Rocket Dreams by Benjamin Marina;

Author:Benjamin, Marina; [Benjamin, Marina;]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2003-11-14T23:00:00+00:00

“Here I sit in a patched-up mobile home on a lushly green field (mostly mesquite, Johnson grass and croton) at the end of a dirt road on the rural outskirts of a small town in Texas. A thick, forested fringe of cedar, oak and pine starts a hundred yards away to the east and north. A ranch with grazing cattle stretches to the west. My main companion is Ishi, the sole survivor of a small flock of guinea fowl I bought as chicks during the summer.” These words come from the journal of Richard Crews, a modern-day Crusoe who has elected to maroon himself (more or less) on a twenty-acre plot of land outside Bastrop, Texas, there to undertake a grand experiment in self-sufficient living. The experiment was supposed to be collective, but from May 2001, when Crews first moved onto the site, until November, he was the sole resident of his “ecovillage.” This diary entry dates from September, by which time Crews had put in a flush toilet, water, electricity, even a phone. He’d also acquired some solar panels, built a windmill on his roof, dabbled in hydroponics, and added gardening, composting, and recycling to his daily routine. It may not be much, but it’s Crews’s first step toward paradise.

Crews, who has long been committed to what he calls “ecological sanity,” does not believe that he’s abandoning the civilized world. Rather, he intends his efforts at creating a self-contained world to serve as an example to the rest of us as the only way that we might guarantee the very survival of civilization. While others are flocking to cyberspace to realize utopian dreams of community and explore what it means to build a “civilized” world, Crews still believes in the down and dirty that’s involved in building colonies for real. He’s a genuine seventies throwback. But what distinguishes his Space Environment Ecovillage, or SEE-1, from a commune, say, is that far from being an end in itself, it is only the first phase of an ambitious scheme calculated to take mankind to the stars.

The mastermind behind the colonization scheme is Marshall T. Savage, an African American fine arts graduate who in the early nineties remodeled himself as a scientific visionary and hatched an eight-step plan for migrating into space. Crews is one of a few dozen people for whom reading Savage’s book, The Millennial Project, was a life-changing experience, and the SEE-1 colony over which he presides represents the project’s modest beginning—a capsule world that aims to operate with complete autonomy. In time, SEE-2 and SEE-3 (to be built in progressively harsher and more isolated environments) will follow, before something to be called “Aquarius Rising” takes shape. This colony will be established on an isolated tropical shoreline site suitable for an ocean thermal energy plant and attendant “mariculture” facilities. “It will require millions of dollars and a community of thousands of people,” says Crews, “and it will be a step toward a fully self-sustaining, floating ocean colony to be called Aquarius.

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