In my last post, The Prius Effect, I said that "Pundits up and down the political spectrum doubt society’s capacity to change. The left wing expresses disappointment in our general attachment to selfish interests. The right wing resists change when it threatens its traditional way of seeing the world. The Prius Effect suggests that consumers, in general, are more flexible and inventive than most pundits imagine."

But average consumers are not the only innovative forces creating environmental change in the marketplace. T. Boone Pickens is the very embodiment of the Texas oil tycoon. Worth about $3 billion, according to Forbes magazine, he’s a militantly conservative Republican with a big house in Dallas’ prestigious Preston Hollow neighborhood and an enormous ranch in the Texas panhandle, to which he commutes on the weekends in a private jet. He’s also, arguably, the world’s leading advocate for wind energy.

In 2008, just a couple of months after his 80th birthday, Pickens published The Pickens Plan and budgeted $58 million of his own money to promote it. [1] The plan proposes the rapid development of giant wind farms across the central plains of North America, specifically to replace the electricity we are currently generating with natural gas. The natural gas could then be used, instead, to fuel clean, efficient transportation. The 80-year-old Texan billionaire made dozens of public appearances all over the country and was interviewed by every major news medium. His website for the plan, www.pickensplan.com, is a masterful demonstration of the power of the digital media with a cute little animated Boone preaching about our dependence on foreign oil, with cute little animated wind turbines turning in the background. The blog is called The Daily Pickens. The site distributes widgets that help users reduce their own energy consumption and influence their own lawmakers.

With a click, visitors can join local Pickens Plan groups, take a pledge supporting the plan, join a virtual march in support of the plan, contact lawmakers through e-mail and social networks and – wow – chart their own progress as plan supporters by establishing a push.pickensplan.com account, effectively grading their own level of commitment.

 The Boone Cam has recorded hundreds of cinema verite encounters between Pickens and his famous supporters, from Sarah Palin to Arnold Schwarzenegger. He shows himself traveling to an appearance on the women’s talk show, The View, with Barbara Walters and Whoopi Goldberg. “I think we reach every audience. And the reason we do is because, one, that they see me as a guy whose sincere about what he’s doing… They have confidence in what I’m talking about. If I’m seen as an honest, sincere guy and I’m pushing something that’s good for America, then I’m going to get those women with me.”

To push his plan, Pickens is conspicuously reaching out to all kinds of people who didn’t previously appear on his dance card. The revolving earth-friendly quotes at the top of the Pickens Plan homepage are from people like President Barack Obama and Senator Harry Reid, a Democrat who had previously called Pickens his “mortal enemy” when Pickens played an instrumental role in defeating Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry.

In Bloomberg Markets magazine’s coverage of the National Clean Energy Summit in October of 2009, Reid says, “I started taking missionary lessons from the group supporting T. Boone Pickens… I now belong to the Pickens church. He’s been a good friend and a real visionary…” [2] 

Why are Harry Reid and Whoopi Goldberg publicly giving their love to a swaggering, swashbuckling energy tycoon? Pickens is, after all, only protecting his own investments in wind power. His new role as an environmental visionary is an outgrowth of his new business as a wind-farm developer. The governmental support he is drumming up will eventually provide tax dollars to build the energy grids that are critical to his success.

The Pickens Plan is a self-serving marketing effort to support the Pickens Businesses. But in the process of building his PR machine T. Boone Pickens has given new legitimacy to wind power. By giving renewable energy a Texas drawl and a patriotic tattoo, Pickens has managed to bring wind energy’s practical benefits to light in front of tens of millions of skeptical Americans.

Like the Toyota Prius, T. Boone Pickens is pragmatic and technologically adept. He describes environmental benefits in practical terms that the average person can understand. Most remarkably, he’s voided the tribal politics that separated “tree-hugging environmentalists” from the citizens of the “conservative heartland.”

In the Pickens Plan, wind power is good for the Earth, promotes national security and enhances the U.S. economy. Millions of acres of prairie could be converted from marginally profitable farmland to highly productive power generators. Farmers and ranchers can still operate around the bases of the turbine towers. We haven’t finished measuring every environmental impact of large-scale wind power (there’s some concern about the effects on bird and bat populations), but so far it looks like an environmental and economic winner. Worldwide we doubled our windpower capacity to about 121,000 megawatts between 2005 and 2008, and about 1.5 percent of electricity consumed worldwide is generated by wind power, including 19 percent of Denmark’s power, 11 percent of Spain and Portugal’s and 7 percent of Germany’s. [3] Texas, all by itself, has more wind-power capacity than all but five countries worldwide. If we had electric transportation, its conceivable that the Great Plains could supply all North America’s energy through giant wind-power plantations.

“This is a global game-changer,” as Boone has said [4], “It’s a no-brainer.”

In his 1989 book, A Coming of Wizards, Michael Reynolds says four mystical beings, “wizards,” have guided his work. He says they taught him to “denormalize” his thinking and “surrender” to his own “energy band.”

The results of his mystical inspiration are revolutionary, inspirational and practical successes in the real world.

Mike is the inventor of the Earthship, a home design that uses recycled materials and nature’s original machinery to create snug, self-sufficient solar houses. When I met him in 1982 he’d already been building Earthships for the better part of a decade. They were scattered around northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. They weren’t like any other houses in the world.

Mike had spontaneously, maybe instinctively, set out to solve a bunch of human dilemmas at the same time.

If energy is precious and the consumption of energy causes environmental damage, then houses should be more efficient. So he half-buried his houses in south-facing hillsides and created their south walls entirely from high-quality insulated glass so they would capture the maximum heating energy from the sun. He built durable, moisture-proof roofs, buried them in soil and planted native plants. He invented a unique ventilation system that pulls cool air from outside and pushes overheated air out through skylights during warm weather.

The Earthships needed to store solar energy when the sun was shining to be used at night and during bad weather. Mike designed massive interior walls three or four feet thick and put them in the south-facing windows. He poured thick floors made of concrete or adobe that soaked up the sunshine all day long, then radiated warmth at night.

Old tires, bottles and tin cans overflow our landfills, so Mike decided to use them as building materials. The massive interior walls of his Earthships are made from old tires. Other walls use cans and bottles like bricks, mortared with concrete or adobe. The “bottle walls” are left unstuccoed so that light shines into his whimsical rooms through a mosaic of multicolored prisms.

To stay off costly, inefficient and unsustainable utility grids, Mike outfitted his houses with photovoltaic solar electricity, wind turbines and water-collection systems. He filtered and reused the water from the sinks and bathtubs in the toilets. From the toilets, wastewater went to the gardens.

Because creating an Earthship — or any innovative home designed specifically for the homesite — is a labor-intensive process, Mike kept the mechanics simple. Anyone can quickly learn to build a wall from concrete and tin cans or bottles. He invented a method of packing sand inside stacks of used tires that creates massive, stable interior walls. You can master the process in a few hours. Once they’re stuccoed they have a beautiful natural shape and they store a lot of solar energy.

Built-in planters grow food, year-round, inside the Earthships. One owner picks bananas in the middle of winter at 7,000 feet elevation in the Rocky Mountains from a tree that sits in the window of an Earthship. Some of them include indoor goldfish ponds.

Mike built several Earthships himself, but soon he was coaching an army of Earthship builders, many of them do-it-yourselfers who couldn’t afford to hire a contractor or a crew, or who just wanted to play a personal role in the creation of their own homes. Naturally, the Earthships came in every shape and size imaginable from little one-room “beer-can bungalows” to the late actor Dennis Weaver’s multi-million-dollar Earthship estate in Ridgeway, Colorado. Reportedly, construction of the 8,500-square-foot home utilized 3,000 old tires and more than 350,000 discarded aluminum cans.

There have been Earthship subdivisions and complexes of Earthship condominiums. Now they’ve been built in Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, India, Japan, South America, Europe and Africa. Mike is the subject of a documentary film, “Garbage Warrior,” and has been on every major television network.

Not every Earthship is beautiful, at least not to passers-by. But look in the eyes of the Earthship owner and you’ll see the unmistakable glow of affection when they talk about their homes, especially if they built the house themselves. To their owners, even the funkiest Earthships are lovable. And some of them are architectural wonders.

The early prototypes were experimental. Some of them seemed to soak up the cold right out of the earth, and no woodstove would heat them. Others broiled their occupants, summer and winter. Sometimes Mike went back and fixed them with a new idea or two. Sometimes the homeowners sorted the solutions out for themselves.

Still, today, nearly 40 years after their invention, they are the cutting edge of sustainable architecture.

I’ve ridden up and down dirt roads with Mike, looking at Earthships and listening to him talk about them. He never talked much about the past. Although he was a licensed architect, the history of architecture wasn’t interesting to him and he didn’t operate in any established architectural tradition. He didn’t even seem to be very interested in the history of the Earthship, his own creation. Mike talked mostly about the future, a future in which the Earthship philosophy would be a major force in the world. The Earthship was, after all, invented for the future.

You don’t see many references to Mike Reynolds’ visiting wizards on any of the thousands of Web pages about Earthships these days. But I keep my copy of A Coming of Wizards near at hand as a reminder that sometimes we need to “denormalize” how we think about things.

Photo: Lisa Haneberg (Creative Commons 2.0)