoltaic panels are cheaper than they have ever been and are even more readily available than are dome kits. Wind turbine generators (wind itself being a form of solar energy, strictly speaking) have been cranking out power continuously in some locations for better than half a century. With the cold war all but forgotten, the need to produce and stockpile fissionable plutonium is also over, at long last.

As concern over the need to house amerika's expanding population grows, the public awareness of concepts introduced by visionaries like Bucky half a century ago increases proportionately. What were once only curiosities are fast becoming necessities. What were formerly mere diversions for the eccentric are now commonplace. Knowledge that was once available to the privileged few is now available to all, and that knowledge must be shared. Only by educating our entire population in not only the need for ecologically sound energy sources and building methods, but in the energies and building methods themselves, can amerika hope to have a secure future.