Chapter 23

Caretakers of the Earth

DURING ONE of our walks at Xanadu, my father told me that none of us own real estate. “We are only stewards,” he said, “charged with taking care of the planet for our grandchildren.” This philosophy became, in Chapterhouse: Dune, a tenet of the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood. Similarly, he wrote in his short story “Death of a City” (1973): “Only the species owned land, owned cities.”

On his six-acre Port Townsend farm, Frank Herbert finally established his “Ecological Demonstration Project” (EDP) to explore the application of alternative energy sources, such as wind, solar and methane gas. From Dune to New World or No World to the Green Brain, he wrote frequently about the environment, presenting frightening images of world ecological systems in trouble. His famous EDP was a Frank Herbert story in and of itself, one in which he “learned by doing,” as he liked to say—the best way of learning anything.

He started it largely because he wanted to practice what he had been preaching. For years he had been crisscrossing the United States talking about environmental issues, and for a long time he had wanted to get his hands dirty, performing experiments that would bring the discussion out of the realm of theory and into the realm of application.

When he began the EDP shortly before the Arab oil crisis of 1973–1974, he spoke of a five-year plan. In that time frame he hoped to prove it was possible to live in comfort while only drawing small amounts of resources from the public energy system. However, my mother’s illness and other factors prevented him from meeting this deadline, one of the few times in the life of this journalist that he did not meet a deadline.

Xanadu was one of his visions for mankind’s future, in which he was developing methods by which modern man might utilize the resources of the planet efficiently, with minimal harm to the environment. As he spoke, I thought of Leto II in Children of Dune, receiving the visions from his father, Paul Atreides, when the elder’s time was past.

A great deal of misinformation about Frank Herbert’s EDP has circulated in the science fiction and environmental communities—principally that my father intended to become entirely self-sufficient, producing one hundred percent of his food and energy needs. Dad said that was like the myth of the perpetual motion machine, a machine that could operate without external influence.

“We’re all part of society,” he said. “We can’t stop interacting with it.”

During his entire life, Frank Herbert shopped in food markets, and never disconnected his homes from public utility systems. Through experimentation, he just utilized these facilities less than most people…and espoused that others follow his lead.

Dad coined an interesting word for self-sufficiency, no matter the degree of application. He called it “technopeasantry,” almost an oxy-moron, and spoke of the particular adaptability of Americans to such systems. He always said we were a nation of “screwdriver mechanics,” with a lot of people who didn’t mind getting their hands dirty.

My parents’ modified A-frame house featured vaulted ceilings and large windows, with large sheets of glass in each gable—all the way to the eaves. The glass was single pane—so it was not the most efficient home to heat. They had an oil furnace with a two-hundred-gallon tank, but were considering the installation of a forced-air wood-burning system.

Before doing that Dad wanted to try solar power, which he believed held great promise for solving his heating problems. With the assistance of an environmental housing expert he designed a passive solar collection system that he hoped would reduce his dependence upon heating oil by around fifty percent. The results were slightly better than that. Even on fifty-degree days when the sun was partially or completely behind clouds, the system produced seventy-two-degree heat. In fact, heat even came out of the system in the middle of the night, despite the absence of a heat storage facility in the design. Dad was amused by this, and found it baffling.

The solar energy system, built on the south roof of the house just above the greenhouse, had simple panels made of plywood, large sheets of thermopane glass, and, remarkably, aluminum beer cans. It had Fiberglas insulation. To keep the cost down, thermopane seconds were used, which had small scratches on them. A control panel with a cedar cover was installed on one wall of the living room.

For solar heat collectors, a few inches behind the thermopane, they set up banks of aluminum beer cans cut in half horizontally with a power saw and attached so that their cupped insides faced the sun. The solar collector system comprised an area of one hundred forty-five square feet, set in six panels. In one of the panels, the cans were painted entirely flat black, with high-temperature paint. In another panel, the cans were left unpainted, in a plain aluminum color. And in the remaining four panels, the cans were only painted black on their interior bottoms, leaving the rest in their natural aluminum reflective state.

Through experimentation Dad found that the completely black cans absorbed slightly more infrared heat, making them more desirable for this application. It was a convection heat redistribution system, in which he used the furnace fan to circulate the air into the solar collectors and back into the house.

He used approximately one thousand, seven hundred and fifty aluminum beer cans, most of which were purchased from a recycling center. Still, he liked to imply other sources, quipping, “I received a lot of help from my friends putting the system together.”

While Dad got this passive-solar system going, he still believed solar technology was too expensive for the average household. He wanted to develop a low-cost alternative energy system for homeowners, something that could be sold in Sears or Wards catalogs for five hundred dollars or less. Until the prices for solar collection technology came down, he thought wind power might be the best answer to produce electricity, which would in turn be converted to heat.

Dad found that buildings used more energy for heating when the wind blew because of the wind-chill factor, and came up with an ingenious solution. If a building had a windmill for generating electricity, it could offset the cooling effect of the wind, flattening out the heat-loss curve by turning a generator and warming a house electrically whenever the wind blew. The harder the wind blew, the more it would heat.

He built a sturdy concrete-walled shop on the hill above his house, intending to construct a second-level conference center with guest bunks sometime in the future. In this scenario he had dreams of teaching writing classes and of conducting courses on environmental issues for corporate and political leaders. All electrical and heating needs for the conference center would be provided by on-site systems. Above the conference center there would be, someday, a thirty-foot concrete tower with a windmill on top. In studying wind technology, he found there had been very few advances since the invention of the horizontal-axis Dutch windmill in the sixteenth century. He envisioned developing something that focused wind power and employed modern aerodynamic principles.

Working with an architect he designed and patented a cylindrical, vertical-axis windmill with a horn on top that focused and concentrated the wind. Air passing through the horn spun a vertical shaft by pushing vanes on it, and this in turn activated an automobile alternator, producing AC electricity. The device had no gears or belts, and was very simple, with relatively few parts.

Dad had a four-foot-high, four-foot-diameter prototype built, which was mounted on a truck chassis and connected to a calibrated speedometer for testing. The unit, self-propelled and drivable on public roadways, enabled them to estimate that a ten-inch-tall unit having a three-foot diameter could produce one horsepower in a fifty-mile-per-hour wind.

Frank Herbert also developed a rather unusual methane gas generating system by slitting a large truck-tire inner tube, filling it with chicken and duck manure and straw, and then patching the tube. A piece of flexible rubber tubing was attached to the tube at the unsealed valve stem, with a spigot on the other end of the tubing. As the manure and straw decomposed, it produced pressurized methane gas, which Dad used to singe the feathers off chickens and ducks he had slaughtered. He also connected the apparatus to a gas heater, and heated the poultry house.^*

He believed that methane had potential large-scale applications for cities, which could convert sewage into methane gas for the operation of city vehicles, including buses. The byproduct would be fertilizer, useful in gardens and farms. On his own farm, my father shoveled poultry manure into buckets and spread it on the vegetable gardens.

Frank Herbert always had plans to improve his solar, wind and methane systems, but the development, maintenance and promotion of his ecological experiments were taking too much of his valuable time. He decided to reorder his priorities, and as the 1970s drew to a close his Ecological Demonstration Project took a back burner. There were novels to write, book tours, and above all my mother’s health, which required constant monitoring.