Karl Hess: Presidential Speechwriter Turned Homesteader

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Anyway, at the IPS, I began to work out the theories of small scale organization. We all knew that small groups could operate very effectively and I was trying to learn why. Which led me, after a while, to start putting together a community-oriented encyclopedia of science and technology that would attack the mythology of large-scale organization big business and big government-that has such an insidious influence on our culture.

PLOWBOY: Wait a minute. Weren't you going about your job the wrong way? I mean, you were trying to develop down-to-earth ideas and theories that ordinary, lower-income residents of AdamsMorgan could use in their day-to-day lives. Right?

HESS: Right.

PLOWBOY: Well, aren't scientific and technological concepts just a little bit difficult for the average citizen to handle?

HESS: No, not when you boil such logic down to its most basic form. We live in a world where all normally intelligent people use a very scientific approach in dealing with material things it's just that most of us don't realize it.

You have to be a scientist to function effectively nowadays. The car you drive has roughly the explosive potential of a whole box of artillery shells. When you turn on a water tap, you're working with hydraulics a science that was unknown until the 20th century. And look at the average kitchen. It's an alchemist's laboratory. You've got to use scientific methods when you handle such equipment or you'll kill yourself.

So it occurred to us that if we could show the people in our rather downtrodden neighborhood that they were already thinking scientifically well, maybe that fact would give them the confidence to think more for themselves and listen less to politicians who (chuckle) don't ever think rationally.

OK. So much for the tough one, science. Technology which is really just the application of mechanical principles to the work of making things-was even easier. We simply begged some space in an old warehouse, started a research and development organization called Community Technology, and began trying to find ways for our city neighborhood to become more self-sufficient. In food, energy in everything we used. But especially in food.

PLOWBOY: Your work, then, must have closely paralleled that done by the Adams-Morgan Institute for Local Self-Reliance. (See the Plowboy Interview with Gil Friend and David Morris in MOTHER NO. 36.

HESS: Oh yes. While the ILSR was starting a rooftop hydroponic garden on one building, Therese and I were hand-carrying a ton of dirt up to the top of another for a more conventional organic garden. We exchanged notes and decided that city dwellers could go either way. Raising vegetables in town is easy. You can do it in the middle of Manhattan.

On the other hand, it quickly became apparent to us all that you probably don't know any way to produce your own protein in Manhattan. Or in any other large city. So we put one of our group who was a chemist and knew a lot about fish-to work designing a system that would raise rainbow trout under high-density conditions in, say, the basement of a downtown apartment building. And then we built a few fiberglass tanks and filtered the chlorine out of our city water and bought some commercial trout food and we actually raised ourselves some trout.

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