The Symbiosis Project,

or The Future Belongs to Those Who Tell a Better Story

We live in a time on the cusp of socio-political revolution. Our leaders lie and cheat their way into power only to use that power for their own personal profit. As we continue to hear in the news some reach for violence as a solution. But, violent revolutions have always resulted in new plutocrats, not the abolition of plutocracy. I join with others in calling for a revolution of consciousness. But what does that even look like? This is the second in a series of articles that aims to answer that question.

This is a true story. It all starts one week from today.

Eat, Drink, and be Merry!

After reading about it online, a Portland man decided to start a community beer-brewing co-op. He found eight neighbors who were also interested. Together they bought $500 in equipment and supplies—enough to brew 30 gallons of beer. Over the weekend, they got in touch with every household in the three-block area around them. They ended up finding 45 people who were interested in brewing and/or drinking beer with them.

For a sliding-scale membership fee of between $30~100 each donor would receive a share—one growler (four pints)—of the beer produced at the weekly brew sessions. So long as costs were covered, it didn't much matter how much anyone could afford to pay; they just wanted to get together with some neighbors and brew beer.

At $30 per month, members were only paying $1.88 per pint of beer, brewing lessons, and access to expensive brewing equipment. But, most importantly, it was a good excuse to get together with neighbors over drinks every week. Folks who couldn't attend got their growlers delivered to their doors.

Everyone being fairly strapped for cash, the members all paid the minimum $30 per month. Even so, the co-op raised $1350! To make their first 120 gallons, the co-op spent $400 on ingredients and $500 on equipment, leaving them a surplus of $450 and 30 gallons of beer. So, at the end of the month, they decided to throw a potluck block party and invited the neighborhood, regardless of co-op membership, to come discuss how they could best spend the extra money.

Through the discussion, the neighbors realized they were all spending too much on was internet access. One woman was really interested in networking. She suggested they spend the $450 on routers and set up a free community mesh wireless network. She told them, for $350 every month they could get a high speed business connection that the mesh network would distribute throughout the community. This turned out to save 45 households $30 every month! So, during the second month, the network was installed and the beer co-op raised another $1,000.

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A Sense of Community

By the third month, the co-op had raised $2,000 total and the entire neighbourhood had saved $1,000 on internet costs—giving the community as a whole $3,000 extra and plenty of beer. Another neighbour had had solar panels installed by Solar City the previous year. He told the group how they offered the panels for no money upfront because Solar City made their money by owning the panels and selling the electricity back to the grid. This scheme saved him an average of $10 per month on electricity over the past year. They also offered $400 for referrals, which he suggested be put back into the neighborhood. Photovoltaic panels don't work on all houses, but five did end up getting them installed. The community gained an extra $2,000 from these referrals.

Between the weekly brew sessions and monthly gatherings, a sense of community began developing. They began building trust and mutual understanding. Not everyone were friends, but people generally understood where their neighbours were coming from. At one of the following community meetings someone suggested they sign up for GetAround.com—a neighborhood ridesharing program. GetAround charges a fee, but it also covered insurance while the car was being borrowed, so the owners were covered if there were an accident. Several of the community members tried it out and discovered that it really worked for their transportation needs. A couple of folks who had vehicles no longer needed them because they found it was much cheaper to simply rent their neighbour's car at the community's special rate. Between no longer having to pay their auto loans, insurance, gas, and maintenance, those who ended up selling their cars saved an average of $500 per month. Those who rented out their vehicles ended up with a little extra pocket money.

After several months of sharing beer and cars—though not at the same time—the community became close enough to start discussing harder topics. At one dinner a woman admitted she had lost her job and was facing foreclosure. She never expected to be in this situation and the stress of not knowing what to do was taking its toll. After much discussion the community decided to work out an agreement to keep her house. They would collectively "rent" the house from her which covered her mortgage payment without requiring a deed transfer. In exchange, she would follow her passion and bake for the neighborhood. They also decided she could offer her house's spare bedroom as a bunk room for WWOOFers—people who live for free in exchange for doing community work, generally on organic farms.

Some students from Concodia University and PCC Cascade who were studying urban planning, permaculture, and engineering, heard about this opportunity and applied to their faculty sponsors to receive credit for work as interns. They all agreed that this was a great opportunity to apply what they had been studying directly where they would be staying.

One of the students was passionate about bikes and engineering and offered to build the community some hybrid electric tricycles from an open-source project he had been working on. These vehicles were electric assisted, able to carry groceries and other light cargo, met all legal bike standards, and were weather enclosed—meaning they could be comfortably ridden in the Portland rain. With the $3,000 surplus they had previously generated he was able to build four for anyone in the community to check out at any time. Also by this time, a few neighbors realized they worked very close to each other and started carpooling. Together with the GetAround program, now a few more folks could sell their vehicles without compromising their transportation needs.

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The Shape of Things to Come

With significantly fewer cars driving down the block, the neighbors noticed that they had much more space to meet and play during their monthly block parties. Another of the students, who was studying urban planning, proposed the idea of a Street Vacation Permit—a legal permit that allows the residents of a neighborhood to close off and collectively own their street in a trust.

The $5,000 permit was a bit of a gamble, but by now the community had more than that saved up and were willing to give it a shot. Application for a SVP takes a lot of work, but the student volunteers her time as it went toward her course credit. Two neighbors—a retired architect and a contractor—worked with the student to create a proposal.

Their final plan closed most of the street to vehicular traffic, but left four parking spaces at either end of the block for the GetAround cars. It also left an 8' wide common, one-way lane down the middle for fire trucks, or other emergency vehicles, and the new trikes. Ethylene propylene diene monomer (EPDM) rubber was laid over the remaining pavement—as it was a cheaper solution to tearing out the concrete and allowed the neighborhood to restore the road if they changed their minds. A community kitchen was placed in the middle of the block. It included a bread/pizza oven, a biogas stove, and all the beer brewing equipment. What remained was 400' x 32, nearly 13,000⏍ of community space. Most of it was dedicated to growing food. The sides of the street were lined with gravel which ebbed and flowed with water from a large aquaponics system.

Aquaponics is a semi-closed system method of horticulture involving plants—like lettuce, bok choi, kale, basil, mint, & chives—fish—like tilapia, bluegill, crappie, catfish, or bass—pumped water, and bacteria—which convert ammonia & nitrite rich fish poo into nitrates that fertilize the plants. This system gives the neighborhood healthy, fresh greens and occasional, hyper-locally sourced fish meat. The edges of the grow beds were built to work as community benches where people could gather and chat.

At 6' intervals along one side of the former street, guide poles were installed. Just as fall came, the neighborhood slid large, bent metal rods into the guide poles which provided a collapsible greenhouse frame that was covered in sheeting. Raising the greenhouse became an annual autumnal equinox tradition in the neighborhood. After the raising the entire community would celebrate with a large Thanksgiving-esque meal under the warmth of the greenhouse. In Spring, they likewise began celebrating the return of the Sun when they would deconstruct the greenhouse.

After having filed several block party permits, the Street Vacation Permit, a rainwater catchment permit, among others, the block had stayed on the radar of the city government. They even won a regional sustainability award. However, their next project went beyond what their local laws allowed—building a community biodigestion system. So, they worked with ReCode and the City of Portland to develop a new model of performance-based municipal code to replace the outdated technology-based code. This meant that as long as the system maintained agreed upon standards of safety and performance, it could be based on any technology. This expedited local innovation and adoption of new standards.

The biodigester accepted the entire neighborhood's kitchen waste. They even were able to work out a deal with a nearby restaurant which allowed the restaurant to eliminate their garbage collection bill. Using methanogenic bacteria, the system turned waste into clean-burning methane fuel. This came to replace the community's natural gas. The biodigester's effluent was a solution of water, nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus—liquid fertilizer! This allowed the aquaponics system to grow even more: foods like tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, beans, peas, squash, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, corn, radishes, carrots, onions, and even a couple dwarf citrus trees.

By the time the system was installed the neighborhood was already hosting a fresh batch of WWOOFers. One such student hit on a novel approach to heating and lighting the greenhouse during winter. A second hoop-style greenhouse was built over the original, with a 2' gap left between the two. The methane was piped through old glass lantern mantles. When burned, this provided white light, nearly-pure CO₂, and heat. This light helped extend the growing season for the plants. The captured CO₂ passed through heat-exchange pipes installed within the greenhouse. This heated the greenhouse while cooling the CO₂, which was finally dispersed through soapy water. This resulted in a CO₂-foam that filled the space between the greenhouses. The water & CO₂ absorbed and stored infrared light both from within and without the greenhouse. The white foam reflected back the gaslight. The net result of this experiment was cheap, artificial lighting & heat, which doubled as heat & light insulation, resulting in a more lush greenhouse, all while processing the community's solid waste into a useful fertilizer.

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Building a Better Future

Since the student interns already had to write up their work, from conception stage to final results, the community created a wiki to share their ideas, successes, and failures with the world. Soon, each community project—whether student-led, WWOOFer-led, or community-led—was being extensively documented on a wiki page.

For their next project the neighborhood installed a Raspberry Pi—a cheap, open-source microcontroller. This measured the inputs and outputs of the greenhouse, aquaponics system, and biodigester. It monitored and recorded temperature, pressure, pH, flow volumes, methane & CO₂ ratios, retention times, etc. These data could be read by anyone via real-time reporting on one of their wiki pages. Along with reporting their design specifications and materials lists others began utilizing and improving their systems.

A group in India made a novel design change in their system which lowered the amount of electricity needed to pump water. A group in Peru found that their bacteria culture produced more methane at similar temperatures. Each community connected through various internet platforms and made their data openly available to each other and each community benefitted from each other's tweaks.

There was a setback though, most of the Indian group's materials were documented in Bengali, while the Peruvian team had written everything in Spanish. Still, within two weeks all three projects were communicating with ease due to their use of an innovative platform called DuoLingo. It is an online language-learning tool that teaches language comprehension by giving students real-world text to translate. The communities crowd-sourced translations of each website & document. The students were provided with non-standard source material and the groups got free translations which they used to create mirrors of each other's work.

This model of innovation became so successful, that multiple communities around the world began using their site to document their sustainability and permaculture projects. The site's international community developed measurement & performance standards and translations became more and more rapid. An organization working in Africa created a Raspberry Pi-based, pedal powered computer that networks via shortwave radio. These computers were used to access and rehost the wiki in remote areas.

This worldwide network of independent communities had accidently created a kind of open-source academic journal where experiments were tried, replicated, and verified. They had incidentally recreated peer-review! And best of all it was free to access and unanchored to any for-profit university or journal system. Once the students had graduated and began looking for jobs, they discovered that having documented their work on the Internet, they could easily reference them as proof of mastery. The model of resumes and degrees started to become outdated. People began pursuing projects as a form of education and reputation building. More people began utilizing autodidactic communalism meaning fewer people needed to participate in the debt-based education system.

People in the original Portland neighborhood began engaging children in community problem solving as a form of education. This extended their feelings of useful inclusivity. More children began mastering critical thinking, because it now actually served a purpose other than filling out a worksheet. Having access to the Internet, they began coming up with their own projects and finding innovative solutions to an array of problems. Teenagers would often mentor the other children guiding them on how to find solutions on their own.

During one of these projects one of the neighborhood teens, who was interested in programming, realized that once the data points from several technologies were established and confirmed, it was possible to create a model the performance of their systems on a computer. He realized that the community's several aquaponics systems could be connected together into a single more efficient, chemically diverse system. This led him to realize he could use his maximization algorithms to take data from all across the wikis and find ways to fit each system together. He created plug-n-play systems that could be tailored to fit the human needs across a gamut of environments. His systems then went on to completely eliminate the concept of waste.

This led to a worldwide open-source innovation revolution, where the performance of all new micro-scale innovations were documented in a standardized format and added to a database. Through this database users could simulate performance of different combinations of techniques that would utilize the flows of energy they had in abundance—most commonly solar, hydrologic, aeolian, thermal, and aerobic & anaerobic decomposition. Many of the communities purchased and/or made a variety of open-sourced 3D printers that could print in metal, glass, ceramic, plastic, and graphene. Now specialized parts could be quickly fabricated, tested, improved upon, and shared. New parts spread globally very quickly and the pace of technological innovation quickened.

Innovation on this scale allowed for the utilization of the vast resources of human ingenuity to tackle local problems and generate many different solutions. The computer simulations of potentially combinable solutions closed the gap of linear consumption and ended the incentives to participate in any consumption that didn't feed back into the community. These naturally regenerating cycles led to an abundance of delicious food, clean water, harvestable energy, shared information, and ground-breaking technology allowing the Earth to sustain a high standard of living for all 9 billion of its human inhabitants. The spirit of sharing inherent in the open-source model led to a global sense of brotherhood. Each community gifted its solutions in good faith without forcing their ideologies or assumptions on any other community.

Such was the liberation of 9 billion thinking, dancing, loving, exploring, laughing, striving human beings. They spent their days exploring their connections with each other, the natural world, their own consciousness, and the things that sparked their passions. Thus ended the age of competition and began the next chapter in the never-ending story of the evolution of consciousness.

If you enjoyed this article, please check out the first article in the series.