Hemp and algae are super-organic substances that can make ecological localism real and practical
Trailer for Herbaria (see bottom of post)
From the visionary and indefatigable urbanist Adam Greenfield (now vibrantly on the social network Mastodon), we are delighted to find the blog Sunshine And Seedlings: an anarchy-solar-punk newsletter.
The writer is a solar-punk storyteller (see other blogs this week), but runs a range of extremely practical articles that dare to go deep into the details of genuinely regenerative, materially self-sustaining communities.
This one - picked out by Adam - is titled The Future Looks Green: Hemp, Algae, and Ideas for Ecovillages and Cooperative Life: “how plants can make medicine, food, bricks, clothes, fuel, compost and more, all while sequestering carbon. And how we can collectively work towards autonomy and ecological regeneration.”
It’s worth reading the whole piece, but we’ll just pick out the opening sequence, which makes startling claims about how hemp and algae can replace plastics, build houses,
Hemp has been considered a miracle plant for thousands of years and has been cultivated globally for just as long. Here is a list of the various things you can make with hemp:
Textiles (clothing, shoes, bags), paper products (writing paper, cardboard, packaging), building materials (hempcrete, insulation, particleboard), food products (hemp seeds, hemp milk, hemp oil), body care products (soap, lotions, balms), CBD products (oils, edibles, topicals), biofuels (hemp biodiesel, hemp ethanol/methanol), animal feed and bedding, rope and cordage, automotive parts, plastic composites, supplements (hemp protein powder), art supplies (canvas, paint), mulch, medicine (epilepsy and pain management), jewelry, beer (hemp beer), and much more.
Algae also has a wide amount of uses including as food when edible varieties are grown. The main thing I want to focus on is Alginate, which is a core ingredient in making bioplastics, biofilms, bioleathers, and biodegradable plastic-like substances.
One issue with bioplastics is that they can become brittle, and sometimes can’t withstand certain forces as well as other materials. But fiber reinforced bioplastics/films/materials are way stronger, and the fiber can come from the parts of the hemp harvest like the stalks - that aren’t often used - to help reinforce these goods.
So a community could grow hemp, create a myriad of products with it, and even use it to help create biodegradable and locally producible biomaterials for packaging or plastic replacements.
Things like hydrogels and biofilms can be made that can directly replace plastics, and they eventually break down in the ecosystem unline traditional plastics. The idea of making a plant based hydrogel is also interesting because things like Atmospheric Water Generators(AWGs) can use a type of hydrogel to help pull drinking water from the air in areas that don’t have access to clean water.
Circular systems, stopping waste, and regenerating the ecosystem
Looking at the uses of both hemp and algae, we can start to think about how we can fundamentally change our ways and methods of manufacturing away from a hypercapitalist, profit-driven, and petrochemical obsessed system to a free and open, collectivist, global and local, biomaterial system that doesn’t destroy the ecological foundations of our lives.
We can start to imagine closing the waste system loops. Things aren’t made with petroleum based plastics, then shipped across the world on ships fueled by fossil fuels, to be sold only to the people who can buy them, to be packaged with plastic that will never degrade, only for the product to end up in a landfill because it can’t be repaired because a corporation wants to increase it’s sales. This model is pure insanity.
To close the waste system loop, we can look towards nature as a teacher, to understand that all life systems follow the waste recycling loop. Seeds are planted, they grow and transform and transport nutrients, they interact with the mycelial web and share resources with other plants, they suck up CO2 and help filter contaminants, they eventually die, they rot and decay back into the soil ecosystem to feed the microbes and other insects and life that make up the soil web, only to act as the base to grow more life.
That is how we should look at everything we do.
If we decide to do things in this world, it can’t be permanent. It has to eventually breakdown and return back into a natural form that won’t impact the ecosystem, and ideally, it should actually help the ecosystem.
That doesn’t mean that we can’t have permanent structures, say for instance a terracing system that can stay intact for thousands of years, but that system will actually help the environment long after we are out of the picture, because it’s a beneficial system. We should make our only impacts to the ecosystem a positive one.
So how do we look at these materials and start to close the waste loop system? Well, with this we can grow hemp and algae literally anywhere, because they both are easy to grow and fast growers. Meaning the things we make aren’t locked into a global economic and trade system.
To make clothes we don’t need to ship raw materials from South America to China, to be made into fabric that is shipped to Vietnam to be made into a garment that is shipped and sold in Germany. We can produce the things we need right in our own local communities. This is less efficient in the capitalist mindframe, because ideally, we would have an economy of scale.
But this means that the economy of scale comes with a trade-off of ecological destruction. And so we can move the idea from a global system, to a regional one. This cuts down on the need for specific ways of manufacturing that tend to harm the environment.
More here. Greenfield’s comment: “Whether or not these particular solutions resonate with you, this is the kind of thinking we need *so* much more of. The hemp/algae production cycle envisaged here is practical enough to be doable locally, immediately and at small scale, but thought out with regard to its implications and the larger processes it enables or meshes with.”
There’s more of great interest from Sunshine and Seedlings, including ideas we’ll follow up later, like “permacomputing”, Buen Vivir, Hygge, Solarpunk & Degrowth.
In Addition:
The embed at the top of this post is a trailer from the documentary Herbaria. From the BFI:
Drawing parallels between the worlds of plants and celluloid film – two delicate entities that are becoming a memory – archivist-filmmaker Leandro Listorti proposes a multi-layered, elegantly hand-crafted film about the importance of care and preservation. There is a poignant sense of loss as we witness the caring hands of botanists and archivists labouring to preserve a visual richness, as found in both the natural world and film archives.