I stay in shape by working out using body weight training and a book called You Are Your Own Gym. You should check it out: 14 bucks and you have a blueprint for life on keeping your whole body in top form. 20 minutes a day, a couple times a week and you’re Special Forces tight. The author, Mark Lauren, loves New Orleans, did some of the photo shoots of the book’s first pressing on New Orleans balconies and even used a local publisher. “What’s this got to do with poop and the price of gas, E?” Funny you should ask. Well, I’m here to tell you that not only are you your own gym, you are also your own power plant. More exactly, your house is its own power plant.
Almost ten years ago, I read a story about how homes in rural India were converting their organic waste (food clippings, excrement, lawn trimmings, animal waste, etc.) into a methane gas to use for heating and cooking. Not long after that I read about skyscrapers in China adopting this technique also to supplement their power needs for each individual building. Not but a few days ago I read about how Norway will be powering their city transit busses with this same source of fuel. Bio Gas production through anaerobic digestion is nothing new; some American landfills have used this to collect the methane from covered landfills since the earlier part of this century.
What I want to propose to you folks is the very strong potential that there already exists technologies for each individual household to be its own power plant. How many times have you had someone brow-beating solar power as not being the end-all technology to end the age of oil, coal, hydro and nuclear power? Well, they’re right. Just like we have the aforementioned various forms of current power generations, so we will need multiple new ways to replace the old ways. We have these means now; we just have to figure out a way to make them all viable. To combine wind, solar, even hydro in some special cases and anaerobic digestion on a house right now is not 100% there, but it’s 66% there and possibly 85% there.
The water waste with current toilet systems are about to undergo a revolution. Bill Gates currently has a challenge to designers and engineers to “reinvent the toilet” and I will bet you from this dialogue will come anaerobic digestive systems for the home in the very near future. We’re up against the same battle of big corporations against the individual being free from their clutches of power, though. Why the hell would they be excited about each individual household being free of their charges? It is inevitable that we will be able to tell the utilities to take a hike soon– sooner if you are willing to sacrifice. Those that don’t, well, they can continue to be a slave to the continuing over-the-barrel, unwanted rear entry molestations that are sure to continue as long as there is greed and power-hungry corporations. We can side-step them.
Through innovation and sacrifice, we will be self-sufficient before we know it. Utopian pipe dream? I don’t think so. I think we, as peoples in this modern age, will be raising the middle finger to the constrictions of not knowing how to fend for ourselves on multiple levels of technology and abilities. We can and will be able to do this as long as we maintain free and open lines of communication. You may be pessimistic but just look at the Pirate Bay (thepiratebay.se): they’re getting heat for providing a service some say is illegal, so what are they going to do? Launch their servers into low orbit space aboard their own satellites. They will need to be shot down to be stopped. DIY or die, folks!
