Ecotopia (22 page)

LIVING IN PLASTIC TUBING

Santa Cruz, June 8. We extrude plastic sausage casings, wire, garden hose, aluminum shapes, and many other items, but the Ecotopians extrude whole rooms. They have devised machinery that produces oval-cross-section tubing, about 13 feet wide and 10 feet high; the walls are six inches thick, and there is a flat floor inside. The tubing can be made solid, or windows can be punched out along the sides. It can be bought with ends cut off square or on the diagonal. The resulting houses take many shapes—in fact I’ve never seen two that were alike—but you can get the general impression by imagining that jet airplane cabins could be bought by the yard and glued together into whatever shapes you had in mind.

Most Ecotopian buildings are wood, the material Ecotopians love best. But wood houses are complicated to build and thus expensive compared to these extruded houses, which are made of a plastic derived from cotton. The extruded houses also have the advantage of portability (a standard section about 12 feet long is light enough to be lifted by four men) and Ecotopians show great ingenuity in using them.

Cut off at one angle and glued together, they produce a square house; on a different angle, a hexagonal or octagonal house. You can glue sections together into an irregular zigzag shape, or make
them into a long looping string, with branches or protrusions, enclosing a sort of compound—a common pattern for extended-family groups living in open country. You can build a central space out of wood or stone and attach extruded rooms onto the outer edge. You can cut doors or windows with a few minutes’ work. And not only can the sections be glued together by unskilled labor, their cost is very low—a room-size section costs less than a fifth of what a standard-construction room costs, including a couple of windows. This, I was told, is the astonishing result of producing housing on a truly industrial continuous-process basis, instead of by handwork.

I have just inspected one of the plants in which these extruded houses are produced. It resembles one of our car-washes. A large vat cooks the ingredients into a foam-type moldable plastic. The foam is then squirted under pressure through a huge oval slot, and hardens as it comes in contact with the air. After passing over some supporting rollers, it has window holes punched if desired, and is then sprayed inside and out with a hard-surface plastic. This has a strange neutral color and resembles a dried corn leaf—which is not surprising since it is derived from corn plants; it is washable, can be painted though few Ecotopians use paint, and modestly fits in with natural landscapes. Finally the tubing is cut off into different lengths and stored in a nearby field until needed.

The floor of the tube has troughs molded along the sides to accommodate wiring and water pipes, which are also available in standard section lengths and connect to outlets, toilets, and so on.

Ecotopians are always talking of “integrated systems,” by which they mean devices that cater to several of their ecological fetishes at once. The extruded house system offers a number of examples. Probably the most startling is the bathroom. Ecotopians have put into practice an early notion of our architects, and produce entire bathrooms in one huge molded piece, proportioned to slide neatly into a section of extruded room. It contains all the usual bathroom components, including a space heater. A companion unit, a large plastic tank, is buried outside, and connected by two flexible hoses. This, it turns out, is a septic tank, which not only digests sewage but produces methane gas in the process, which in turn
operates the heater! The effluent that runs out the other end is not at all repulsive, but clear and excellent for watering gardens, so that ordinarily the garden is placed adjacent to the bathroom. Sludge is removed from the tank every few years and used for fertilizer. This system may seem disgusting to some, but it has its advantages, especially in rural areas. And when you remember that gas and electric energy in Ecotopia are inordinately expensive (costing about three times what they cost us) it is clear why such an odd but thrifty idea has caught on widely. Another integrated system Ecotopians are proud of is the heat-pump solar heating device; these are especially effective with the extruded rooms, consume no fossil fuel or even water, and require only a small amount of electricity to operate their pumps.

Incidentally, one curious symptom of the high cost of energy in Ecotopia is that houses tend to be abominably ill-lit. They contain lamps of several kinds, used for reading and work purposes—though Ecotopians avoid fluorescent tubes, claiming their discontinuous emission patterns and subliminal flicker do not suit the human eye. But for ordinary socializing their houses are lit by small bulbs and often even by candles (which they produce from animal fats as our ancestors did).

Such peculiarities aside, an extruded house has a comfortable feeling once you get used to it. The fact that walls and ceiling merge into one another can make for unease at first, yet it is snug and secure too. Ecotopians decorate houses in many different modes, but those who live in extruded houses tend to use even more rugs, coverlets, blankets, and other woven objects, presumably to soften the severe geometrical lines of the structure. Sheepskin and fur rugs are also common. Because of the extremely good insulation and air seal provided by the foam shell, extruded houses are easy to heat—in fact the windows are usually kept wide open—and their inhabitants thus tend to wear little clothing indoors. (Indeed some of them are totally unconcerned about nudity—I was once greeted at the door by an Ecotopian wearing nothing at all.)

One of the pleasantest houses I have yet visited had extruded rooms arranged like spokes of a wheel around a central stone core.
This provided the living, cooking and eating area, which was octagonal in shape and had a translucent dome over it. An indoor tree, perhaps 15 feet high, stood in a miniature garden under the dome. One side of the main octagon opened out toward the river from which the house stones had come. The other sides had sliding doors opening into a series of tube rooms, five of which were bedroom-study-retreat rooms, one a spacious and luxurious bathroom complete with fireplace, and one a sort of work room with a small bathroom. Plants and woven fabrics were everywhere, forming beautiful contrasts with the pale, graceful extruded shapes. In one of the bedrooms, a soft, deep-pile rug continued up the walls to window level; aside from a low bed, there was no other furniture, though a bank of cabinets lined the far end of the room. These, I discovered, are available prefabricated, like other kinds of dividers for the extruded rooms; but often people devote great artistry to making their own, with fantastically beautiful woods and intricate detail work.

Extruded houses lack the many built-in appliances of our trailers, but they are probably much more durable; some have been lived in for 15 years now. They are easily patched by the occupants. Once, to demonstrate this, an Ecotopian who was showing off his house to me took an axe and chopped a gaping hole in it! Then the family gathered round, plugged up the hole with shreds of foam, and neatly glued on a piece of surface plastic. The whole process, accompanied by much laughter, took about 10 minutes.

Like all plastics manufactured in Ecotopia, the extruded houses can be broken up and thrown into biovats, digested by micro-organisms into fertilizer sludge, and thus recycled onto the fields from whence their materials came. Oddly, the one serious problem encountered when they were first used was that they tended to blow away in high winds. But instead of our heavy, excavated foundations, they now use large adjustable corkscrew devices which anchor each corner but leave the earth surface undisturbed.

Many Ecotopians are fond of these products of housing automation. But they are very unceremonious about them, and treat them with none of the almost religious respect they extend to wood structures. If a family member dies or leaves, his room may be
sliced off and recycled. When a baby is born or a new person joins a group, a new room can be glued onto the existing constellation—a long room for an adult, a short one for a child. Any self-respecting architect would shiver at such a prospect, but it does make the houses a direct expression of the life inside them.

(June 9) Marissa and I apparently on a more flexible basis now—after doing the Helicopter War checking I went out to the camp for a bit of rest, and yesterday she went down with me to the extrusion plant. It turned out she had never been in an extruded house—must have put a lot of energy into avoiding them!—and concluded they were awful. Got furious when she saw I was fascinated and impressed. “I knew it! They’re just a piece of your American junk!” She banged on the slick surfaces, made terrible faces. For a moment I didn’t take it too seriously, but then suddenly realized her reaction was intensely personal and concerned something much more important: she felt I was backsliding, losing whatever sense she and other Ecotopians have banged into my head since I’ve been here. Began to weep. “How can you love wood the way you say you do, and yet be sympathetic to this insane artificial crap? Just feel it
, feel
it!” (I felt it. She’s right: it’s got a sort of pale, neutral, clammy feel, and no smell, and very little texture.) Wildly, and crying again: “I will never, never
, never
live in one of those things, never!”

Suddenly I knew we are on the verge of new developments I don’t understand, where everything has taken on a new and subterranean importance; there is some sense in which she is watching me, evaluating me, which is different from her playful cultural arm-wrestling at the beginning. Whatever it is in me that she cares about, she
really
cares about…. We have also reached some new, more relaxed level of sexual relating. For weeks she accepted my sexual appetite for her as a kind of aberrant fact of nature that would pass, and it has—we are now in a much better balance, she pursues me as much as I pursue her. We look at each other with a lovely sense of mutual desire. —Strange, swelling, bursting sensation in chest when I think about it—as if I want to pour myself out
to her, from the heart. “I always worry about being sentimental,” I said last night, “but I’m going to say anyway that I love you.” She looked at me intently. “What do you love about me?” “Your intensity and your freeness. And the way we are joyful together—not just in bed, other times too.”

“Well,” she said, speaking carefully, “I have begun to love you too. I love your intelligence, your kindness. And you startle me with your strange viewpoints on things. And actually I’m more joyful with you than with other people. Maybe you liberate me in some way. You’re the most powerful person in my life these days.”

“What do you mean, powerful? That I have friends in Washington?”

She laughed. “My God, no! You just bring out a stronger kind of love than I have for anybody else.”

“The kind of love you would have for a mate?”

We looked at each other gravely for a while. “I’m not sure,” she said finally. “If you were an Ecotopian, I think it would be. But maybe it’s because you
aren’t
an Ecotopian that it’s so exciting to be around you. You’re more of a cynic than we are, so I want to test everything against you! But you’re so terribly rootless too—”

At this, to my surprise, she began to cry. And to tell the truth I suddenly didn’t feel so cheery myself. She’s right: I am a homeless wanderer, and somehow this trip is bringing into new perspectives the things I thought were settled—the way Pat and I had worked things out with each other and the kids, my easy loose relationship with Francine. I’m beginning to see that to an Ecotopian, who always has a strong collective base to return to, a place and the people of that place, my existence must seem pathetically insecure. I have never cried about it. But maybe I should….

SEPARATION OF FUNCTIONS:
RESEARCH AND TEACHING IN ECOTOPIA

Berkeley, June 9. American universities are our major source of scientific innovations, and important for social policy formulation as well. But, in line with their penchant for small-scale organization, the Ecotopians have attempted to separate research functions from teaching functions. This has brought about a striking proliferation of small research institutes. These are usually located near universities and their staffs are partly permanent members and partly university professors on their year-off research rotation. These institutes seem to contain 30-100 members—scientists, technicians, machinists, and so on—it is hard to tell who is what, as their professional roles are not so well defined as with us. One such institute I have visited, near Monterey, was studying a variety of oceanographie and related biological problems. Another, south of San Francisco, concerned itself with astronomy, astrophysics, and so on. (The Mt. Hamilton telescopes, I am told, are once again usable due to the drop in air pollution and city illumination levels since Independence.) Scientific institute laboratories such as these appear to a layman to be well equipped, and Ecotopian scientists are often invited to international congresses where their work is highly respected for its originality, though of course it is not as broad in scope as ours, nor anywhere near as well financed.