Energy Independence: 2021

This is who I am today.

Well, last year actually... baby Naigh, born in the late spring of the Covid Pandemic, is a year and a half old toddler as I write these words, but he is still making vital, as in "living", contributions to our off-grid lifestyle, as you will be able to see from the following video -- meaning that the contents of his solar-hot-water washed cloth diapers, which you are probably grateful you won't see in the movie, power one of the experimental biodigesters we have on-site around our RV tiny-home at the Rosebud Continuum Eco-Science Center in Land-O-Lakes Florida. Let's check it out:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOVL1-5slkU

The lifestyle my wife Enas and I are trying to create for our son Naigh Levant comes from a blend of our cultures -- Enas is from a small rural village in Palestine by the occupation wall north of Ramallah where her father built a solar hot water system and where all family members always turn off the lights and recycle water and food scraps and grow as much food as they can at home because attention to conservation and reuse is the only way to survive the electricity and water constantly being cut and food and gas shortages are a fact of life.
I was born in the city of Chicago but my mother is Iraqi and Lebanese and growing up I saw the devastating effects of political turmoil and war on my relatives there.

In fact, it was my Rockefeller experience that solidified the intention I had developed studying Biological Anthropology at Harvard and living first at Currier House -- which, in the 1980s people joked as being the house where "The Third World met the Nerd World" -- and then at the Jordan Co-Op, which people joked as being Harvard's "on-campus Vegetarian commune". I applied for the Rockefeller Fellowship sitting at the Tozzer Anthropology library across from the Harvard Biological Laboratories where I had my work-study job studying leeches and in my application I declared my intention to find some place where humans and the natural world could co-exist without conflict.

When I got to the interview I remember how grateful I was for the presence of Abby Rockefeller, Abby being the early pioneer and champion of composting toilets as live-saving solutions and alternatives to the dysfunctionally linear "cradle-to-grave" system of resource extraction, destruction, and waste we have created. I was able to talk about how inspired I had been to see them in action, along with hydroponics and aquaponics and solar power at the New Alchemy Institute on Cape Cod, which I had visited freshman year with the set-building crew of the Hasty Pudding show I was in -- Serf's Up -- about a peasant rebellion. My entire time at Harvard I spent thinking of how to find a community of like-minded spirits who would be truly interested in and invested in ending our environmental and social and economic dilemmas. I declared my intention to use my fellowship year to go to Borneo and live among people of the rainforest whom I had studied in my classes. The committee asked me, "So, Mr. Culhane, if you find your eco-paradise, what then, do you just stay there and kiss this civilization goodbye?" I replied, "no, on the contrary, if I find a way of living that actually works and brings peace with nature and other cultures and creates happiness and environmental sustainability I would have to come back and share what I discover with everybody here at home so that we can all benefit."
The committee said, "Then, on the basis of this promise, we will award you the Rockefeller Fellowship".

And I did discover some incredibly hopeful and inspiring things during my Rockefeller year, principle among which is that there are cultures, cultures not our own but that could very well be our own, that don't believe in the concept of waste, cultures that find nature and our role in it to be sacred and whose members participate in systems that make nature and human nature MORE productive, not less.

My Rockefeller year took me from Borneo, where for a year I lived and hunted and fished and gathered with the Melayu and Dyak peoples while doing rain forest ecology research at Harvard's Gunung Palung field site and joining medical missionaries in the interior, to Baghdad, where I spent half a year helping my mother's family through the terrible effects of the Iran-Iraq war, which almost cost me my life when a missile hit the building we were in. I learned the joys and benefits and necessities of self-provisioning, and the promise I made to the Rockefeller Committee kept playing like a song in my head so that in reality, my Rockefeller Experience never ended and I got addicted to a pattern of continually exploring culture's not my own, looking for the solutions they offered for solving humanity's collective existential crises and bringing them home to share with others who didn't have the privilege of such hopeful encounters.

To keep up this... this "addiction" I'll call it, though there is nothing negative about it... the only real career I could conceive us was that of a teacher -- a teacher of sustainability and political ecology and urban ecology and regional and international development -- and that is what I do today. And it was in pursuing my Master's and Ph.D. in this field, the former doing research and living in the jungles of Guatemala and the latter doing research and living in the slums of Cairo -- an almost exact replica of my Rockefeller Experience, that I discovered and modified home-scale biodigesters, an ancient technology that caught the attention of National Geographic and brought me into their tribe, if you like, as a National Geographic Explorer.

I'd like to share with you a 3 minute video they produced for their International National Geographic Cengage Learning Textbook series that goes into greater detail about the solution to the scourges of food waste and toilet waste that have become the main focus of my research and development deployment around the world:

As should now be abundantly clear, I brought home from the Rockefeller experience, and am now living at home a lifestyle that is as close to the zero-waste philosophy I learned from the indigenous people of Borneo coupled with the resiliency I had to learn in war-torn Baghdad from my grandparents and relatives.

It started at Harvard with a hope, a hunch, a suspicion, a sense that we can do better.