12th
Reminiscences
Hector Valentine is explaining how they came to live in hexayurts. It’s an interesting case.
When I started this stuff just past the turn of the millennium, I’d spent a bit of time living rough - maybe a year all-told, between backpacking around America, riding freight trains, various other adventures. It was a few weeks here, a month and a half there, short hops between couch surfing or jobs that came with hotels.
If I was homeless it was because I did not want a home: I was a wanderer, a homeless person with options. Those were soft, fond, sweet days.
Anyway, that experience, of being more or less homeless at times, informed the design a lot. What could a bunch of hobos pooling their dollars for a home depot run manage? If it’s 12 sheets of plywood, and that’s $6 a sheet… hundred buck house territory.
Yeah, for logistical reasons we tended to recommend lighter materials, but the hundred buck house was always a big part of the pitch. 10 years later? Ballpark guess, 20 million people living in hexayurts and derived structures. How’s it turning out? We didn’t do the analysis in the early days. We just built and taught and pushed it into the world, figuring that Bucky was right when he developed the Dymaxion Deployment Unit.
That’s all we did: we implemented Dymax.
It was an intelligent gamble. Bucky was always a space cadet - I used to joke that he was a reincarnated alien - but although he tended to have terrible problems getting things to work here in the terribly heavy gravity of earth, far from the floating stars - he was right about planetary resource management, right about “one world” resource management, right about all the big stuff.
So we rolled the dice and built it, using our local knowledge of early 21st century manufacturing and materials to implement. And it worked.
We’re at the dawn of a new age. Everybody thinks these Superthreats might be the end, but they’re the beginning. The Planetary Near Death Experience which we need to make us re-evaluate our values, as a species, in the same way that individuals always rethink their values when they see the Great Light (Of The Oncoming Train) in a near-death experience.
We’re having a Planetary Near Death Experience, a collective near death experience, so we all re-evaluate our shared values.
The old environmental movement was about this - the whole “we must make do with less” thing that we’d now recognize as deadly neopuritan thinking. The old environmentalists tried to make it all about moral issues. But it isn’t, and that gap - between the science and neopuritan psuedo-Christian morality - leaves terrible problems that really brought that movement down. Cleanliness, even Ecological Cleanliness, is not next to godliness, and even if it is, it doesn’t matter. We can’t confuse moral and scientific problems and expect to get straight thinking in either area. It’s not about sacrifice, it’s about not causing harm: those are two separate problems.
You can have a life with everything, with no compromises, and harm nobody - if you’re accurate in taking what you want, and leave nothing unwanted behind afterwards. It’s skill, but there’s nothing neopuritan about it. At all. Quite the opposite, in fact, it can be quite indulgent.
The path we’ve chosen is a better one - we talk about it as a matter of desire - we’re done with conventional stories about right and wrong, about do without and do with less. No, what we need is deadly accurate desire.
If you want a hamburger, you want the experience of eating a hamburger. But you don’t want 4000 gallons of wasted water and 400 lbs of carbon or whatever the figures are (Cascio used to know.) Our society has hidden from us the true cost of our actions, but as computers and disaster-sharpened instinct restore our awareness, we have a simple path ahead of us: DO WHAT YOU WANT, AND NOTHING ELSE.
I call this “side-effect free living.”
First, you make the invisible visible. Sterling’s Viridian Movement got that one spot on.
Then you deal with what you can now see. And that’s not about this kind of protestant denialism, this notion of envirosocial sin and sacrifice as the only fix, that’s neopuritanism’s worst excess - to take Christian religious values and apply them to the global environmental crisis.
No, what it’s about is getting smart. TAKE WHAT YOU WANT, AND NOTHING ELSE.
These are simple rules to live by if you try. Take what you want and nothing else we call the law of precise desire.
We owe it to each other to desire precisely right now. If we all take what we want, and nothing else - if we each take the experiences we want, but as far as possible leave or share the things, if we all give our utmost to those people who need us, we will have half of the problems of this planet licked by Wednesday.
So that’s my thought, Hector. I’m sorry you’re stuck in my huts, but I’m sure it’s better than nothing or you wouldn’t have built them. If I could have designed a folding palace, you can be sure I would have, and I’ve spent pushing seven years in them myself so… good luck on the food and medical care situation, mate, and consider talking to the folks in DCAR (the Democratic Central African Republic, our Refugee State for new readers who don’t know) about their preventative medicine agendas. Good research work going on down there. Their lives depend on it, so they look very alertly, notice everything, integrate patterns, train their brightest offspring early and generally make the best of very bad shows.
DCAR is our way forwards globally. The people down there can save us all if we will only listen to them.
