June 21, 2006
Washington D.C., Georgia, and Florida

Resuming my travels, I find models of sustainability in such diverse places as a national museum and a hostel in the woods. I see friends who are anxious about how to balance their work with their desires to improve the world. And I receive some ideas about how to get this trip back on track.

Buckminster Fuller's spirit persists at the Hostel in the Forest, in Brunswick, Georgia, where the common areas and staff quarters are housed in wood-framed geodesic domes. The guests stay in treehouses. The hostel is hidden in the woods, out of earshot from the highway, and the staff threatens to throw you into the pool if you're caught using your cell phone.

After a few days rest in New York, I had resumed the rapid pace of my trip, and this sylvan stop is only a brief breather before I hit the road again. Traveling south from New York, I stopped first in Washington D.C. to see my friend Tony. Tony is enrolled in the cultural studies graduate program at the University of Minnesota, and he's spending the summer interning in DC, to save the Internet and other media from corporate interests.

I had been reading more Buckminster Fuller on the bus, about how Fuller refused to "earn a living" in the conventional way, to the chagrin of his wife's family. Fuller just found that keeping a job interfered with his efforts to establish a higher quality of life for all of humanity. He wrote, "You have to decide whether you want to make money or make sense, because the two are mutually exclusive."

Fuller also wrote that most workers in our society produce no life support through their jobs. They waste life support, however, in the gas they consume driving to work. Consequently, it would be more economical to pay these workers to stay at home.

This made Tony think of Autonomist Marxism, and Tony, his roommate, and I engaged in a lively debate on these topics as we walked the streets of Washington.

I went out with Tony and his roommate that evening, but the next day Tony needed to work, and I wandered the nation's capital on my own. I visit the National Building Museum and view an exhibit titled The Green House: New Directions in Sustainable Architecture and Design. To my disappointment, however, the exhibit contains little that I don't already know.

I am intrigued by the exhibit's emphasis on prefabricated houses. Prefab houses are made from mass-produced parts that are quickly assembled on site. Buckminster Fuller was working in the realm of prefab when he designed the Dymaxion House. The Dymaxion House was a circular aluminum house with passive cooling and greywater collection, designed to be mass produced by airplane manufacturers.

If a prefab house is successful, one sustainable building design can result in numerous green buildings across the landscape. The key is to design a sustainable house that meet people's needs and desires so successfully that everyone wants such a house even if they previously cared little about sustainability. This is what Fuller constantly emphasized, though his own Dymaxion House was an utter flop.

Outside Murky Coffee, I had seen two former William and Mary students, Gabriel and Ryan. Ryan was about to leave, but I sat and joined Gabriel.

Gabriel, however, wasn't able to talk much, busy with his computer, applying to jobs. He was just crashing at Ryan's place until something panned out. He said he had applied to a hundred jobs, apparently without success.

Gabriel, who cares deeply about the environment, appeared to be set on finding a job that would advance his values. But such jobs are hard to obtain. He seemed both frantic and disheartened.

Work Versus the Fantastic

In Atlanta, Georgia, I visited Yasmin and Serene, two of the three Alami sisters, all of whom had attended William and Mary. Yasmin, like Gabriel, seemed anxious about finding a job that would fulfill her. I share with her Buckminster Fuller's thoughts, as well as Thoreau's. After I graduated from college, I attended an exhibit at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, in North Adams. The exhibit was titled Fantastic.

The Fastastic is a type of optimistic desperation, when going with the flow is no longer an option. It's about doing something not because it's going to work but just because you need to do something. The exhibit took its inspiration from the utopian experiments of the nineteenth century, presenting expressions of the same impulses today.

One work was a plan for converting abandoned Kmart buildings into community eco-information centers. Another displayed images of people revolting against suburbia. In one photograph, neighbors are laying sod across their neighborhood road.

The exhibit transformed me. I changed my diet, my lifestyle, and I quit my job because I didn't believe in it. I wasn't about to take another job I didn't believe in, but I had a rough time getting a job I did believe in. I sent out dozens of resumes in vain. For a couple of months, I didn't work.

I was more depressed than I had ever been. I felt useless to society. I took solace in Henry David Thoreau, who devoted his life to avoiding employment. He did work, but nothing that anyone would pay him for. And employers didn't even want him to do his job well. When Thoreau worked as a surveyor, his customers didn't want him to survey accurately. They wanted him to overstate the size of their landholdings.

Like Fuller, Thoreau realized that you couldn't make both sense and a dollar.

This isn't to say that Yasmin's current job - wilderness therapy for adolescent sex offenders and gang members - was unfulfilling. But Yasmin is captive to her imagination, and it's never long before she imagines herself doing something new.

The First Step is the Steepest

When she had returned to Williamsburg this past May for sister Sarita's graduation, Yasmin's latest interest, like mine, was sustainable architecture. Yasmin was particularly interested in treehouses. The first time I met Yasmin, a year and a half ago, we had bonded over a shared attraction to treehouses. I had searched on the Internet and found a hostel in Georgia where treehouses housed the guests.

During graduation, I gave Yasmin one of my books on green architecture. We joked about starting an architecture firm that would promote treehouses as sustainable, affordable, flood-proof housing.

Riding on the bus, I drew Yasmin a picture of a geodesic sphere in a tree. The floor plan demonstrated that this small sphere contained all the amenities needed for comfortable living. By the time I arrived in Atlanta, however, Yasmin's interest in architecture had fizzled.

The latest thing was documentary filmmaking. Specifically, Yasmin wanted to make a film about migrant workers in Georgia. Yasmin's ideas don't seem to spawn from her head but from her big heart, and I wonder if it's her awareness of this that makes her hesitant to follow through on any of them. But I'm confident that if she did follow through, her big heart could lead her to success.

I decided that even if I do nothing to reduce carbon emissions in Atlanta, I would feel accomplished if I could see Yasmin take the first steps toward documenting Georgia's migrant workers. She was resistant, but I found for her the contact information for an Emory student group assisting immigrants, a Georgia organization promoting immigration reform, and a school teacher in a town with a large migrant population. After much stalling, Yasmin sent two emails requesting phone interviews and promised me should would make a call the next day.

Other than two dinners out, the only time we left Serene and her boyfriend Sachem's apartment was a brief excursion to Acworth, Georgia, to steal two kittens from a farm. Serene couldn't wait for permission to take the cats. During the car ride home, the kittens crawled on me and Yasmin. One kitten, granite-colored, proved himself to be a born explorer with an insatiable curiosity. The other, black-suited with white gloves, cautiously followed in granite's pawsteps.

Most of my time with the Alamis was identical to the time I spent with my grandmother in Boca Raton, Florida. Everyone lounged about, playing Sudoku with the television in the background.

Bucky Appropriated and Corporate PR

Before I arrived in Boca, I spent a day in Disney World, in Orlando, Florida. I was suffering from an inexplicable attraction to the place. My family had visited a number of times by the time I was ten years old. During the last visit, I especially enjoyed one theme park called Epcot.

Epcot is divided into two halves. The first presents a cheerful view of the future. The second purports to be a showcase of world cultures. In Future World, I first learned about alternative sources of energy, fuel efficiency, and creative agricultural practices such as hydroponics.

An attraction called "The Universe of Energy" contained a film that exposed me to solar and wind power. In "The World of Motion," a presentation demonstrated how changing a car's shape affected its aerodynamics and miles per gallon.

Even though I was ten years old, I was skeptical about the corporate sponsorship of these attractions. Only recently did the world's largest oil corporation drop its sponsorship of "The Universe of Energy," but not before seeing some dramatic changes to the ride. Now the attraction highlights the limitations of renewable energy while proclaiming that we are always discovering new deposits of fossil fuels. Global warming is acknowledges as a topic "with a lot of questions," and because of global warming, we must seek cleaner ways to burn fossil fuels.

"The World of Motion" had become "Test Track" and removed all mention of fuel efficiency. now focusing almost exclusively on safety, an effective selling point for today's large, inefficient cars. There was a single, uninformative display on hydrogen fuel cells, followed by a showroom of vehicles, including the Cadillac Escalade, which gets 12 miles to the gallon. In Disney World, gift shops are around every corner, and the "Test Track" gift shop was full of Hummer merchandise.

The World Showcase was no more encouraging. The "world" consisted almost entirely of North America and Europe, with the exception of China, Japan, and Morocco. All of sub-Saharan Africa was represented by a single gift shop. Sub-Saharan Africa is represented in Disney's Animal Kingdom park, but little indication is given that there are human animals in Africa too.

As I exited Epcot, I stopped at its centerpiece, a geodesic sphere constructed in violation of Buckminster Fuller's patent. The name of the attraction is stolen from Fuller as well: Spaceship Earth. The ride inside narrates the history of communication, from prehistoric times through the future, and it recalls the comprehensive and speculative history in Fuller's bookCritical Path. The ride reaches its climax passing through a Fullerian geoscope, a transparent sphere, with the world's continents superimposed, that can be viewed from without or within.

The narration of the ride was written by Ray Bradbury, who supposedly displayed embarrassment upon encountering Fuller after the ride was completed.

Nevertheless, I have fun at Disney World. Disney's new thrill rides, in the other theme parks, are thoroughly enjoyable, full of creativity and attention to detail. Disney can thrill me, but it offers nothing to inspire me like it once did.

A Lofty Model

From Boca Raton, I headed north to Brunswick, Georgia, to the Hostel in the Forest. The hostel was created in the 1970s by local poverty lawyer Tom Dennard.

The hostel is intended, among other things, as a model of sustainable living. A composting toilet is illuminated by a stained-glass window. Food waste also is composted, and everything that is technologically possible to recycle is recycled. Any remaining trash is deposited in the "Can of Shame."

After settling into my treehouse, I join the other hostelers. Most of them are playing a drinking game, but I opt for a game of chess with a young woman named Sarah, with chesspieces that she sculpted. Sarah is a vegan hairstylist from outside Sarasota, Florida, and she had stopped at the hostel on her return from the Bonaroo Music Festival in Manchester, Tennessee.

I had been rethinking my energy-saving projects, and while I don't think distributing flyers is an effective approach, it is something I can do everywhere I go, even when my time is limited. I developed two new "Top 10" lists. One is for paper, recognizing that my carbon emissions from paper are many times those from such electricity consumers as lights and my computer. The other is for people who don't have money to spend or a house of their own, recognizing that my home energy tips are not useful to many of the young people I meet or other renters.

I needed, however, direct contact with people. Tony had suggested that I post my energy-consulting services on Craig's List. Craig's List is an online assortment of classifieds and other postings for a number of major cities across the country and the world. I considered this a way to earn both money and carbon. I posted the following on the Craig's Lists for Nashville and Chicago, two upcoming stops:

Advice on how to make your home, business, or organization more environmentally friendly and energy efficient. Learn how to save money and the environment. I offer this service for free, though I will accept donations to offset my expenses.

Now I just need to wait and see if anyone responds. Though I am constantly moving, much of this trip is a waiting game.

I speak with Sarah at the Hostel in the Forest until the early hours of the morning. Then I walk the dark path back to my treehouse and climb the stairs.

Coming up next: Single-minded Nashville hostelers, Midwestern renewable energy junkies, and gracious strangers who take me in.

Click here to view panoramas of the Hostel in the Forest .