The Plowboy Interview: Frank Herbert

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I also feel strongly—and act on my feelings—that individuals should take their own steps to be more self-reliant and to lessen their impact on our environment.

PLOWBOY: What have you done to live that belief?

HERBERT: Did you see the solar collector on the side of our house? That's what's heating our home. Now I didn't say to myself that I'd wait until we could get all our heat, all the time, from solar energy . . . or that putting up a collector would disrupt the beautiful lines on this already constructed house . . . or that I wouldn't build the heater until we could come up with a way to store the warmth. I simply decided to build an inexpensive collector—the device's sun-catching "tracking rings" are made from recycled beer cans—in order to use solar heat when I can. You see, people keep looking for an absolute final solution, often waiting to use alternative technology until they can build an energy-saving house from scratch, when there are many intermediate steps available to us.

Bev and I also grow all our own vegetables. We live in an area that has what the U.S. Department of Agriculture describes as "poverty soil". So, when we moved here eight years ago, I paid $200 to have peat hauled in by truck and dumped in the stone terraces out back. Our neighbors laughed at us for spending all that money on peat . . . but the vegetable crops we grew in those walled beds paid us back that investment in just a year and a half.

I also have an attached greenhouse . . . I'm slowly but surely thermopaning all the house's windows . . . I intend to add a solar collector over our swimming pool building to heat its water . . . and—for a time—I even raised chickens to provide manure for my methane experiments.

In addition, a friend—John Ottenheimer—and I have invented a wind machine. Our device is built on a vertical axis . . . a feature which allows us to transmit the power quite easily to the ground, and keeps the device from being "torqued down" by sudden wind shifts. Our machine can withstand a 100-knot gust, yet can be built out of plastic, wood, or any of a variety of inexpensive materials.

PLOWBOY: Are you marketing this windplant?

HERBERT: Not yet, but we intend to. We're still testing and refining the design . . . we've been working on it for five years.

Another way I try to do my bit for ecology and alternate lifestyles is by bringing "movers and shakers"—men and women like the officers of Weyerhaeuser Tree Company—out here to see our place. I think it's extremely important to reach people who are making decisions that will affect the lives of us all, and to show them that you don't have to be "a kook living in a tipi"—that image is meant to describe their way of thinking, not my own-to be interested in supplying some of your own energy and food.

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