Powering the Dream_ The History and Promise of Green Technology - Alexis Madrigal [85]
If that does happen, there will be a curious resonance between the world imagined by Victor Cohn and the one that humans end up living in: The globe will become one huge managed climate bubble, “a terrarium” in the words of journalist Eli Kintisch. Cohn imagined,
Man in 1999 made weather on a vast scale, or at least changed it. TV scanned distant clouds, and electronic brains analyzed signals from chains of robot observers all over the world. A group of unmanned satellites or space stations, circling the earth at a height of 500 miles, observed the atmosphere over the entire globe, and relayed what their TV cameras saw to scientists down on earth. A federal agency, established in 1971, then made United States control decisions. In mountains, weather makers built deep snow packs, and a 1999 report said: “We are forming new glaciers now, and may expect more summer runoff than ever.”42
But what for Cohn was a hopeful future is for us a worst-case scenario.
chapter 18
Transcendentalism
IN THE SPRING OF 1975 Jim DeKorne welcomed the photographer Jon Naar onto his family’s one-acre homestead in El Rito, New Mexico. They toured the grounds, passing the “survival greenhouse” and its aquaculture pond, the house heated largely by the sun, and into a small outbuilding that housed the batteries for a Jacob Wind Turbine of a design more than fifty years old.1
The building was small and built entirely from wood. Skinny logs formed the outside of the building, simple boards the inside. A half-sized door allowed entry into the control room. On a shelf, a bank of large “Heavy Duty” batteries ran up to the wind machine’s electricity generator. The only adornment was a New Yorker cartoon tacked on the wall.
DeKorne wore a long, untrimmed beard that called to mind both Fidel Castro and Allen Ginsberg. A herringbone cabbie hat was pulled low on his forehead, nearly to his thick-rimmed glasses. The former schoolteacher and English master’s degree holder looked uneasily into the camera with his finger pointing at his energy storage system.2 The wind-powered batteries provided electricity for a pump that circulated water from a flat-plate solar collector on the roof to the fish pond. The aquaculture tank worked like a “heat battery” for storing solar energy.3
By that time DeKorne was well known to the small group of solar enthusiasts who had sprung up around the country. He had published a series of articles in the back-to-the-land magazine Mother Earth News, describing his various efforts to build a totally self-sufficient existence out on the New Mexico plateau. He had created the Walden Foundation to publish a book, The Survival Greenhouse, describing an underground system for hydroponic agriculture.4 He and his wife, Elizabeth, also decided to create an “eco-system” that was “capable of supplementing the diet of a small family” while staying “consistent with ecological reality—only natural, non-polluting systems could be considered.” Their secondary considerations were “maximum yields, minimum waste, and reasonable ease of operation and maintenance.”5
The raw material was a one-acre plot of land they purchased in 1970. Over the next five years, it became a roughly self-sufficient homestead. They had the greenhouse and a sauna, a root cellar, and a pigpen. The family’s big idea was to sink the greenhouse four feet below the ground, allowing them to use the soil as an insulator. This “grow hole” was part of a looping ecosystem composed of earthworms, plants, and rabbits. DeKorne had stocked a solar-heated fish tank with bluegill sunfish from the closest pond and caught them “with barbless hooks,” but the fish required more food than they provided, so they eventually stopped farming them.6
The