"Hydroponics and Housing for the 21st Century" Patrick G. Salsbury http://www.sculptors.com/~salsbury/ Boulder Creek, CA ----- Presented Sunday, June 30th, 1996 Hydroponic Society of America - 17th Annual Conference San Jose, California, USA Abstract As humanity moves into the future, we employ technology to address and correct age-old problems. By using efficient design principles and advanced materials, houses of the future will begin to free people from dependence on existing infrastructure, such as power, water, and phone lines. Hydroponic gardens will make these homes into miniature biospheres; self-contained bubbles that can be dropped anywhere on the planet, whether it be on mountain-top, island, desert, or tundra. By integrating systems for power and food generation, energy harvesting, water and waste recycling, and wireless telecommunications, the house can be viewed as a dwelling and life support system. If mass-produced from low-cost, high-strength materials, such a house begins to drop into the price range of a standard automobile. This research attempts to take a look not only at the technical details needed to implement such a dwelling system, but also at the larger-scale ramifications with regard to homelessness, global "crowding", and the effects on worldwide economy and education once such technology becomes widespread. Specific attention will be paid to hydroponic food production systems that are simple to use and computer-controllable. There is no longer any rational reason for people to go hungry on this planet. Every day, forty thousand children die of starvation on this planet. That's approximately one child every two seconds. Dying. I pause to reflect on this every now and again, as a sobering reminder of where we're coming up short, as a species. The problem is not a technical one, by any means. We've known how to grow food for thirty thousand years, at least. No, the problem is a political one. Humans seem to want to fight more often than not, and that keeps the croplands torn up, and the food trucks from getting through to where they're needed most. This research proposes a technical solution to this non-technical problem. By side-stepping, but not ignoring, the political issues, there are often great gains to be made that might otherwise get mired down in red tape. Although humans have been farming for the past thirty thousand years, some of the largest advances have been made in the past few centuries, and seem to be on the increase. In fact, the most promising results thus far seem to be in the hydroponics field. There is a large and growing body of information relating to hydroponics, and the reader is encouraged to explore this data as their interest prompts them. Briefly, hydroponics focuses on growing plants without soil. Plant roots are grown in a medium such as gravel, sand, or a fibrous material called "rock wool" through which nutrient-rich solutions flow, usually at timed intervals. The solutions can be customized to deliver specific nutrients for specific crops. This allows the plant to extract exactly what nutrients it needs, allows the roots time to breathe when the solution is drained away between cycles, and also allows any plant-wastes to be flushed away with the solution, so that there is no toxic buildup around the roots. This combination of techniques allows for extraordinary results when compared to traditional soil-based farming. (See Table 1.) Comparative Yields Per Acre in Soil and Soilless Culture Crop Soil Soilless Soya 600 lb 1550 lb Beans 5 tons 21 tons Peas 1 ton 9 tons Wheat 600 lb 4100 lb Rice 1000 lb 5000 lb Oats 1000 lb 2500 lb Beets 4 tons 12 tons Potatoes 8 tons 70 tons Cabbage 13,000 lb 18,000 lb Lettuce 9000 lb 21,000 lb Tomatoes 5-10 tons 60-300 tons Cucumbers 7000 lb 28,000 lb Table 1 - Comparative Yields Per Acre in Soil and Soilless Culture [Resh (1991) - p. 29] Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs Abraham Maslow, a psychologist from America in the mid-20th Century, developed the idea of a "hierarchy of needs" that must be met, in a specific order, for humans to develop into complete beings. To wit: Maslow maintained that our most basic need is for physiological survival: shelter, warmth, food, drink, and so on. Once these physiological needs are met, individuals then are able to address the need for safety and security, including freedom from danger and absence of threat. Once safety has been assured, belonging or love, which is usually found within families, friendships, membership in associations, and within the community, then becomes a priority. Maslow stressed that only when we are anchored in community do we develop self-esteem, the need to assure ourselves of our own worth as individuals. Maslow claimed that the need for self-esteem can be met through mastery or achievement in a given field or through gaining respect or recognition from others. Once the need for self-esteem has been largely met, Maslow stated, we will develop a new restlessness and the urge to pursue the unique gifts or talents that may be particular to that person. As Maslow stated, "A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be at ultimate peace with himself. What a man can be, he must be. He must be true to his own nature" [Maslow, A. (1970). Motivation and Personality (2nd ed.) p. 48 - New York: Harper & Row]. Maslow referred to this final level of need as "Self-Actualization." [Kunc, 1992] Maslow's Hierarchy is often represented as a pyramid (See Fig. 1), to show the levels of progression in human development. Food comes in at the very bottom level. There are various interpretations of the hierarchy, with subdivisions of the general types based upon scale of need. For example, in physiological survival, humans need air first and foremost. Without it, they will perish within minutes. Warmth (depending on local climate) would probably come next, followed by water, sleep, food, shelter, etc. Each of these has a longer time-period that a person can go without before death occurs. /\ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / \ / SELF- \ / ACTUALIZATION \ /Pursue Inner Talent \ /Creativity Fulfillment\ /------------------------\ / SELF-ESTEEM \ / Achievement Mastery \ / Recognition Respect \ /--------------------------------\ / BELONGING - LOVE \ / Friends Family Spouse Lover \ /--------------------------------------\ / SAFETY \ / Security Stability Freedom from Fear \ /--------------------------------------------\ / PHYSIOLOGICAL \ / Air Food Water Shelter Warmth \ /__________________________________________________\ Figure 1: Maslow's Hierarchy of Human Needs As one progresses up the pyramid, one begins to wonder: "How long can a person go without self-esteem?" Certainly, it's not as life-threatening as lack of food, water, or air. Yet just as certainly, it has some detrimental effect upon their development. A quick scan of the television or radio channels will provide seemingly endless examples of current social problems, urban decay, poor education standards, etc. Again, the above question may come to mind. "How long?" The consequences are plain to see, and yet, according to Maslow's Hierarchy, these social and political problems may have a more deep-seated root, farther down the pyramid. To put it bluntly, a person who's going around with a grumbling stomach, wondering where their next meal is coming from, is not going to be concerned about doing their Civic Duty. To be homeless on the street, with no chance of being admitted to most of the restaurants they can see, is almost like rubbing salt into a wound. Their brain is quite literally being short-circuited by the message of FOOD-FOOD-FOOD-FOOD and there is little time for other ideas to enter. To tell a homeless person to "get a job" is to talk to them on completely the wrong level. That's a 4th-tier, "self-esteem/achievement" message, being passed to a 1st-tier, "physiological need" brain-state. The homeless person has to deal with meeting all of their physiological needs (of which there are four or five, as noted above), then move on to meeting their safety needs. After that, they need to feel that they belong; that they have friends and loved ones. Then, and ONLY then, will their brain be in a proper state to receive the message about getting a job and joining up with societal structure. Before then, you might as well be jabbering at them in some alien tongue, because they aren't going to process what you're saying as anything important to the goal of meeting their immediate needs. This does not apply only to the homeless, or only to Americans. It is a general trend in human development. We can see the same effect in many areas. Underdeveloped Third-World countries are concerned with subsistence farming, scavenging, or sometimes even eating insects just to survive, and thus they are too preoccupied to be bothered with things like learning computers, writing web pages, or building space colonies. In Middle Eastern countries, food supply is reasonably well assured, but the issue at hand is safety. People spend much of their time worrying about terrorist attacks, and wondering where the next bomb will go off. Thus, they can't devote as much time to building coffee-houses, educational centers, or art institutes. As cultures become more established, their primary needs are met, and they begin to develop the higher social organs of a society. Education becomes widespread, food is plentiful, housing widely available and affordable. Art, music, and culture begin to flow. What we see, in essence, is that the lower tiers of the pyramid are being met for a larger and larger portion of the population, and thus a great majority of the people flourish. They don't just survive, they don't just live, they _thrive_. It's important to note the distinction between those three states. They all deal with the act of living, but each one signifies a different level of development, based upon available resources. This closely mirrors the hydroponic environment with respect to plants, and so we see another general trend. When an organism is given the resources it needs to function, and is supplied them, not in bare minimums, but in abundance, and when its wastes are removed effectively from the localized area to be reprocessed into the environment efficiently, then the organism will thrive. (The reader is encouraged to review the figures for tomatoes in Table 1 for a case-in-point example of the difference between "living" and "thriving.") The Role of the House in Human Development Traditionally, the house has provided most of the functions of Maslow's Hierarchy. Food was grown in the garden, water came from a well or stream, (and more recently, from pipes), warmth from the hearth, shelter from the walls, and privacy from the very space surrounding the house. (This is the "elbow room" of the rural regions, when your nearest neighbor is sometimes several kilometers away.) The family lived and gathered in the home, provided feelings of love, belonging, acceptance, and provided resources for personal growth, exploration, and learning (to a point...then it became time to "leave the nest.") In many ways, industrial society has fractured the home, replacing gardens with grocery stores and convenience markets. Water comes from the faucet, warmth from a radiator or furnace vent. The walls of many apartments provide little shelter from the sounds of neighbors going about their lives, and in cities people are seldom away from the sounds of sirens and traffic. In fact, individuals seldom get time away from _other people_. Still, they are most likely away from extended family, and the need for acceptance is transferred from family and loved ones to the workplace. Shared experience often comes from watching the same TV shows as friends, and then talking about them while at work. In this way, it seems that the underlying fabric of society's psychological makeup (tiers one and two of Maslow's pyramid), the very home that we live in, has become fractured and dysfunctional. The house itself may have become a slightly toxic part of our existence. For if we get up in the morning, leave for work, come home at night exhausted to a place we're not all that fond of, and get ready to do it all again tomorrow, then what kind of life are we leading? How much of that can a person take before it begins to have detrimental effects on their psychological state? How many people like that can a society take before it begins to wear thin and fray at the edges? The Problem Restated as Design Specification How can we formulate an environment for human beings that provides for their health, happiness, safety, shelter, space, food, and water requirements, gives them adequate information resources to encourage intellectual growth, and provides enough space for privacy, "elbow room", and peace of mind? Such an environment should not strive simply to meet the bare minimum requirements, but should provide an abundance of resources to encourage thriving. It should be a veritable cornucopia for them to draw from. (Variety is the spice of life.) Such an environment must provide for human wastes, and take care of them in an intelligent, and eco-friendly manner. The house should not depend solely on outside sources for its needs. While it may make sense to plug into a power grid when available, it should also be able to generate its own power. When attached to a grid, it can sell off any surplus power and make a profit for the residents. Water may come from a hookup to local pipes, may be drawn from a local stream, pond or lake, harvested from rainfall, or perhaps even condensed out of the very air. It can be purified on-board, and stored for future use. Heat can obviously be harvested from the sun when in sunny areas, and should also come from other sources. Electric heat can be generated cleanly, and electricity is readily available from a variety of power-generation systems which can be kept on-board and intertwined. These may include fuel-cells, photovoltaics ("solar cells"), windmill generators, and deployable mini-hydroelectric turbines for houses near running water. Food may come from a local store, although fresh vegetables and grains should always be available from a hydroponic garden within the house. Enough food can be grown in 125 square feet of hydroponic space to feed a person indefinitely. [Gabel, 1979] Thus, with a series of stacked, illuminated trays, one average sized room should be able to provide an average family with copious amounts of fresh food, indefinitely. Information needs and communications may be met, to a good extent, by computerized hookup to the Internet. An advanced house will have many controllable elements that can be run by automated processes. The computer can monitor and adjust power generation; water intake, purification, and storage; heat, humidity, light levels; food production and the various elements of running nutrient cycles; house security, automatic doors, and so on. A Few Words About Computers Most people don't realize the power of the computers that sit on their desktops or get toted around in their notebooks. If they only use the machine for playing games, writing email, or keeping track of finances, they haven't begun to scratch the surface of what that little piece of silicon is capable of doing. The fact of the matter is, when loaded with the proper software, just about any computer that has been manufactured since the early 1990's is capable of running an entire house. Any processor that is equivalent to a 386 or better, is capable of running a multiuser, multitasking, Unix-style operating system that will allow multiple people to use the machine at once, while it simultaneously monitors general house functioning. In some cases, this software is freely available over the Internet at no cost, other than that of learning how to run it. Interested readers are encouraged to check out the comp.os.linux.* hierarchy of USENET newsgroups, or to do a web search for the word "linux" to see a shining example of one such free operating system. Telecommunications functionality is also a necessity in modern homes, and can likewise be met in many ways by the current computers on the market. Present day computers are now beginning to edge into the sphere of communications that was traditionally held by the telephone, television, and fax machine. In fact, there are programs available on the Internet at no cost which allow computers equipped with sound boards to act as full-fledged telephones. The computer on one end digitizes the speaker's voice, sends the data across the net on a 14.4K (or faster) modem, and the computer on the other end converts the signal back into audio form which comes out of the PC speakers. Real-time conversations can be held with only slight (1-2 second) delays, which will lessen as technology advances. There are also versions available which cryptographically scramble the voice data, to assure privacy even though the conversation traverses the public networks. Total cost to the users? The cost of their Internet connection, which is typically $20 per month. There are no long-distance charges. In a similar vein, computer screens already deliver higher resolution than televisions, higher even than the much-promised but still undelivered "high definition television" (HDTV) that has been "just around the corner" for the past several years. With increasing network speeds and the high-powered graphics cards available today, TV can appear in a window of your computer screen, at full speed, with stereo sound. Using the small digital cameras available starting at around US$100 (Mid-1996), you may now do interactive video conferencing across the Internet. In essence, the power of the television studio is coming to the computer, and each home can be its own "station." In the computer industry, there is something called "point-to-point protocol," or PPP. This is a networking protocol that allows any two points in communication with each other (i.e. - one phone calling another) to pass data as though they were hardwired into the Internet. This means that any phone, in any location, may make a phone call and be part of the Internet, just for the duration of that call. The practical upshot of this, in the context of the portable, self-sufficient house, is that any home, anywhere, may be connected to the Internet. Cellular and satellite technologies remove even the need for connecting wires, allowing families to live on remote mountain tops or tropical islands and still remain connected to friends, loved ones, current events, and educational resources. In this way, we begin to see how some of the traditional social structures of schools and communities begin to dissolve and re-form into the in-home schooling and virtual cultures of the online world. In Maslow's hierarchy, having met the basics of physiological needs (level 1) and safety (level 2), people move on to dealing with the higher issues of belonging (level 3), self-esteem (level 4), and self-actualization (level 5). They begin to explore, to branch out, and to develop themselves more fully towards their true potential. This is not meant to imply that the Internet is a panacea, and that simply by connecting to the resources online, one will become a more complete human being. In fact, there are strong arguments to the contrary. In his 1995 book, "Silicon Snake Oil," Clifford Stoll takes a very long, hard look at the almost fanatical rush to jump on the Internet bandwagon. This seeming mania has corporations spending millions of dollars trying to attract net-surfers to glitzy web sites that have lots of flash but little content, while libraries and schools are slashing their book and periodical budgets so that they can afford the latest New Thing to be offered on CD-ROM, and the latest machines to run those CD-ROMs. Readers are encouraged to pay special attention to this book. It indicates some new social problems that are heading our way quickly. Please bear in mind that it was always intended to be "Technology in the Service of Mankind" and not the other way around. The computer is a tool. Nothing more, nothing less. It should not be your master, and only by much labor and study may you begin to master it. The rewards are great, but the cost in time and focus may be more than many wish to invest. It is an inherently flexible tool, allowing one to perform in a wide variety of media. In today's society, such flexibility is useful, for as Abraham Maslow also said: "Those who are only good with hammers see every problem as a nail." The computer is with us for the foreseeable future. It shouldn't appear as a fearsome thing, but as a useful extension of ourselves. By integrating the home computer with the home hydroponic garden, we should be able to develop gardens that are somewhat self-tending. This will lessen the amount of focus non-gardeners need to spend on the garden, and will thus help gardening appeal to a larger portion of today's push-button society. The computer can keep track of things such as light levels, heat levels, humidity, nutrient flow and concentration, and amount of oxygen or carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and nutrient solution. It can even take care of rotating plant trays or grow lights, provided the proper hardware is installed. All this can be done in the background, while the computer is also being used to maintain general house functioning, communications, etc., as noted above. Some may think that this approach takes away the "fun" of gardening, and in some ways, this may be true. But for a good many people who are currently getting food from the local convenience mart, there may not be a tremendous interest in actual gardening. They'd like to put in the seeds, hit a button, and get food out of the other end. We must accommodate such viewpoints in future designs, so that people are able to reap the benefits of home-grown, readily available, non-processed food, without devoting copious amounts of their time to obtaining that food. In "The Celestine Prophecy," James Redfield noted the feedback loop that can develop between a gardener and their plants, and how that loop is reinforced when one eats the vegetables that they, themself, have grown. As more people discover the joy of producing their own food, and tending to their own nutritional needs, we can expect to see a change in how people think, and in how society functions. As you build the bottom layers of Maslow's pyramid, the upper layers have a more solid foundation to leverage from. The Freedom to Roam Steven K. Roberts has spent the past eleven years promoting a lifestyle that he calls "technomadics" or "nomadness". It's a lifestyle using technology to free oneself from the infrastructure of society, which allows one to travel about the world, while maintaining contact with friends and family. Steve is widely known as "the guy on that computerized bicycle" by the many people who may have seen him on TV, or in newspaper and magazine articles with his recumbent bicycle, the BEHEMOTH (Big Electronic Human-Energized Machine... Only Too Heavy). Steve rode approximately 17,000 miles on three different versions of his recumbent bicycle. Each one heavier, and more well-connected than the last. It was quite common for Steve to be getting email, faxes, cellular phone calls, ham radio calls, and information via satellite link-up...all while pedaling down the road on his bike. He used a digital camera to send pictures of where he was, kept track of his location via GPS (Global Positioning System), and kept a database of over 6000 friends and contacts from around the world. He has run a mailing list for several years promoting this lifestyle, and there is active discussion from many people roaming the planet in networked vans, hiking with backpacks and notebook computers, and other creative combinations. For the past several years, Steve and his friends have been working on the Microship. It's a sea-based extension of the ideas developed on the BEHEMOTH, including all the latest tools to allow him and his partner, Faun, to head out onto the oceans and explore the planet's coastlines and seaports, all while keeping in touch, of course. The Microship has more bells and whistles than I'd care to think about, including a hydroponic garden to supply fresh food while on the open sea, in case the day's catch proves sparse. Steve's vision of the future entails a society of people who move about the planet in freely-forming and freely-separating communities of intention. People who come together, for a while, because of some common interest, and then go their separate ways at the time of their choosing. Much like the Internet, really. Whether they be packs of bicyclists riding cross-country, or his forthcoming "Flotilla" of small water craft, the idea remains the same: People find others with similar interest, join up with them for a while, travel and explore together, and then split off to join with other groups or explore on their own. People interested in learning more about Steve's work or who share his vision may want to check out his "Nomadic Research Labs" web site at: http://www.microship.com/ The portable house idea set forth in this research is a land-based extension of Steve's core concepts, for those who might not want to change location every day, but aren't really up for a 30-year mortgage, either. Once people have the freedom to get up and move, there's no more fighting with the neighbor for years (or decades) on end. There's no more staying in one area, because "the mortgage will be paid off in just a few more years." People will no longer be rooted down, plant-like, to one area, because their house will no longer be tied to plumbing, power, and phone lines, or anchored to the ground. Instead, they will begin to rediscover their animal freedom to get up and move around. If they don't like the political climate, they are free to find a niche that more aptly suits them. If the neighborhood no longer holds the same charm, they can pack up and head out to find another. If they really don't want to be around ANYONE, they can head to the top of a remote mountain, a desert isle, or some similar wilderness. This is not a new idea, by any means. Nomadic tribes have been wandering across the planet for aeons, and do so to this very day. In this century, one of the principle pioneers of the self-contained house idea was R. Buckminster ("Bucky") Fuller. Bucky deliberately trained himself to think fifty years ahead of his current time, so that he could envision the needs of forthcoming generations. He created the geodesic dome, as well as hundreds of other inventions and artifacts, and wrote several dozen books. A good one to start with is "Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth." Bucky went to excruciating effort to promote the ideas of self-sufficiency and living light on the land, more in tune with the planet around us. As we move forward, more and more of his ideas are beginning to reach fruition. Active discussion and many resources are to be found on the bit.listserv.geodesic newsgroup, which is tied to the GEODESIC mailing list. From there, interested readers may dive into the sea of ideas that Bucky has inspired. Economic Implications The ramifications of this ability to move about are fairly profound. It will change the core concepts that are held about society and its structure. For centuries, Man has divided up land, parceled it out, sold it off, left it to heirs, farmed on it, built on it, and lived very closely to it. More recently, city dwellers have become isolated from the land, and have paid higher prices for smaller divisions of property. Throughout all of this has ridden the spectre of the tax collector. No matter where people lived, they stayed fairly well tied to an area, and the landlord or tax collector always knew where to go to collect money. In some ways, this isn't going to change, fundamentally, for anyone who "owns" land is probably going to be charged some sort of tax on it. However, the people in self-sufficient dwellings are free to come and go as they choose. They will most likely pay "rent" of some sort to the owner of the land they happen to be on at any given point, which will help the land owner with the inevitable taxes. The interesting thing is that now ANY landowner may become a landlord, at least, for a while. Imagine, if you will, a farmer who has some fields lying fallow. The air is clear, the view is spectacular, and the population density is very, very low. Along comes a person and says "Nice view you have, here. Care to rent it out for a bit?" After some discussion, they make a deal, and the newcomer has his house air-lifted in by helicopter for a few months, while he enjoys "life in the country." After the agreed-upon time is up, the house gets air-lifted out again, the farmer has some extra money in hand, and also has his field back just in time for the next planting. Of course, this is a rather simplistic view of things, and would obviously involve slightly more negotiation than simply saying "mind if I live here?" Entire new industries open up for realtors who can help people find the type of place they've been looking for to park their house. USENET newsgroups and web pages will be able to coordinate efforts between the land-owners who have space to rent, and the technomads who wish to rent them for a while, much as the "forsale" newsgroups and want-ads in the newspaper currently function. This mobile, independent technology moves us forward in ways that leapfrog current social thinking. We move past the mentality of the nation-state, with its artificial borders and fabricated hostilities against "enemies" from the other side of some political line. As a species, we are once again able to begin seeing people as just that...people. When everyone is moving around, it becomes increasingly difficult to keep fighting with someone just because they're in some certain location. When a disaster hits, it becomes easier to replace the damaged house with a shiny new one. Better yet, one with all the latest features and additions. Better even than that, it may be possible to move things to safety beforehand, if the problem is foreseen, as is often the case with hurricanes and floods. Food In an evolutionary sense, it all comes down to food. Either you eat, or are eaten. The ability to procure food defines your existence. As noted earlier, a person's brain will quite literally short-circuit if it's not receiving adequate and proper nutrition; to a drastic, and often fatal, end. People won't be worried about current events if they aren't eating well, and conversely, if they are eating well, they'll be much more attentive to that which is going on around them. To eat is the very first thing we ever learn. Every one of us did learn to eat, way back when we were unicellular. It's part of our nature. So why, you may wonder, is there still all this hoopla about food? Why are cultures deprived of the necessary nutrients to allow them to get on in life? Why, precisely, ARE those forty thousand children starving to death every single day? Since we've known how to grow food for at least thirty thousand years, it quickly becomes apparent that the artificial scarcities that are created daily around the globe are actually little more than thinly veiled acts of terrorism. These so-called "scarcities" are often little more than an unwillingness on someone's part to ship something to somewhere it's needed. When you stop to think about it, it's just one organism or culture's attempt to starve out another organism or culture, which really isn't very polite, when you stop to think about it. So here we sit, in the middle of the 1990's, just before the cusp of the Third Millennium. And what do we have to show for ourselves? Forty Thousand dead children every day. And that's only from starvation. We haven't even begun to count diseases or other afflictions. In the larger picture, as well as on a personal level, it really does all come down to food. In looking at Maslow's hierarchy, it's apparent that food provides our baseline. It's what we build the rest of ourselves out of...quite literally. So the question for all humans living in our current society is this: Would YOU like to build a body that consists mainly of artificial colorings, preservatives, and disodium EDTA? Or would you prefer to select from a more wholesome group of raw materials? Each of us needs to ask this question of ourselves, and act accordingly. Who knows? Maybe one of those starving children had the answer to world hunger, or poverty, or AIDS, or Ebola, locked up inside their neural matrix. Had they been given the proper balance of nutrients, calories, books, experiences and resources, perhaps they would have figured out one of the mysteries that has eluded us, as a species, for aeons. The only way to find out, of course, is to nurture them, and let them grow. Until then, we're all going to suffer, in some way or another. Worldwide, we need to address the problems of starvation, not with committees, not with focus groups and international hearings, but with food. Throwing coins at starving people won't help them nearly as much as giving them food will. Long term benefits come from giving them the knowledge and ability to produce their own food, not to wait for handouts from us. Once they have that, their brains may begin to work a bit more smoothly, and some of the recurring social problems that we keep seeing may begin to fade away. References and Suggested Further Research: The Best of The Growing Edge (Book collection from 'The Growing Edge' Magazine) (c) 1994 by New Moon Publishing, Inc. 215 SW Second Street, #201 P.O. Box 1027, Corvalis, Oregon 97339 Phone: 503-757-0176 Fax: 503-757-0028 Email: talexan@csos.orst.edu The Celestine Prophecy (c) 1993 by James Redfield Published by Warner Books, Inc. 1271 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020 ISBN: 0-446-51862-X The GEODESIC mailing list send email to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.ACSU.BUFFALO.EDU with one line in the message body: SUBSCRIBE GEODESIC ----- (Also available as the bit.listserv.geodesic newsgroup in USENET) Ho-Ping: Food for Everyone (c) 1979 by Medard Gabel and the World Game Laboratory World Game Institute - 3215 Race St, Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA Phone: (215) 387-0220 E-Mail: wgi@worldgame.org Web: http://www.worldgame.org/~wgi Hydroponic Food Production - A Definitive Guidebook for the Advanced Home Gardener and the Commercial Hydroponic Grower Fourth Edition, (c) 1991 by Howard M. Resh, Ph.D. Published by Woodbridge Press Publishing Company Post Office Box 209 Santa Barbara, California 93102 Hydroponic Home Food Gardens (c) 1994 by Howard M. Resh, Ph.D. Published by Woodbridge Press Publishing Company Post Office Box 209 Santa Barbara, California 93102 The Hydroponic Hot House - Low-Cost, High-Yield Greenhouse Gardening (c) 1992 by James B. DeKorne Published by Loompanics Unlimited P.O. Box 1197 Port Townsend, WA 98368 The Hydroponics Mailing List - hydro@lists.best.com, is for the discussion hydroponic gardening and related topics. To join the mailing list, please send mail to hydro-request@lists.best.com with the message "subscribe" in the body (not the subject line) of an email message. Web archives at: http://www.growroom.com/HydroList/ The Independent Home - Living Well with Power from the Sun, Wind, and Water A Real Goods Independent Living Book (c) 1993 by Michael Potts Published by Chelsea Green Publishing Company P.O. Box 428 White River Junction, Vermont 05001 The Kids' Whole Future Catalog - A Book About Your Future (c) 1982 by Paula Taylor Published by Random House, Inc., New York ISBN: 0-394-85090-4 (trade) 0-394-95090-9 (lib. bdg.) The Need to Belong: Rediscovering Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. (c) 1992 by Norman Kunc, Axis Consultation and Training Ltd. 4623 Elizabeth Street, Port Alberni, B.C. Canada V9Y 6L8 http://www.almanac.bc.ca/~axis/maslow.html Steve Roberts and Faun Skyles Nomadic Research Labs 740 Aldo Ave., Santa Clara, CA 95054 Phone: 408-567-0201 http://www.microship.com/ Practical Hydroponics International Magazine A.C.N. 058 296 826 P.O. Box 225, Narrabeen, NSW 2101, Australia Phone (02) 913 8855 - FAX (02) 913 2300 Silicon Snake Oil - Second Thoughts on the Information Highway (c) 1995 by Clifford Stoll Published by Doubleday 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036 ISBN 0-385-41993-7 Worm's Way - Urban Farming Source Book/Catalog 3151 South Highway 446, Bloomington, IN 47401 Phone: 800-274-9676 Web: http://www.wormsway.com/ Bio: Patrick Salsbury is a Design Scientist living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He works on creating solutions for social problems such as traffic congestion, homelessness, poverty, hunger, and poor education. Most Recent Update: Sep. 15, 1997