Stamets believes that unlocking agar­i­kon’s secrets may be as important to the future of human health as Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillium mold’s antibiotic properties more than 80 years ago. And so on a sunny July day, Stamets is setting off on a voyage along the coastal islands of southern British Columbia in hopes of bagging more of the endangered fungus before deforestation or climate change irreparably alters the ecosystems where it makes its home. Agarikon may be ready to save us — but we may have to save it first.

Joining Stamets on the 43-foot schooner Misty Isles are his wife, Dusty, a few close friends, and four research assistants from Fungi Perfecti, his Olympia, Washington-based company, which sells medicinal mushroom extracts, edible mushroom kits, mushroom doggie treats, and Stamets’ most recent treatise, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. “What we’re doing here could save millions of lives,” he tells me on the first morning of the three-day, 120-mile voyage. “It’s fun, it’s bizarre, and very much borders on something spiritual.”

A few months earlier, the University of Illinois-Chicago’s Institute for Tuberculosis Research sent Stamets its analysis of a dozen agarikon strains that he’d cultured in his own lab. The institute found the fungus to be extraordinarily active against XDR-TB, a rare type of tuberculosis that is resistant to even the most effective drug treatments. Project BioShield, the Department of Health and Human Services’ biodefense program, has found that agarikon is highly resistant to many flu viruses including, when combined with other mushrooms, bird flu. And a week before the trip, the National Center for Natural Products Research, a federally funded lab at the University of Mississippi, concluded that it showed resistance to orthopox viruses including smallpox — without any apparent toxicity. The potential implications are obvious: Most Americans under 35 have not been vaccinated for smallpox, and experts fear the current supply of the vaccine may be insufficient in case of a bioterror attack. A bird flu pandemic within the decade is even likelier. Currently, agarikon is being tested to see if it can also fight off the H1N1 swine flu virus.

“When you mention mushrooms people either think magic mushrooms or portobellos. Their eyes glaze over,” Stamets laments. That a homely, humble fungus could fight off virulent diseases like smallpox and TB might seem odd, until one realizes that even though the animal kingdom branched off from the fungi kingdom around 650 million years ago, humans and fungi still have nearly half of their DNA in common and are susceptible to many of the same infections. (Referring to fungi as “our ancestors” is one of the many zingers that Stamets likes to feed audiences.)

On the first morning of our journey, agarikon remains elusive. From the deck of the Misty Isles, the white heads of bald eagles pop out of the dense green slopes of Mink Island, generating false sightings of the chalky mushroom in the treetops. “People say, ‘Everywhere you mycologists look, you see mushrooms,’” Stamets says, focusing his binoculars. He laughs. “It’s true. The thing about mushroom hunters is, they tend to burn an image of a mushroom on their retina. Then you end up overlaying that image on the landscape. The mushrooms seem to jump out at you.”

STAMETS IS of medium height and stocky build. His graying beard, round face, and glasses recall Jerry Garcia. As he tells it, mushrooms came into his life because of a humiliating stuttering habit. “I always stared at the ground and couldn’t look people in the eye,” he recounts. “That’s how I found fungi.”

He remembers pelting his seven-year-old twin brother with puffball mushrooms, watching the spores explode in his face. But Stamets didn’t get serious about mushrooms until he was 18, when he ingested psilocybin mushrooms for the first time. Hallucinating alone in the Ohio countryside, he got caught in a summer thunderstorm and climbed a tree for shelter. Waiting out the storm, Stamets examined his life. “I asked myself, ‘Well Paul, why do you stutter so much?’ So I repeated, ‘Stop stuttering now,’ over and over again, hundreds of times. The next morning, someone asked, ‘Hi Paul, how are you?’ I looked him right in the eye and said, ‘I’m fine, how are you?’ I didn’t even stutter. That was when I realized mushrooms were really important to me.”

Not long after his first trip, Stamets enrolled in college but dropped out to work as a logger. He eventually graduated from Olympia’s Evergreen State College, whose unofficial motto, Omnia Extares, roughly translates as “Let it all hang out.” While studying biology and electron microscopy, he pioneered research on psilocybin, discovering four new species and writing a definitive field guide. Unable to afford grad school, Stamets started Fungi Perfecti and published The Mushroom Cultivator, which remains a classic within the subculture of mushroom enthusiasts. (He once spotted a copy on the bookshelf of one of the directors of the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.)

Stamets began distancing himself from the magic mushroom crowd about nine years ago. “The problem with the psychedelic scene,” he told me while driving near his vacation home on Cortes Island, the Grateful Dead playing on the stereo, “is that people contemplate their belly buttons and don’t get anything done. I wanted to save lives and the ecosystem.” Yet he still credits psilocybin with giving him a sense of purpose. Stamets, who has a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, used to spend hours executing complex martial arts routines in the mountains as he tripped. “I had these visions of myself as a mycological warrior in defense of the planet.”

While studying the medicinal uses of fungi, Stamets built an extensive library of wild mushroom cultures harvested from the virgin forests of the Pacific Northwest. “It’s my most valuable asset,” he says. In the event of a fire, “everything can burn. I’m grabbing my test tubes and running.”

His tinkering has yielded many surprising discoveries about mushrooms and mycelium, the cobweblike, often hidden network of cells that spawns them. He’s demonstrated that oyster mushroom mycelium can more effectively restore soils polluted by oil and gasoline than conventional treatments can; in one eight-week experiment, the fungus broke down 95 percent of the hydrocarbons in a diesel-soaked patch of dirt. He’s used sacks of woodchips inoculated with oyster mycelium as filters to protect river habitats from pollutants such as farm runoff contaminated with coliform bacteria. Recently, he proved that cellulosic ethanol could be produced with sugars extracted from decomposing fungi.

Insisting that he’s merely a “voice for the mycelium,” Stamets says he can’t really take credit for his discoveries about an extraordinarily diverse and evolutionarily successful kingdom that modern science has scarcely explored. Still, over the past four years, he has filed for twenty-two patents and received four. “I’m up against big bad pharma, and they will try to steal from us. I have no illusions about this,” he says. “Truly, it’s a David versus Goliath situation.” He asserts that after one of his public talks, in which he spoke about his discovery of a fungus that kills carpenter ants and termites by tricking them into eating it, he was approached by two retired pesticide industry executives. Convinced that their former employers would feel threatened by this relatively cheap, nontoxic pesticide, Stamets claims, they advised him to watch his back.

Stamets’ mother, a charismatic Christian, believes the only explanation for his unexpected discoveries is that he is chosen. “I’m not that smart,” he says. “I was the dumbest one in my family. But I’m just exceptionally lucky. Other mycologists know more about mycopesticidal fungi than I do. They missed it. In the 2,000-year history of Fomitopsis officinalis” — agarikon’s scientific name — “I’m the first one to discover it has antiviral properties? I don’t get it, either.”

“Paul Stamets is a modern example of the amateur scientist from the 17th and 18th century who made wonderful contributions with only their native curiosity and keen sense of observation,” explains Eric Rasmussen, a former Navy physician and researcher for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the National Science Foundation, who now heads INSTEDD (Innovative Support to Emergencies Diseases and Disasters), a Google-funded nonprofit that develops tech-nology to control disease outbreaks. “He’s listened to in a lot of unexpected corners.” In 1997, Battelle, a nonprofit R&D lab and a major Defense Department contractor, asked to screen more than two dozen strains of Stamets’ fungi. A few years later, it sent him back a classified report revealing the mushrooms to be highly effective in breaking down the neurotoxin VX, the illegal chemical weapon. Soon afterward, DARPA invited Stamets to one of its brainstorming sessions.

In his role as an ambassador for an entire taxonomic kingdom, Stamets has been elevated to something of a cult figure. “I do have some crazies once in a while who believe that I’m the messiah or that we’re destined to be together,” he said, by way of explaining the tight security around his Olympia compound. “That’s sort of unnerving.” While we explored Cortes Island the day before setting sail, he occasionally texted with Leonardo DiCaprio, who had featured Stamets in his documentary The 11th Hour. Anthony Kiedis, the singer of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, had planned to join the agarikon expedition until he broke his foot. Stamets has “hero status in my mind,” Kiedis emailed me. “He opens himself up to information about fungi the same way I open myself to a new song that is out there waiting to be found.”

Yet for all the acclaim, Stamets is still an outsider without a PhD or an academic or institutional sponsor. That has made it hard for his work to be taken seriously in some circles — “We are just weird enough that I think we frighten people,” he says — but it’s an identity that he ultimately relishes. His inherently positive message — that we can tap a renewable natural resource to solve an array of environmental and medical challenges — has inspired a broad set of followers. Stamets leads workshops on “liberation mycology” and delivered the plenary address at last year’s national botany conference. In February 2008, he held forth at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference, the annual conclave of deep thinkers and tech gurus in California. Afterward, Google’s founders “ambushed” him with an invitation to their exclusive summer think tank, and Al Gore complimented him on an obscure chemical reference, saying, “You taught me something I didn’t know about global warming.”

“NOT A SINGLE prospect…was pleasing to the eye,” sneered Captain George Vancouver when he named this glacier-carved labyrinth of channels and fjords Desolation Sound after spending a cloudy week here in the summer of 1792. But under the clear July sky, it’s sublime: the water a deep, glassy blue, the islands dark green. Afternoon of the first day arrives without an agarikon sighting, so we head ashore to explore a patch of old growth. Stamets’ friends joke about his notorious “death marches,” but the jaunt proceeds at the leisurely pace of a chanterelle foray.

Fungi were among the first organisms to colonize land 1 billion years ago, long before plants. A visitor to the planet 420 million years ago would have encountered a landscape dominated by fungi such as prototaxites, a bizarre-looking, 30-foot-tall mushroom. Contemporary fungi may be more discreet, but they’re just as ubiquitous — and mysterious. Fewer than 7 percent of the estimated 1.5 million species have been cataloged. Mycologists have recently identified 1,200 species of mushrooms in just a few thousand square feet of Guyanese rainforest, half of them previously unknown to science.

As we walk, Stamets points out that the spongy feeling under our feet is a vast subterranean network of mycelium. Stamets refers to mycelium as “nature’s Internet,” a superhighway of information-sharing membranes that govern the flow of essential nutrients around an ecosystem. A honey mushroom mycelium that covers 2,200 acres in eastern Oregon is thought to be the world’s largest organism. When Stamets saw mycelium for the first time, growing like a spiderweb across a log, he brought it home and tacked it onto his bedroom wall. Mycelium’s labyrinthine tendrils prevent erosion, retain water, and break down dead plants into ingredients other organisms can use to make soil. Stamets likes to call fungi “soil magicians.”

Yet it can be difficult to champion an organism that grows out of poop or decaying wood, can be deceptively toxic, and appears extraterrestrial. Stamets says American society is pervaded by “mycophobia” — an irrational fear of fungi that he traces back to England, whose medical tradition equates mushrooms with decay and decomposition. Stamets has little patience with those who disrespect mushrooms. “I hate the word ’shrooms,’” he says. “Pet peeves: Don’t kick mushrooms in my presence and don’t use the word ’shrooms.’”

The summer dry season has subdued the mushroom population, but as we walk and my mind becomes more focused they soon pop into view: bracket fungi growing like ledges across a fallen log, a fragile cup-capped mushroom camouflaged in leaf litter. Logging has razed the Pacific Northwest’s old growth; less than 20 percent of the original forest is still standing. A handful of mushroom species, including agarikon, depends on this diverse habitat, whose disappearance Stamets views as not just a lost opportunity but a national security concern. The cancer drug Taxol was derived from the bark of Pacific yew trees, a conifer native to the Northwest. (See “Natural Selections.”) And tests of 18 of the 28 strains of agarikon Stamets has cultured have found varying levels of antiviral potency, indicating the great diversity even within a single fungus species, adding to the urgency of protecting its dwindling habitat. It’s conceivable that the most powerful strain is growing on a tree in a logging concession somewhere.

Foresters long assumed agarikon caused trees to rot, and preemptively logged them. Stamets, however, believes it actually protects trees from parasitic fungi. “The tree says, ‘I will accept you, Mr. Agarikon, but I want you to protect me. Give me life, and I will give you my body.’”

In the weeks before our cruise, the National Center for Natural Products Research identified the structures of the molecules responsible for agarikon’s antiviral properties. It found the molecules to be more active in the laboratory than the smallpox antiviral Cidofovir. Reverse engineering mushrooms’ complex chemical creations to synthesize a new drug is a slow and costly process; Stamets estimates that he’s sunk more than $400,000 of his own money into the effort. The next step toward developing a pharmaceutical is mammal studies, a gamble that the venture capitalists he has met with are so far unwilling to fund.

“I’ve seen the lab results. I know it has potential,” says Rasmussen of INSTEDD. “What I don’t know is how it performs in clinical trials. And that’s a deeply frustrating situation to be in — to see this level of activity against nasty bacteria and viruses and not have the ability to begin clinical trials and work up the scale to human trials and see what the most effective delivery method is, what the dosing needs to be, what the side effects will be — and I think there will be very few. I mean, it’s a mushroom, for God’s sake.” Thus far, the active ingredients in agarikon show no or very little toxicity.

Stamets has long had a hunch that agarikon could be a pharmaceutical powerhouse. He knew from historic texts that other cultures had tapped into its medicinal properties. In the year 65, the Greek physician Dioscorides described it as a treatment for “consumption” — an early name for tuberculosis. A 19th century British text noted that it was still prescribed “to diminish bronchial secretion.”

Agarikon was also highly valued by the Coast Salish First Nations peoples of British Columbia. The Haida of British Columbia’s Queen Charlotte Islands are said to have carved the tough, leathery fungus into spirit figures and placed them on the graves of shamans to protect them from evil spirits. Mushrooms also figure prominently in Haida mythology: Women, it is said, came into existence after a “Fungus Man” found shells that resembled vaginas. The Haida knew that boiling agarikon, which they called “ghost bread,” into a tea helped with lung problems.

Tragically, they never discovered what Stamets is now finding: that the mycelium running through the tree bark is resistant to smallpox, which decimated the Haida when the British brought the virus to the region in the late 1700s. A few years ago, Stamets visited the Haida Nation’s president. Oral traditions had kept the mushroom’s reputation alive, but its secrets had been forgotten. “I know my grandmother knew about this fungus,” the Haida leader told Stamets, “but after the smallpox epidemic we lost all of our elders, and we lost all of this knowledge.”

AS THE MISTY ISLES sails alongside East Redonda Island, all binoculars on deck look for snags — craggy treetops that indicate an old, decaying Douglas fir, agarikon’s ideal habitat. The captain, a Canadian named Mike, thinks we’d be interested in seeing some Haida pictographs on the northeast shore. The paintings come into view — crude red shapes on a granite face, sheltered by an overhang. Suddenly, from behind binoculars, a researcher yells, “There’s one!” Our attention pivots toward a dense cluster of trees about 100 feet to the left of the pictographs, where I can barely make out a white blob growing on a Douglas fir.

“Oh my, it’s huge!” Stamets cries. “It’s like the Moby Dick of agarikon…the biggest one I’ve ever seen in my life! How cosmic, right where the pictographs are! God, you’re a beautiful column. It’s got to be 70, 100 years old.”

Mike anchors Misty and I ride to shore with Stamets in an inflatable boat. We walk to the base of the tree and gaze up at the agarikon, 20 feet off the ground. The fungus is two feet long and resembles a bloated, mutant caterpillar, tubular and segmented. It is growing around a stubby branch poking out from the tree. Stamets believes that it probably fell from higher up, accidentally landed on the branch, and then calcified the wood to provide itself with a sturdy perch — an unusual occurrence he’s never seen before.

From the pictograph site, someone calls out that one of the paintings appears to be of Fungus Man. “No way, no way!” Stamets exclaims. “Fungus Man is there? Oh boy, oh boy, I’m getting shivers up and down my spine now.” He takes three deep breaths. “We may have discovered a mystery that no one ever knew — that the pictographs exist here because of agarikon. I feel like this is a fulfillment of a dream. We’re so lucky. Unbelievable. See, this is the thing about mushrooms: It’s not luck. There’s something else going on here. We’ve been guided. But this is what happens. All of our big finds, we have been led.” It also happens to be Stamets’ 53rd birthday.

Stamets grabs a long stick and reaches up to poke the fungus. It won’t budge. He pokes again. “We really shouldn’t take it,” he concludes. “We should be honored that we found it. This is now supersacred.” He lets the agarikon be and walks over to check out the pictographs. Fading from time and the elements, the rock paintings depict a dolphin, a turtle, and a two-foot-high figure with stick arms, big round eyes, and what seems to be a mushroom cap growing out of its round head. Is it Fungus Man?

The afternoon sun is falling behind the island, so we leave the question unresolved and set Misty back on course. Just before dusk we reach the mouth of the Toba Inlet, a fjord carved into Canada’s mainland, flanked by high slopes of Douglas fir, red cedar, and alder. We dock at a lone fishing lodge, and from an outdoor hot tub, we enjoy the tranquility that the salty George Vancouver once described as “an awful silence” pervading “the gloomy forest.” Captain Mike grills salmon and Stamets con­siders the day’s events. “I’m glad we didn’t take it,” he says. “When I had the stick in my hand, I felt, ‘Something doesn’t feel right about this.’ I thought, ‘If this is gonna come down just with a touch, I’ll take it. But if it gives me resistance, I’m stopping.’” (He returned the following month with a team of researchers to retrieve samples.)

Toward the end of our last day at sea, Misty turns down the east side of Cortes Island. Stamets spots another agarikon growing 35 feet above the water under the bottom branch of a Douglas fir, sweating beads of amber. He goes ashore for a closer look; while the fungus appears to be dead, he believes the mycelium running up the tree is still alive. Climbing onto an overhanging rock, he finds another one growing in a tree, a sign of an old colony.

Back on deck, Stamets looks across the open water. “How is history going to remember you?” he wonders. “How is Fleming remembered? How are people who have saved millions of lives remembered? I want to die with a smile on my face.” He then strips off his clothes and dives into Desolation Sound.

Andy Isaacson (www.worldwebeyes.com) is a writer and photojournalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Slate and National Geographic Adventure.

From Alternet

JOHN LOK / THE SEATTLE TIMES

From left, Mary Heim, Akiva Notkin and Lev Klarnet prepare for a recent Local Bounty community potluck put on by Sustainable Wallingford.

SCALLOPS, Sustainable Communities All Over Puget Sound, is a loose-knit alliance of about 60 neighborhood groups in Washington state seeking to organize grass-roots efforts to live on the Earth more lightly. The groups take on small, practical projects ranging from garden-sharing to light bulb replacements in an effort to promote energy conservation and local/organic food while discouraging waste, among other thingON A WINTRY day in January, Dave Reid loaded some 700 pounds of freshly harvested organic vegetables into the cabin of his 27-foot sailboat in Sequim Bay, hoisted his sails and rode an outgoing tide into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, bound for Seattle. Over the next two days, Reid sailed on quirky winds, dodged state ferries, scooted past Chinese container ships and even encountered a mammoth Trident submarine before eventually docking at Shilshole Bay. That’s where his customers showed up to collect their allotments of herbs and greens.

In an economy that usually rewards speed and efficiency, Reid’s carbon-free voyage gives new meaning to tilting at windmills. It took 36 hours to make a trip a small truck could have accomplished in two hours. And his 700 pounds amounted to a minuscule percentage of the food consumed in Seattle that day.

But Reid and his collaborators in the regional sustainability movement are dead serious about the idea of transporting goods by sailboat. It’s an idea that’s less about straight-from-the-farm spinach and arugula than it is about proving that just about anything can be moved from Point A to Point B without burning a drop of oil. To make that work on a larger scale, he says, the effort must start small. Instead of waiting for President Obama or the Ford Motor Co. to conserve energy, he’s taking action now, riding on the belief that individuals and neighborhoods must take matters into their own hands.

On a rather microcosmic level, Reid appears to have made his case. Six months after his test run, he has negotiated deals with several Puget Sound farmers and has dozens more interested. This summer, Reid is making weekly voyages from Sequim and Poulsbo to Shilshole Bay.

A soft-spoken engineer who quit his job to launch his Sail Transport Company, Reid doesn’t expect to make a profit anytime soon. But he insists that his business is not about profit anymore than it’s about maritime nostalgia. “We are not looking backward,” he says. “We’re looking forward, dealing with the emerging realities of a new economy.”Sustainability — broadly understood as meeting today’s needs without exhausting resources or compromising the future — is hardly a new concept in the Pacific Northwest. Seattle and Portland win frequent kudos for programs such as solid waste and public transit, and former King County Executive Ron Sims got a White House appointment this year in part because of his experience with the idea.

But Reid’s voyage is an example of a new wave of efforts that spring not from City Hall or the Statehouse but from neighborhoods and small towns. From Bellingham to Olympia, from Burien to Ballard, neighbors are organizing low-budget programs designed to grow food in their backyards, get people out of their automobiles, switch to low-energy light bulbs — anything that encourages energy conservation and discourages oil consumption.

Sustainable Bainbridge, for example, supports local food production by putting farmers together with consumers, preserving farmlands and helping local people grow their own vegetables.

A group called Spokespeople, supported by Sustainable Wallingford, is attempting to organize recreational cyclists to use their bikes to deliver fresh food — including Reid’s vegetables — to people who otherwise would drive their cars.

Sustainable Ballard has invented the “Undriver License,” which encourages people to reduce their use of cars, and is working on a program to help people do weatherstripping and caulking to better insulate their homes.

In Port Townsend, a group called Local 20/20 helps train residents to organize “neighborhood circles” that could respond more efficiently than government to a flood, storm or other major emergency.

And several of those groups hope to train thousands of volunteers to install 1 million low-wattage fluorescent light bulbs in local homes. Think about it, says Vic Opperman, who cofounded Sustainable Ballard. If community groups could recruit, say, 10,000 volunteers and each replaced 100 light bulbs in the neighborhood, they could have a dramatic and immediate impact on energy consumption.

Fueled by such optimism, community groups have begun to trade ideas via yet another new grass-roots organization with the acronym SCALLOPS, for Sustainable Communities All Over Puget Sound. Like its constituent groups, SCALLOPS has no paid staff, no office, virtually no budget and no political authority. Still, it’s now more than 60 groups strong, organizing with volunteers around kitchen tables and on the Internet.

What they lack in budget and political heft, these groups make up for in sheer ambition. Reid and friends aspire to do no less than introduce an economic and environmental sensibility to a nation and a world shaken by the failures of past years. In Seattle, local government consults grass-roots groups on issues such as transit routes and bicycle paths. A Port Townsend group initiated the political uprising that led to last fall’s successful ballot measure authorizing a local public utility district to take over delivery of electricity across Jefferson County.

Organizers may be 20-something idealists wearing dreadlocks and pierced earrings, 30-something software engineers, or 70-something grandmothers in sensible shoes. But they share a core mission. Opperman calls it simply “radical energy conservation.”

A TALL, HANDSOME woman, Vic Opperman trained in architecture and became determined to help curb what she sees as society’s stumbling course toward self-destruction. It began for her, she says, when the Bush administration was ramping up to invade Iraq. “I started going down to Ballard and protesting every Wednesday. I had never been involved in anything like that, but I found myself organizing rallies.”

While the war raged on, Opperman turned her attention to energy conservation, which became the founding principle of Sustainable Ballard. It is not a huge organization; the annual meeting and elections in January attracted just 40 people. But that small group has made itself felt by incubating ideas for reducing the community’s dependence on oil.

As similar groups sprouted all over the region, Opperman and two friends saw a need for an umbrella organization — “something like a congress” — where activists could bounce ideas off each other. Hence, SCALLOPS.

“The idea was basically: Let’s find something that works, and then help other communities do the same thing,” says Neva Welton of Bainbridge Island, who cofounded SCALLOPS.

“Each community is unique, and there are differences in how they organize,” she explains. “SCALLOPS gives organizers a chance to hear how somebody else did it.”

They meet every three months or so, hearing reports from far-flung organizations about projects that have worked or not worked. “I feel like I’m back in the ’60s,” says Cathy Tuttle, who organized Sustainable Wallingford last year. “Except this time people seem to know better what they are doing. We’re better linked into the power structures.”

Tuttle has been tracking these issues longer than most. With a Ph.D in urban planning, she worked seven years for the city of Seattle, writing and evaluating neighborhood plans and compiling a list of indicators of local sustainability. The city never formally adopted those indicators, but they have been used in other cities as far off as northern Europe, she says.

Tuttle offers a more poetic definition of sustainability. Ultimately, she says, “it’s about learning to live on one small planet with grace and joy.”

WHILE POPULIST environmentalism has gurgled for years in Puget Sound neighborhoods, nobody seems to know for sure why the movement has suddenly taken off. Certainly, popular concerns over oil consumption and carbon footprints have been on the increase, fueled in large part by Al Gore’s widely touted books and documentary film. Last year’s spike in oil prices lent momentum, but the movement seems to have continued to grow even as gas prices declined.

There was Hurricane Katrina, too, which showed Americans that they cannot count on government to rescue them from a catastrophe. And then the ongoing economic crisis, which has forced people to look for economical ways to live. Most recently, the idea has been elevated by a president who campaigned on a platform of energy conservation and a change of values — a script that might have been written at a meeting of Sustainable Ballard.

“None of this is new,” says Kathy Pelish, a Microsoft employee who helped organize the Sail Transport Network, which has helped promote Dave Reid’s venture. “This has been building since the ’60s. We had Jimmy Carter, who got skewered for touching the third rail. Since then, we’ve been living on borrowed time.”

The challenge, she says, is to fundamentally change attitudes toward economics, consumption and the environment before the world bumps up against the limits of oil and other natural resources.

There’s also a hunger for community, says Tuttle. “People desperately want local meaning and local solutions to problems, and that translates to local food, local transportation, more reliance on your neighbors.”

It was community, not politics, that inspired Amy Pennington, an avid cook and gardener who had been frustrated by the lack of a vegetable garden at her Queen Anne apartment. She figured Seattle is full of people who yearn to grow an edible garden but lack the space, and other people who have garden space but lack the time or skills to work it. What’s needed, Pennington decided, is an Internet site that puts these people together, like an online dating service.

She teamed up with Sustainable Ballard and a friend created her Web site, and on March 1 launched urbangardenshare.org.

Pennington, who also produces “In the Kitchen with Tom (Douglas) and Thierry (Rautureau)” Saturdays on KIRO radio, expected her new project would draw lots of aspiring gardeners and far fewer gardens. But by early summer she had 200 people and equal numbers of each. One of them was Laura McLeod, who has a large yard behind the Ballard home that has been in her family since 1907. She posted her profile on urbangardenshare.org, and promptly was matched with a neighbor, an experienced gardener who needed space. Then another, and another.

“Now there are four neighbors tending their gardens in my yard. We have seven raised beds with lettuce, kale, spinach, beets, lots of tomatoes. One neighbor comes early in the morning and recites mantras as he works.”

Do the gardeners worry about sustainability and attend neighborhood meetings? Probably not. But, consciously or not, they have become part of a movement that makes a strong connection between petroleum and fresh asparagus, between energy and community.

“We are not trying to reverse history,” insists Reid as he rigs his boat for another carbon-free delivery. “We’re moving forward.”

Reid and Opperman and friends bring to the environmental movement a surprising sense of optimism. Like their counterparts at Greenpeace or the Sierra Club, they believe that the Earth’s ecosystems are in serious trouble. But they’re not filing lawsuits or marching in the streets. Instead, they’re determined to do something about it — whether it’s riding bicycles or taking the bus, growing vegetables or transporting them to hungry Seattleites.

“These things are concrete and hopeful,” says Pelish, of Wallingford, “and that is what makes them powerful.”

From Seattle Times

These efforts include cooperation in the following areas:

1.  Greenhouse Gas Inventory.  A memorandum of cooperation between the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and China’s National Development and Reform Commission sets out avenues for collaboration on capacity building in climate change, with an initial focus on helping China to develop a robust, transparent and accurate greenhouse gas emissions inventory.

2. Joint Clean Energy Research Center. Originally announced this July, more details were provided on the joint center that will “facilitate joint research and development of clean energy technologies by teams of scientists and engineers from the United States and China, as well as serve as a clearinghouse to help researchers in each country.”  Financial support from public and private sources of at least $150 million over five years, split evenly between the two countries, will be provided.  The Center’s research will initially focus on building energy efficiency, clean coal including carbon capture and storage, and clean vehicles. (Factsheet)

3.  Electric Vehicles. Those initiative will “include joint standards development, demonstration projects in more than a dozen cities, technical roadmapping and public education projects.”  (Factsheet)

4. Energy Efficiency. Building on the Ten Year Framework on Energy and Environment Cooperation, government officials of both countries will “work together and with the private sector to develop energy efficient building codes and rating systems, benchmark industrial energy efficiency, train building inspectors and energy efficiency auditors for industrial facilities, harmonize test procedures and performance metrics for energy efficient consumer products, [and] exchange best practices in energy efficient labeling systems.” (Factsheet)

5.  Renewable Energy.   The two countries will develop roadmaps for wide-spread renewable energy deployment in both countries.  The Partnership will also provide technical and analytical resources to states and regions in both countries to support renewable energy deployment and will facilitate state-to-state and region-to-region partnerships to share experience and best practices.  (Factsheet)

6.  21st Century Coal. The two countries will “launch a program of technical cooperation to bring teams of U.S. and Chinese scientists and engineers together in developing clean coal and carbon capture and storage technologies.”  The Presidents also welcomed a package of announcements on public-private partnerships in advanced coal technologies. (Factsheet)

7.  Shale Gas. Under a new Shale Gas Initiative, the U.S. and China will “use experience gained in the United States to assess China’s shale gas potential, promote environmentally-sustainable development of shale gas resources, conduct joint technical studies to accelerate development of shale gas resources in China, and promote shale gas investment in China through the U.S.-China Oil and Gas Industry Forum, study tours, and workshops.” (Factsheet)

8.  Nuclear.  The two countries reaffirmed the goals of the recently-concluded Third Executive Committee Meeting of the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership to promote the peaceful use of civilian nuclear energy, and “ agreed to consult with one another in order to explore such approaches—including assurance of fuel supply and cradle-to-grave nuclear fuel management so that countries can access peaceful nuclear power while minimizing the risks of proliferation.”

9.  Public-private partnerships on clean energy. A new U.S.-China Energy Cooperation Program (ECP) will “leverage private sector resources for project development work in China across a broad array of clean energy projects, to the benefit of both nations.”  The ECP, consisting of at least 22 founding member companies, will work on collaborative projects in renewable energy, smart grid, clean transportation, green building, clean coal, combined heat and power, and energy efficiency.

In a joint statement, President Barack Obama and President Hu Jintao agreed on a common approach to achieve a successful outcome in international climate negotiations (emphasis added in bold):

Regarding the upcoming Copenhagen Conference, both sides agree on the importance of actively furthering the full, effective and sustained implementation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in accordance with the Bali Action Plan. The United States and China, consistent with their national circumstances, resolve to take significant mitigation actions and recognize the important role that their countries play in promoting a sustainable outcome that will strengthen the world’s ability to combat climate change. The two sides resolve to stand behind these commitments.

In this context both sides believe that, while striving for final legal agreement, an agreed outcome at Copenhagen should, based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, include emission reduction targets of developed countries and nationally appropriate mitigation actions of developing countries. The outcome should also substantially scale up financial assistance to developing countries, promote technology development, dissemination and transfer, pay particular attention to the needs of the poorest and most vulnerable to adapt to climate change, promote steps to preserve and enhance forests, and provide for full transparency with respect to the implementation of mitigation measures and provision of financial, technology and capacity building support.

Taken together, these commitments and statements represent an important step forward towards agreeing on a protocol for accurate accounting and verification of China’s policies for achieving the necessary emissions reductions that science requires. They will also hopefully start to satisfy those skeptical that China will agree to a protocol for accurate accounting and verification of its impressive array of policies for achieving emissions reductions.

The announcements also suggest that the United States and China are on the same page when it comes to both the necessity of aggressively moving forward on an affirmative agenda to reduce carbon pollution and create millions of new clean energy jobs. The agreement contains concrete measures for sustained and meaningful collaboration and demonstrates that the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases are prepared to move beyond the tired narrative of developed versus developing country responsibilities on climate action toward a more “positive, cooperative, and comprehensive” relationship on clean energy and climate change.

We hope that the upcoming United Nations climate change summit in Copenhagen will follow this example and focus as much on bottom-up technological strategies for achieving real reductions in emissions as it will on top-down targets for carbon caps.

Alternet

A lot of these bidet style toilets are expensive, as are may of the toilet seat add-ons. The Blue Bidet is only US$ 69, C$79 when I saw it at the local Home Show in Toronto.

Peter Gallos explains the Blude Bidet from Lloyd Alter on Vimeo.

Peter Gallos tells me that it can be installed in under half an hour. They make a cold water model that just uses the line that supplies the toilet, and a version that uses hot and cold water but needs a more elaborate installation. I wondered if our 40 degree F water would not be a bit of a jolt to the butt, but he says it is such a short blast that it isn’t a problem. TreeHugger Justin tried one earlier and wrote in his post Bidets: Eliminate Toilet Paper, Increase Your Hygiene:

After using a bidet, most people find cold water is fine, and not particularly shocking on one’s rear. Occasionally, a few sheets of paper are needed to dry oneself. To avoid this, you could get a air- drying bidet that would eliminate toilet paper entirely.

Interestingly, Blue Bidet does not say that they are eliminating toilet paper, just cutting its use by 75% and using the remainder to dry yourself off. Perhaps it is too hard a sell to say you don’t need any. I will give the thing a try and let you know.

More on the Blue Bidet in the USA and in Canada.

Some say print books are passé, but I still like curling up on the couch with a mind-expanding read. Here are my top picks for ecological and sustainable reading.

Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough & Michael Braungart. Why settle for a throwaway culture? This book inspires elegant design solutions, stating that every single product must either go back to the earth or back into industry to be made into something else. A revolutionary way of upgrading the Industrial Revolution.

Introduction to Permaculture by Bill Mollison. The classic text on permaculture design (which is not limited to gardens, but can also be used to design homes, communities and societies in general). An excellent introduction for the aspiring student or someone who just wants to know what it’s all about.

The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. What exactly would happen to the earth if human life disappeared? The author explores a few different scenarios in great detail (including a suddenly depopulated Manhattan). Absolutely addictive reading.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver. A great read for the locavores. The author spends a year eating only from her garden, or that which is locally grown or raised. A foodie’s delight, this book proves how richly one can live off the land.

Eating For Beauty by David Wolfe. Leading raw foodist David Wolfe takes that old adage “you are what you eat” to a new level. He describes how what you eat literally creates who you are, and which foods will create the most beautiful you – in body and in spirit.

Lifeplace: Bioregional Thought and Practice by Robert L. Thayer, Jr. In a world gone insanely global, this book takes us deeper into the microcosm.  A bioregion is defined by nature, not by politics, and having intimate connection with your home means living within that context – historically, geographically and culturally.

Green Building & Remodeling For Dummies by Eric Corey Freed. Written by the founder of organicARCHITECT, this book is a comprehensive guide to green building materials and techniques, energy and water systems, and the pros and cons of everything. Check out a sample chapter here.

Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth by James Lovelock. First published in 1979, this book sets forth the Gaia Hypothesis, stating that our planet is more than a sum of its resources, but rather a fully integrated living being, with systems of life more complex than previously imagined. I wonder what Gaia’s thinking about us now?

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan. Follow a McDonald’s meal back to a cornfield in Iowa. Learn about the differences between large and small organic farms. See what it’s like to hunt and gather for oneself. Food is what builds our bodies – we ought to know what it takes to build our food

Ecovillages: A Practical Guide to Sustainable Communities by Jan Martin Bang. Documenting some of the successful Ecovillages around the world, the author shows us how groups of people have come to together to live out the permaculture model in both rural and urban environments.

Cohousing: A Contemporary Approach to Housing Ourselves by McCamant, Durrett and Hertzman. If you think intentional communities are too much like communes, but typical modern housing creates too much isolation, cohousing may be the answer you’re looking for. Explore these European neighborhoods built with the aim of fostering community while simultaneously respecting each family’s personal space.

The Findhorn Garden: Pioneering a New Vision of Man and Nature in Cooperation by The Findhorn Community. The founders of Findhorn were guided to begin growing a garden (including tomatoes, roses and tropicals) on an infertile, sandy plot in cold coastal Scotland. The quality and quantity of what they grew stunned horticulturists around the world. Enjoy this photo-filled book and learn the surprising secret of their success.

Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature by Janine M. Benyus. We’ve thus far created a modern world based on artificial ideals, but nature, which runs on sunlight and creates no waste, holds the solution to many modern problems. This isn’t a “back to nature” book, but rather a book proposing thoroughly modern technologies that copy nature’s best traits.

Holistic Management: A New Framework for Decision Making by Allan Savory and J
ody
Butterfield. A great read for businesspeople and managers – particularly those in charge of large areas of land. This book views people, economies and the environment as interconnected. Using holistic management techniques, we can make decisions that take all factors into account, for both short and long term. I’d like our government leaders to read this book.

Voluntary Simplicity by Duane Elgin. Living with less “stuff”
can mean living with more purpose, balance and connection. Here’s the inspiration you need to scale back on material goods and make more room for the priceless things that money can’t buy.

Now if all these books were printed on tree-free paper (like Cradle to Cradle) with soy-based ink, we’d be another step towards true sustainability. Otherwise, the audio or e-book will suffice. However you do it, you’ll be inspired. Let us know any other books that are on your list of eco essentials.

Buzz up!

Two electrodes, stacked one on top of the other. Image credit: Doriano Brogioli.

Now That’s a Clever Source of Power!
When you mix fresh water with salt water, a reaction happens so that a new salinity equilibrium can be reached. This dissipates energy that could be harnessed and turned into clean electricity using a new technique developed by Doriano Brogioli of the University of Milan Bicocca in Monza, Italy. Are we about to enter the era of “estuary power”?

Electrokinetics
Here’s how it works:

The [electric double layer] capacitor is made of two porous carbon electrodes immersed in salt water. The electrodes are then connected to a power supply so that one becomes negatively charged and the other positively charged. Since salt water consists of positively charged sodium ions and negatively charged chloride ions, the positive electrode attracts the chloride ions and the negative electrode attracts the sodium ions. With the help of the electrostatic force keeping the oppositely charged ions near their respective electrodes, the EDL capacitor can store a charge.To extract the charge, fresh water is pumped into the device, causing the sodium and chloride ions to diffuse away from the electrodes against the electrostatic force. In other words, the work done by the fresh water to extract the salt water is converted into electrostatic energy, appearing as an increase in voltage between the electrodes. Overall, the system transforms mechanical work (the mixing of the salt and fresh water) into electrostatic energy that can be extracted as usable power.

The beauty of this is that the world has plenty of estuaries, and if this technology can be scaled up, it has the potential to produce many gigawatts of “always on” clean power, the holy grail of renewable energy.

Of course this is still in the lab, so there are still a lot of unknowns that need to be figured out before a real world deployment could be possible (and even if it’s technically possible, cost will be an important factor), but it’s definitely worth keeping an eye on this technology.

Via Physorg

One hundred and fifty years ago on Aug. 27, Colonel Edwin L. Drake sunk the very first well that produced flowing petroleum.

The discovery that large amounts of oil could be found underground marked the beginning of a time during which this convenient fossil fuel became America’s dominant energy source.

But what began 150 years ago won’t last another 150 years — or even another 50. The era of cheap oil is ending, and with another energy transition upon us, we’ve got to scavenge all the lessons we can from its remarkable history.

“I would see this as less of an anniversary to note for celebration and more of an anniversary to note how far we’ve come and the serious moment that we’re at right now,” said Brian Black, an energy historian at Pennsylvania State University and and author of the book Petrolia. “Energy transitions happen and I argue that we’re in one right now and that we need to aggressively look to the future to what’s going to happen after petroleum.”

When Drake sunk his well, there were no cars, no plastics, no chemical industry. Water power was the dominant industrial energy source. Steam engines burning coal were on the rise, but the nation’s energy system — unlike Great Britain’s — still used fossil fuels sparingly. The original role for oil was as an illuminant, not a motor fuel, which would come decades later.

Before the 1860s, petroleum was a well-known curiosity. People collected it with blankets or skimmed it off naturally occurring oil seeps. Occasionally they drank some of it as a medicine or rubbed it on aching joints.

Some people had the bright idea of distilling it to make fuel for lamps, but it was easier to get lamp fuel from pig fat or whale oil or converted coal. Without a steady supply, there was no point in developing a whole system and infrastructure dedicated to petroleum.

Nonetheless, some Yankee capitalists from Connecticut were convinced that oil could be found in the ground and exploited. They recruited “Colonel” Edwin Drake, who was not a Colonel at all, mostly because he was charming and unemployed. He, in turn, found someone skilled in the art of drilling, or what passed for it in those days.

Drake and his sidekick “Uncle Billy” Smith started looking underground for oil in the spring of ‘59. They used a heavy metal tip attached to a rope, sending it plummeting down the borehole like a ram to break up the rock. It was slow going.

On Aug. 27, 1859, at 69 feet of depth, Drake and Smith hit oil. It was a big deal, but the Civil War stalled the immediate development of the rock oil industry.

“When the discovery happened, the few people who were there and not involved in the war, went around and bought all the property they could and had outside investors come in,” Black said. “But the real heyday of the development happened from 1864-1870. It’s that 11-year period when the little river valley was the world’s leading supplier of oil.”

The “little river valley” in western Pennsylvania earned the nickname Petrolia. Centered in the Oil Creek valley about one hundred miles north of Pittsburgh, the wells of Pithole, Titusville and Oil City pumped 56 million barrels of oil out of the ground from 1859 to 1873.

Suddenly, rock oil was everywhere. And cheap. Whale oil had always been a bit precious. A three to five year voyage would only yield a few thousand gallons of the stuff. In 1866, after the end of the Civil War, 3.6 million barrels poured out of the region. Daniel Yergin notes in his history of oil, The Prize, that as more people poured into the oil regions “supply outran demand” and soon the whiskey barrels that held the oil “cost almost twice as much as the oil inside them.”

Still, fortunes were being made and lost. Not just money, but energy, was flowing from underground. Some have estimated that for every unit of energy you invested sinking a well, you got back “more than 100 times as much usable energy.

Oil, people soon found, was uniquely convenient. To equal get the amount of energy in a tank of gasoline, you need 200 pounds of wood. Pair that energy density with stability under most conditions (meaning it didn’t randomly explode), and that, as a liquid, it was easy to transport, and you have the killer app for the infrastructure age.

In a world that only had a tiny fraction of the amount of heat, light, and power available that we do now, people came up with all kinds of ideas for what to do with oil’s energy: cars, tractors, airplanes, chemicals, fertilizer, and plastic.

Perhaps it’s not a surprising consequence of this innovation that at current consumption levels, Americans would blow through all the oil ever produced in Petrolia in less than three days.

The scale of the oil industry is astounding, but it’s becoming clear the world’s oil supply will peak soon, or perhaps has peaked already. People quibble about the details, but no one argues that oil will play a much different role in our energy system in 50 years than it did in 1959.

The search for alternatives is on. If that search goes poorly — as some Peak Oil analysts predict — human civilization will fall off an energy cliff. The amount of energy we get back from drilling oil wells in the middle of the Gulf of Mexico continues to drop, and alternative sources don’t provide usable energy for humans on the generous terms that oil long has.

But humans with an economic incentive to be optimistic become optimists, and the harder we look, the more possible alternatives we find. The big question now is whether the cure for our oil addiction will come with a heavy carbon side effect.

“Peak oil and peak gas and coal could really go either way for the climate,” Pushker Kharecha, a scientist with NASA’s Global Institute for Space Studies, said at least year’s American Geophysical Union meeting. “It all depends on choices for subsequent energy sources.”

Over the next 20 years, synthetic fuels made from coal or shale oil could conceivably become the fuels of the future. On the other hand, so could advanced biofuels from cellulosic ethanol or algae. Or the era of fuel could end and electric vehicles could be deployed in mass, at least in rich countries.

With the massive injection of stimulus and venture capital money into alternative energy that’s occurred over the past few years, the solutions for replacing oil could already be circulating among the labs and office parks of the country. To paraphrase technology pundit Clay Shirky talking about the media, nothing will work to replace oil, but everything might.

If history tells us anything, it’s that energy sources can change, never tomorrow, but always some day.

“What is required is to operate without fear and to take energy transitions on as a developmental opportunity,” Black said.

[Sources: Daniel Yergin's The Prize and Brian Black's Petrolia.]

Images: Robert Dennis Collection of Stereoscopic Views.

by Charlie White via DVICE

Why tow around a bus-sized motorhome when you can create a 100-pound trailer that has nearly everything you need? Meet a guy named Paul, creator of this bicycle-towed camper with a wind turbine on top, a place he called home at the Burning Man project for a week.

He cooks his meals in a solar oven, and heats up water for showers and kitchen use with a solar water heating system. There’s a urinal funnel on the outside, but unfortunately there’s no facilities for taking care of number two. Guess he just had to squat for that. Overall, this is as off-the-grid as you can get.

Paul built this micro house as a design study, wondering what would happen if Swine Flu resulted in an apocalypse that required him to be entirely self-sufficient. Check out the gallery below to peruse his Spartan accommodations, and don’t miss our favorite feature, the bubble on the end where he lays his head at night, giving him a clear view of the stars.

Via Ecofriend

Buildings account for thirty-eight percent of the CO2 emissions in the U.S., according to the U.S. Green Building Council, and demand for carbon neutral and/or zero footprint buildings is at an all-time high. Now there is a new building material that is not just carbon neutral, but is actually carbon negative. Developed by U.K.-based Lhoist Group, Tradical® Hemcrete® is a concrete substitute made from hemp, lime and water. What makes it carbon negative? There is more CO2 locked-up in the process of growing and harvesting of the hemp than is released in the production of the lime binder. Of course the equation is more complicated than that, but Hemcrete® is still an amazing new technology that could change the building industry.

Good looking, environmentally friendly and 100% recyclable, Hemcrete® is as versatile as it is sustainable. It can be used in a mind-boggling array of applications from roof insulation to wall construction to flooring. It is seven times stronger than concrete, weighs half as much, and is less prone to cracking. Hemcrete® is also waterproof, fireproof, insulates well, does not rot and is completely recyclable. In fact, the manufacturers say that demolished Hemcrete® walls can actually be used as fertilizer!

Available for years in the U.K., Hemcrete® is only now finding its way into North America. The species of hemp used to manufacture Hemcrete® is illegal to grow in the U.S., making Hemcrete® an expensive option for U.S. builders for now. As pressure for more sustainable building materials grows, lawmakers are certain to revisit this and other similarly restrictive statutes, particularly if there is money to be made. And judging from the success of Hemcrete® in Europe and elsewhere, there is plenty to be made; it is so profitable overseas that Hemp Technologies, one of the biggest manufacturers of hemp products in the UK, is actively recruiting as many new growers as it can.

+ Tradical Hemcrete

In the last three years, it has created RayTracker Inc., a solar tracking solution for photovoltaic systems; Distributed World Power, which designs solar systems for developing countries; Aptera Motors, which designs fuel-efficient cars; and ESolar.

It is jumping into the environmental market as venture capital is flowing more into clean-tech companies. Investment in such firms shot up 73% in the second quarter from the previous quarter, according to Ernst & Young, and is expected to continue growing.

The percentage of clean-tech investments to total investor funding has increased to double digits over the last three years, said Doug Regnier, an Ernst & Young partner leading its Pacific Southwest clean-tech consulting business.

Energy “is probably the biggest opportunity of the century,” Gross said. “The world’s energy needs and the demand to make that clean energy is going to be a challenge and an opportunity for smart entrepreneurs.”

Though focused on computer software for two decades, Gross said he returned to his passion for solar energy in 2000 as power shortages loomed. The Caltech graduate bought the restaurant next door to Idealab and turned it into a machine shop, eventually running solar experiments on the roof. Idealab’s first clean-tech firm, Energy Innovations, was created in 2001 to convert solar applications for commercial use. Idealab hired 50 people in the next three years to work on such ideas as a fuel-saving car and a portable solar device for developing countries.

The concept for ESolar came about as Idealab engineers started thinking about ways to provide cost-efficient solar energy for utilities and realized that most solar panels in commercial use were too big to be cost-efficient.

“We tried to figure out the angle we could exploit where we can zig where other people zag,” Gross said.

They came up with what Gross calls an unorthodox plan: “Go small.” Rather than make giant solar panels, they sized them at one square meter. That made the panels easier to install, putting them together like Legos rather than erecting a giant solar facility.

The smaller mirrors also are able to be aimed more quickly at the boiler target, said Michael Liebelson, head of the low-carbon development group at NRG Energy Inc., which is building plants using ESolar technology. Idealab’s software expertise helped it devise a way to manipulate the mirrors for better precision, he said.

“ESolar has one of the most, if not the most, innovative solar thermal technologies out there,” Liebelson said.

The ESolar plant in Lancaster went up on the barren desert site in 18 months, said Lancaster Mayor R. Rex Parris. He’s trying to make his city a center for alternative energy. “For an alternative energy to go on the line in 18 months, it’s literally unheard of,” he said.

ESolar has lined up more than $130 million in investments from such firms as NRG, ACME Group, Google’s philanthropic arm and Oak Investment Partners.

For Gross, ESolar’s effort is a sign that the interest in solar is growing — and that Idealab still has its knack for building companies and persuading venture capitalists to invest, even in a tough economy.

And it helps Gross regain a foothold after mutual fund giant T. Rowe Price and others sued him in 2002, alleging self-dealing and fraud, and shareholders bailed him out in 2006 after he failed to repay a $50-million personal loan.

“The biggest factor is when you’ve demonstrated that you can take a company from revenue to profit to successful exit,” he said. “That makes an investor comfortable that you can do it again.”

Artificial photosynthesis has yet to be cracked, but electrical engineers in the US think that synthetic leaves could be used to generate electricity in a different way – by sweating.

Natural leaves constantly lose water through evaporation in a process called transpiration, which draws water from the roots to the very top of even the tallest trees.

The new synthetic leaves also lose water through evaporation to create that mechanical water pump effect, and use it to generate power.

Flowing bubbles

Michel Maharbiz at the University of California, Berkeley, working with colleagues at the University of Michigan and MIT, built their leaves from glass wafers shot through with a branching network of tiny water-filled channels arranged like the veins of a leaf.

The smaller channels extend to the edge of the plate and have open ends that allow water to evaporate, drawing fluid along the leaf’s central stem at a rate of 1.5 centimetres per second.

The researchers added metal plates to the walls of the central stem and connected them to a circuit. The charged plates and the water within the stem create a sandwich of two conducting layers separated by an insulating layer – in effect, a capacitor.

The leaf is transformed into a source of power by periodically interrupting the water flowing into the leaf with air bubbles. Thanks to the different electrical properties of air and water, every time a bubble passes between the plates the capacitance of the device changes and a small electric current is generated, which passes to an external circuit where it’s used to pump up the voltage on a storage capacitor.

“We use the mechanical energy in the liquid flow to change the capacitance and add energy to the capacitor,” says Maharbiz.

Energy scavenger

Each bubble results in an increase in output voltage of some 2 to 5 microvolts, and the device has a power density of some 2 microwatts per cubic centimetre. “I think we could easily reach hundreds of microwatts per cubic centimetre [with modifications],” he says.

That is still a fraction of the power density of power systems such as fuel cells or batteries, but it’s a respectable figure for an energy scavenging system, Maharbiz says.

The device could be scaled up to produce artificial trees that generate power entirely through evaporation wherever there’s a cyclical change in humidity. Although the modest power output is not enough to rival solar technology, Maharbiz thinks it could act as a complementary technology – the sunlight that generates solar power could also drive transpiration to boost the electricity generated.

Breaking the tension

Abraham Stroock at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, thinks this is the first attempt to generate electricity from evaporation-driven flow. Although he points out that one US firm Voltree has succeeded in generating tiny quantities of power from the pH difference between soil and the roots of real trees.

“One challenge with the new study is that a bubble is used to generate the current in the capacitor,” Stroock says. Bubbles prevent transpiration taking place over long distances because they break the tension that allows the water column to be pulled along like a piece of string.

Maharbiz says he can get round this issue by using solid insulators instead of bubbles, that spin in place as the water is pulled passed like a water wheel to create the permittivity differences needed to generate power.

Journal reference: Applied Physics Letters (DOI: 10.1063/1.3157144)

Scientists have discovered a remarkable, unexpected and cheap way to store hydrogen fuel– using carbonized chicken feather fibers.

The problem of storing hydrogen as fuel has traditionally been a perplexing and expensive dilemma. For instance, a car with a 20-gallon hydrogen storage tank made from carbon nanotubes or metal hydrides– two of the best ideas so far– would add $5.5 million or $30k respectively to the price of that vehicle.

A storage tank made from carbonized chicken feathers, however, would only mark up the cost a measly $200. The green bio-material would also help solve the problem of how to dispose of the 2.7 billion kilograms of chicken feathers generated each year by commercial poultry operations.

• » See also: GE to Cleantech Startups: We Can Help
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One of the major reasons hydrogen-powered vehicles aren’t commonplace on our highways is the immensely difficult problem of how to store enough of the fuel on-board to give those vehicles a cruising range that approaches that of gasoline or diesel fuel. Storing sufficient quantities requires placing it under extreme pressure, which can add significant weight to the vehicle and increase the potential for a dangerous explosion.

That problem has led scientists to look toward structures like carbon nanotubes for a solution, since they can pack large quantities of hydrogen at normal pressure within a fairly small space. The catch is that manufacturing carbon nanotubes is very expensive and ultimately impractical.

Enter scientists at the University of Delaware, who while researching the potential of keratin derived from chicken feathers to improve the performance of microcircuits, unexpectedly discovered that by heating the keratin fibers they could strengthen its structure enough to compare to the strength of nanotubes. In other words, the hydrogen storage capacity of the strengthened keratin was essentially equivalent to that of carbon nanotubes, but using nothing more than chicken feathers as raw material.

In addition to hydrogen storage, the new method could turn chicken feather fibers into a number of other eco-products like hurricane resistant roofing, lightweight car parts, as well as the aforementioned bio-based computer circuit boards.

Furthermore, utilizing this technology would be recycling at its best. Previously, there has been no major use for all the feathers leftover from chickens in the poultry industry.

Image Credit: Just chaos on Flickr under a Creative Commons License