Monday, October 13, 2008

Home Grown


Being a man and a great thinker, I am constantly thinking about two things, sex and the environment.

Recently there has been a good amount of turmoil in the global economy triggered by the pop of a housing bubble glistening with fraud and the fact that our economy is based on a good number of imaginary machinations, so confusingly laid out that people believe in them, kind of like the theory of relativity. Saving the economy could be as easy as bringing Tinkerbell back from the dead. We just have to believe.

But, I am babbling now. Let's get back to the point.

I started thinking about housing, the housing market, houses, and how they could be better, because if there are better houses out there, people will want to live in those, and we can start blowing up a new housing bubble.

New and environmentally friendly houses...


Here is the idea: living, growing houses.

If you are a biotechnologist, get to work on this. I have a feeling that I am not the first to think of this, but I really am upset with all of you that you haven't made it happen yet. I am pissed that my house isn't alive.

I would start with Bamboo. Certain strains of bamboo can grow up to four feet in a day and it is strong, really strong. Yeah, it is stronger than you. I don't care how much you can leg press. Yeah... no. That's not even impressive. No... Most people can leg press that much. Trust me... No, that is not impressive. I know 12 year old girls that can leg press that much.

Imagine, houses that are growing, living structures.


Now, I know that some of you probably hate rattan and bamboo furniture. Deal with it. I don't like that kind of furniture either.

Also, some of you are probably going to tell me that bamboo doesn't grow so well in Wisconsin. True, but it does grow well in places like Louisiana. Hmmm. I don't think that bamboo is filled with formaldehyde, but maybe they can do without the formaldehyde. Those crazy Cajuns.


I could go on and on with different advantages and thoughts that I have on this idea, but I don't want to bore you guys. Just think about this. Humans have been manipulating plant and animal genetics for thousands of years. We have created square watermelons, can grow a human ear on the back of a mouse, clone sheep, and transplant hair (this hair restoration plug brought to you by Bosley Medical Systems). We should be able to figure out how to grow a house.

Don't let the Smurfs make the human race look stupid. I know Papa Smurf is smart and all, and they have been outsmarting Gargamel for years, but come on.

P.S. Why haven't you subscribed to Ideas By Chuck.com?

P.P.S. Cheer up. The only people who could stand to gain from the entire world economy being in the dump are aliens looking for cheap real estate. Just keep on trucking, and maybe look into getting the new Gold-Pressed Latinum card from Visa.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Gargamel is Dick Cheney in James Taylor's body

Anonymous said...

this is a great idea!
A lot of people have had it but there is a beast far greater than Gargamel that is preventing things like this from becoming a reality, it's called bureaucracy and i can't believe I spelled it right!

This is the kind of shit people like Michael Reynolds have been working toward for decades.... McCain should take a look at him for some clarity on what the word maverick means.

it got to the point where he had to take his superior eco-archt. ideas and innovations to third world countries in order to realize them..... now there are people in Buttcrackistan living in better more efficient houses than us.

sam small said...

Dude, what are you talking about?
You can totally grow a house. A Bamboo. And don't worry, thanks to some really cool architecture and engineering, your bamboo house can have a variety of "looks" besides tropical bamboo.

Hurricane and earthquake strong designs for building code approved residential, resort and commercial structures assembled from prefabricated engineered panels built from certified Structural Bamboo poles offer an extraordinary solution to a variety of the construction challenges facing anyone building today.

Structural Bamboo poles from Bamboo Technologies are ICC certified as complying with IBC, IRC and UBC construction material standards and now also qualify for LEED credits as a rapidly renewable resource.

Bamboo is one of the fastest growing plants on the planet and is extremely efficient at absorbing carbon, locking it away indefinitely into soil deposits.

Structural Bamboo offers an attractive solution that not only reduces the carbon released into the atmosphere from the use of concrete or steel, bamboo actually removes carbon from the air and sequesters it away indefinitely.

http://www.bambooliving.com/

Bamboo Technologies has developed technical and real life expertise in bamboo construction since it started all this over fourteen years ago. To bring to market the first and still only building-code certified Structural Bamboo buildings in the USA, Bamboo Technologies developed and tested a construction system that plays off the natural strengths of Structural Bamboo to manufacture very strong buildings and allow for straightforward analysis by structural engineers.

The system uses certified bamboo poles to prefabricate finished bamboo structural panels. The finished panels allow for rapid onsite erection of the structures and ease shipping to assembly sites around the world.

Check it out and let me know what you think.
Thanks

Charles McCarthy said...

Thanks Sam. I understand all of that. But I am talking about a living house. A house made of living plants.

Charles McCarthy said...

I got this feedback/new idea from John P.

I think it is an interesting idea.

I do have to say that I have been thinking for a while that it would be a good idea to get the mining rights to land fills because most people don't realize that when we run out of oil, we run out of cheap plastic.

Also, a good percentage of these prisoners in prison are being kept there, and costing you money because they committed nonviolent marijuana related crimes.

I don't know about you, but I don't like the idea of spending any money to keep someone in jail for smoking a dooby.

Here is John's idea:

Green Prison

Remember as a kid when you realized that you could collect old aluminum Coors light cans and trade them in for cold hard Star Wars toy buying cash? We learned that clearly, there is a market for recyclable material.

Well how about all those landfills across our beautiful country? They’re just towering monuments of waste leaching toxins into the ground water and turning the ground into a shade of green we’d rather not see. They need to be cleaned up, right?

On average, what percentage of the material in any given American landfill is recyclable? Under the millions of tons of disposable Huggies, how many tons of copper wire from old eight track stereos and glass Coca Cola bottles thrown away during the Reagan administration are there to be mined? Well, I’m too lazy to do a googlenet search on the interweb machine to find out, but I’d be willing to bet that it’s a lot.

However, it’s not enough to make it economically viable for a private entity to hire workers to sift through that mess. I mean, could you imagine the labor cost alone? How much would someone have to pay you to wallow knee deep in old Kleenexes and rotting Dominoes take-out? The value of all the collected recyclable material wouldn’t be enough to pay any workers (documented or otherwise) to do it.

Were could you possibly find an American labor force that would be willing to do such a horrible but necessary job at a cost that wouldn’t break us all?

I did do a world wide Yahoo machine search and found that there are more than two million people currently incarcerated in American prisons and it’s costing us all a lot of tax payer green to keep them there.

Now, don’t get carried away. I’m not going to suggest that prisoners be forced into slave labor to do this job, but how about the idea of a Green Prison? You set up a temporary facility at a landfill, secure the site, and get people to work mining the “good” dirt. The value of that mined material is then sold and used to pay for everything the Green Prison needs. When all the recyclable material has been removed, and the area is cleaned up in the process, the Green Prison packs up and moves to the next landfill.

It could be like popular work farm prisons that allow low risk detainees to earn a small wage so that when they’re released, they actually have some means to support themselves until they can get on their feet. The only difference with the Green Prison is that prisoners aren’t competing with private farmers and business that have to pay market wages to their employees. A Green Prison competes with no one, takes no jobs away from anyone, costs taxpayers nothing, and cleans up the planet.

The practice of prisoners working for the good of society is already widely accepted. Think about the courageous stump jumpers that help fight terrible forest fires or the prisoners that help during disasters to lay sandbags in floods? Well is there a bigger disaster than the mess we’ve made with overfilling landfills? The chance for prisoners to redeem themselves, and for us as a society to really do something about the waste we produce.