Our digital lives are mediated by screens. This images shows a wooden screen that opens out onto air and light. I like that kind of screen.
Now that we're comfortably seated inside the tree house, I'd like to share a 40 second video from Sergiy Yurko, a Ukrainian inventor. His designs for low-cost solar thermal collectors are impressive. With a $1000 investment in materials, and basic tools, he built a thermal concentrator capable of boiling a metric ton of water. His documentation of this system against a backdrop of war paints a picture of resiliency in the face of overwhelming uncertainty.
In this video, you can see an artificial geyser that's powered by sunlight. It's a hole in the ground, filled with water, that continuously vents billows of steam. In the age of the anthropocene, when humans have an immense and unchecked capacity to manipulate the natural world, it's cool to see someone make a homemade geyser with wooden sticks and scraps of mirror. The scale is humble and geological at the same time.
Heat energy has a primacy and directness that electricity doesn't. Traditional homes were organized around a hearth, and wood fires provided energy for everything from drying clothes to smoking meat. I like the idea of using solar power in a more raw form. If nothing else, to replicate the intense thermal comfort of a campfire, but with a low-tech solar system that stores the heat energy in water.
The inventor Saul Griffith wants to Electrify Everything. He wants a massive WWII-style industrial mobilization to transform the economy, and imagines a future where people enjoy the same or higher standard of living, without changing their patterns of consumption. This is a pretty popular view on climate change action.
I tend more towards the Degrowth mindset, that we need to radically shrink the scale of human production and consumption. This article looks at Degrowth and concludes that it's unrealistic and unhelpful. I disagree, but I think it's a well written article and does a good job of thinking through the issue.
Most of the potential solutions to climate change involve drastically re-thinking the organization of our social and material reality. I'm just one person; I'm not really in a position to effect change upon the whole of our industrial infrastructure. But I do see myself as capable of conjuring images of those ideas. Maybe you don't think Degrowth is a good idea at a global scale, but that doens't mean it wouldn't be fun to explore on a theatrical scale, for a few weeks at a time, the way you might explore Costa Rica or Thailand, regardless of whether you want to live there.
Degrowthers say that the United States could be more like Costa Rica. We could be happier and healthier while producing and consuming less. I think that is a fun idea.
Reality doesn't feel manipulable. I want to build a system that feels like it could be reconfigured overnight.