🎙️ Living Libraries and the Fruits of Knowledge we harvest from building a hand made solar hot water system

(Teleprompter Script — Final Complete Edition)

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(lights rise; calm, reflective tone)

Two days ago, my son — Sinar Nawar — was born.
His name means radiant blossom.

Holding him reminded me of every child born without the guarantee of something as simple as hot water. It reminded me why our students and I are building what we call a “refugee-camp-ready solar-hot-water system.” It will be a system that can be delivered as a reasonable sized "kit in a box" (5 foot by 1 foot by 6 inches) and needs no brazing (torch welding) or combustible gases or electricity, but can be put together with simple hand tools.

Why?

Because warmth, dignity, and cleanliness should never depend on privilege or infrastructure.

Last week, here at Rosebud Continuum,
a high-school student named Deaven — rhymes with Heaven —
was helping us build a solar-hot-water system with Landmark Solutions Engineer Paco Amran.

We talked about how useful trigonometry was for getting the angle of the solar collector right,
how Pythagoras’s Theorem gives you the hypotenuse, the stand height, and the ground distance.

I thought about how many students over my 35 years of teaching —
from kindergarten to graduate school, ten of those years teaching at-risk high-school students in U.S. ghettos —
would ask that famous question:

“But, Teacher, when will I ever actually use algebra?
When will I ever use trigonometry?”

And that one word — use — messed me up.

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I tried to answer Paco’s question about how I got started in renewable energy in Egypt,
and found myself tripping over my own words.

He was praising my engineering skills and inventiveness despite not having formal training.
“I’m not an engineer,” I told our team — “just an academic…”

But then I said,

“When I was in Egypt, I was able to use the people around me — plumbers, copper welders, glass-cutters, metal-smiths, carpenters, even local engineers — to help me build my first solar-hot-water systems.”

And I caught myself.

Through Logic 3-based Nexus Thinking, I sounded like a typical settler-colonialist.
I was a guest in a country not my own —
and I was using the word use like I owned the place.

That felt terrible.

“Use?” No. That’s not what happened.

I backtracked.

“I don’t mean I used them,” I stammered… “I mean — I was able to take advantage of…”

I stopped again, embarrassed.
“Well — no, not take advantage of them, but of their skills…”

Another pause.

“I lived there. We each had something to offer to solve the problems we faced.”

The electricity and water were always being cut.
When there was water, it was rarely hot.
People used dangerous kerosene baburs, sometimes even burned garbage just to heat water.

We had to work together.

I had university access, research privileges, the ability to take financial risks.
They had the skills.
Each of us contributed what we had.

Uggh — those words: use, take advantage of — ick.
That’s not how it was.
We co-created something.

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Because behind those words sits an entire worldview.

We’ve been taught to see learning as utility:
to use math, to use people, to use nature — as if everything were just a tool.

But what happens when we stop using and start relating?

That question took me back to the anthropologist David Graeber.
He wrote that the Romans had three words for what we now flatten into use:

• Usus — the right to make use of something.
  
  

• Fructus — the right to enjoy its fruits.
  
  

• Abusus — the right to destroy or exhaust it through ownership.
  
  

Together they formed Dominium —
the abusive right to ruin what one controls.

We inherited that language.
It hides inside our speech:
“I used this opportunity.” “I used this person’s skills.” “I used this resource.”

Each phrase quietly encodes dominion.

But in the Nexus way of thinking, life doesn’t work through dominion.
It works through exchange.

An animal doesn’t use a tree when it eats its fruit.
It partners with the tree, dispersing seeds to grow more trees.
The fruit is part of the exchange —
sweet sustenance traded for fertility and distance.

That’s usufructus, not abusus —
the use of fruits that keeps the cycle alive.

So many Indigenous and First Nations peoples honored usufruct rights —
the right to use the fruit of, not to use or abuse the fruit bearer.

As Michael Pollan wrote in The Botany of Desire,
plants and humans co-evolve — partners in a long conversation of attraction and care.

Even when students ask about trigonometry,
I realize: the real lesson isn’t when we’ll use math,
but how we relate to what we learn.

That’s why I invite my students to create relational summaries —
to build partnerships with the material,
to decide whether knowledge becomes a weapon of domination
or a fruit we share.

(pause; shift tone)

And that reflection brought me back to Cairo — to the moment when philosophy became plumbing.

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Part 2 — The Living Library of Cairo

When I arrived in Cairo as a graduate student,
I thought I knew what learning looked like:
libraries, notes, citations, proper authors.

But Darb al-Ahmar had other plans.

The first night the electricity went out.
The water stopped.
The hot-water heater died.

I sat in the dark, feeling the winter chill — yes, Cairo gets cold —
hearing generators hum in wealthier districts and thinking,
so this is energy poverty — not a concept, a heartbeat without power.

At the university library I found elegant equations,
but nothing that could heat water on a rooftop built of scrap.

So I stepped outside.
And the real library opened its doors.

The plumber, hammering at a leaky pipe, taught me pressure and patience.
The nahas, the copper-welder, showed me how metal glows before it melts,
so together we could make a leak-proof 12-pipe manifold.
The glass-cutter, the tinsmith, the scrap-dealer — each offered a page in the book of survival.

They didn’t lend me their skills to be used;
they invited me to learn their language of doing.

They were my teachers. I was their apprentice.

A community is a living library — every person a book filled with tacit knowledge,
stories annotated by callouses, laughter, and repaired tools.

When I shared a research diagram, they shared muscle memory.
It was a book swap, not a transaction.

Of course, they “used” me too — if we must keep the word —
but not through exploitation: through co-creation.
I was their research assistant; they were my engineers.

We were co-authors of a text none of us could have written alone.

That’s the essence of Nexus Thinking —
seeing the connections between water, energy, food, and the people who sustain them.

We didn’t just build a solar-hot-water system.
We built a network of trust —
copper pipes soldered with conversation, glass boxes sealed with gratitude.

Each hot shower was a chapter finished;
each failure, a lesson footnoted in friendship.

Years later, designing the refugee-camp-ready version,
we weren’t applying Cairo’s design elsewhere.
We were applying the mindset —
Palestine, Jordan, Morocco, Florida — anywhere people are told they lack resources.

Because the real resource is relationship.
The hardware follows the heart.

And so, when Deaven and Paco and Chelsea and I talk about trigonometry,
I realize we’ve come full circle.
Math, like community, is a way of describing relationships —
angles of sunlight, lines of trust, the geometry of care.

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Part 3 — Design WITH the Other 90 Percent

When I first began researching sustainable design,
I discovered the Cooper Hewitt Museum’s exhibit “Design for the Other 90%.”
I devoured the book.

At first, for sounded generous.
We design for the poor.
It sounded noble.

But after years in Cairo I understood: that tiny preposition carried a hierarchy —
the same shadow as Dominium — the designer above the designed-for.

So when I was inducted into the National Geographic Explorer family,
I was overjoyed to see the exhibit reborn as “Design With the Other 90%.”

At headquarters in Washington D.C., I walked through with explorers from every continent,
realizing that with wasn’t just a word change — it was an epistemological revolution.

“Design for” assumes charity.
“Design with” restores reciprocity.
It turns the designer from savior to student, benefactor to collaborator.

That echoed what I’d first encountered reading E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful (1973): Economics as if People Mattered.
Back then, it was philosophy.
Now, it was life.

During my junior year abroad from Harvard,
I spent fifteen months in Tunisia and Egypt,
studying Arabic, acting in plays, living daily life.

At the American University in Cairo Theater,
I played Joxer Daly in Juno and the Paycock,
an Irish character in poverty and pride who says:

“If you want to know me, come and live with me.”

At the time, it was just a line.
Two decades later, back in Cairo for my Ph.D., it became a methodology —
participant observation turned participatory co-creation.

I’ll never forget visiting Laila Iskander,
who would later become Egypt’s Environment Minister,
or Saif Rashidi from the Aga Khan Foundation,
when I brought sixteen UCLA urban-planning students to study informal settlements.

I asked them both, separately:

“Why don’t you have solar hot-water systems here, like they do up north in Israel and Palestine? You have more sun!”

Both gave the same answer:

“Because you aren’t here to do it.”

“Why me?” I asked.

“Because you asked the question,” they said.
“You care. We’re busy with our priorities.
But we’d love it — so, yalla, come live with us and make it happen.”

That was one of the most important lessons of my life.
Change doesn’t begin with expertise; it begins with presence.

Somebody has to stay — the catalyst with Disney’s “stick-to-it-ivity.”

It’s not enough to design for the other 90%.
We must design with them — live with, learn with, fail and rebuild with.

To understand — to echo Dr. Alan Rayner’s Natural Inclusion — that we are them.

Because until you’ve shared a cold morning waiting for water that never warms,
you’ll never truly understand what a solar-hot-water system means.
It’s not about temperature.
It’s about dignity.

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🔹 Insert – The Fractal Lesson

(reflective; hands open as if tracing invisible geometry in the air)

And the learning didn’t stop in Cairo.
Every new version of that same simple solar-hot-water system keeps widening the circle — like a fractal repeating itself at a higher level of awareness.

Today, here at Rosebud Continuum, our student Chelsea Mandriguez — whose partner is Palestinian-Jordanian — said something that struck me:

“This project just keeps going deeper and deeper.
There’s no end to what you can learn from it.”

She’s right.

Because in Egypt, following a Palestinian practice born from constant water and power cuts,
we learned to build two-barrel systems:
a cold-water barrel mounted above a hot-water barrel that leaned on its stand of solar collectors.

In Israel, where reliable utilities serve wealthier neighborhoods, you see only one horizontal tank —
cold water flows in under pressure.
But in the poorer areas you see two vertical barrels,
storing water whenever there’s service, then feeding it down into the lower hot-water tank where thermosiphoning takes place.

I realized we could improve on that idea.
I began experimenting with a used IBC tote — the kind used for transporting liquids —
as both cold-water reservoir and support frame.
It became the stand for the hot-water barrel and the lean-to for the solar panels.

The challenge then became:
How do you lift the cold water from the IBC tank — about 0.75 meters above the ground —
up to the hot-water barrel, which sits roughly 1.1 meters higher (about 1.85 meters total)?

We needed a low-cost, power-independent solution.

When I gave a talk at the Shimon Peres Center for Peace,
a high-school student approached afterward.
He said he’d been following my work online and wanted to help.

A few weeks later, at another lecture near Bethlehem with the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies,
the same young man appeared — this time holding a small box.

“I think I’ve figured out a way to do it,” he said.
“It’s called an air-lift pump.
I don’t know if it’ll work, but here are all the parts — maybe you can figure it out.”

I brought them back to New York and started experimenting — yes, in my own bathroom in my mother’s New York apartment while I was teaching “The Psychology of Environmental Sustainability and Justice”  full time  at Mercy College.
And it worked.

A simple 10-watt solar panel powered a 5-watt DC aquarium air pump,
lifting water 1.5 times its depth — just enough to raise it from the IBC tank into the upper barrel.
No mechanical pump. No clogged impellers. Just bubbles and gravity.

At first, I used it for what I called air-lift aeroponics,
but soon realized it could solve one of the biggest issues of off-grid living:
how to move water without depending on constant electricity.

Chelsea looked at me and reflected on the fractal nature of insight tied to hands-on experience.
I said, 

“This is like Walt Whitman saying he could see the whole world in a blade of grass — or Faraday’s “Natural History of a Candle” with a simple flame inviting him to the entire cosmos. From one tiny thing, you can see the whole world.”

And her intuition is right.
This humble solar-hot-water system isn’t just an appliance.
It’s a fractal of understanding — a living metaphor for Nexus Thinking itself.
Start anywhere — in water, energy, food, or community —
and if you follow the relationships,
you end up everywhere that matters.

(beat; smile of recognition)
Which brings me to another lesson — about who gets to stand in the light when those relationships succeed…

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🔹The African Union Lesson

After those early rooftops in Cairo,
Mostafa Hussein — a carpenter-apprentice trainer in Darb al-Ahmar —
and Hanna Fathy — a Zabaleen recycler and agronomy student —
and I formed our NGO:
Solar C3ITIES — Connecting Community Catalysts Integrating Technologies for Industrial Ecology Solutions.

With a small infrastructure grant,
we hired local stakeholders and built thirty hand-made solar hot-water systems.

Then the invitations started coming —
conferences in fancy hotels,
the African Union, even MENA House for a National Geographic television event.

At first they wanted only “the academic.”
(gentle smile)
I insisted Mostafa, Hanna, and our community partners be on stage with me —
and that they be treated like dignitaries,
not sent to “eat in the kitchen with the help.”
Because Design With means share the mic — and share the meal.

At one African Union session,
an attendee stood up — polished, confident — and asked,
in a tone that carried a hierarchy:

“Why talk about local solar hot water construction?
This isn’t Europe or America — it’s Africa.
The poor have other priorities.”

I asked where she was from.
“Nairobi.”

I asked if she had a hot-water heater at home,
and if she was taking warm showers in this hotel.
“Of course.”

(beat)

Then I asked:

“Why should a mother bathing her infant on a winter morning
in Cairo’s informal communities want anything less?
Would you bathe your baby in cold water before work?”

(soft pause)

She took a breath.
Quietly, she said, “No.”
And sat down.

Because this work has never been about temperature.
It has always been about dignity —
and about who we count as worthy of it.

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Part 4 — From Necessity to Innovation: Nexus as Reciprocity

When we talk about Design with the Other 90%,
we must also talk about intentions.
Good intentions are never enough — the road to hell is paved with them.

In 1968, activist priest Monsignor Ivan Illich delivered his famous speech to Peace Corps volunteers:
“To Hell with Good Intentions.”

He warned that charity without humility is another form of colonialism.

That message haunted me.
Because the “problems” we rush to fix abroad
often mirror the ones we ignore at home.

We don’t need to save the world;
we need to live responsibly where we are — and the world will meet us there.

When I moved into the Cairo neighborhoods of Darb al-Ahmar and Muqattam,
they became my backyard.

Their resilience and humor taught me to see my own U.S. communities differently.
Poverty, pollution, precarity — they aren’t “over there.”
They’re right here, beneath our glitter.

That truth hit home one night in Rajasthan, India,
at the Barefoot College — where the poorest women become solar engineers.

It was 2 a.m.
I sat with Roy Bunker, drinking wine in his office.
I said, “Roy, I’d love to work here.”

He smiled gently:

“Thomas, you’re already poisoned.”

(beat)

It hit me like a solar flare.

He didn’t mean cruelty.
He meant that my Harvard and UCLA education had taught me to measure and manage,
but not always to listen and belong.

At Barefoot they hire teachers who’ve lived poverty,
who feel environmental injustice.

“Here,” he said,

“our teachers come from the slums and villages.
They blend art, music, tradition, and indigenous wisdom with high and low tech alike.
They embody what James C. Scott calls Metis — local knowledge — fused with Techne — formal expertise.
That’s how we avoid what he warned about in Seeing Like a State (1998) — grand schemes that fail because they never learn from the people living them.”

He was right.
The real work isn’t to teach, but to unlearn.

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And I’ve found allies on that path.
One is Katrin Pütz, founder of (B)Energy Biogas in Germany.
She champions “Aid-free development.”

Her biodigester businesses run on empowerment, not dependency.
She reminds us — as economist André Gunder Frank warned in The Development of Underdevelopment (1966) —
that foreign aid can become a tool of control,
a way for wealth to perpetuate dependency while calling it progress.

It’s the same illusion in the Walrasian world system,
named for economist Léon Walras,
which imagines perfect markets, perfect knowledge, and balance through central equilibrium —
a model built on the fantasy that economies behave like clockwork rather than like coral reefs.

But the real world isn’t an equation.
It’s a network of relationships — messy, adaptive, decentralized —
more like a forest than a factory.

That’s the world we need to design for — no, with.

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And that’s what we do now,
here at Rosebud Continuum —

building refugee-camp-ready solar-hot-water systems
and community-scale biodigesters,
working with plumbers, students, artists, and engineers —
each a page in the living library of human creativity.

Because every time we turn waste into warmth,
or sunlight into hot water,
or a question into collaboration,
we close the loop.
We make Nexus Thinking tangible.

(softly)

When my son Sinar Nawar cries in the night,
and I warm the water to bathe him,
I think of the children born in refugee camps
and remember: they too are part of my backyard.

Everywhere we live is the center of the world — if we live there with care.

(beat)

Because the ultimate renewable resource
is not sunlight, or water, or biogas.
It’s relationship.

(soft pause; close with conviction)

That’s what I’ve learned from the living libraries of Cairo,
from Barefoot College, from Rosebud, from my students, and from Sinar.

The future won’t be built for anyone.
It will be built with everyone.