Dude, Grow Your Own

This Fourth of July, Elrond Hubbard celebrates the proud Americans who look at the sorry state of everything and say, “Fuck it. We’ll grow it ourselves.”

‘Cause let’s face it, folks. The world is going to Hell faster than you can say Larsen B Ice Shelf; to shit faster than you can say National Pork Producers Council.

Elrond Hubbard knows he does his part, driving an SUV. And he knows he consumes a buttload of gas in it, what with all his driving to Raleigh to pick up gear, taking it to Sanford or Rolesville or Chocowinity to shoot a video, and taking it back to Raleigh. And while he’s on the road, he consumes an assload of fast food.

He sits in left-turn lanes in Cary wondering where it all ends. Everyone takes twice as long to get to work now because they have to stop in at Starbucks. This means more people turning left, more assholes gunning back out into traffic, more cars idling in drive-throughs, more windshields out there at once reflecting glare into each other like infinity mirrors facing across the intersections.

Elrond Hubbard looks into that heat at 8:00 AM, when it’s already 90 degrees and hazy, and he thinks that all we are doing in the Middle East is stirring the stew. Call him un-patriotic. Call him un-supportive of our troops. Tell him he doesn’t deserve to watch fireworks on Independence Day because he does not honor the war to which they allude. Though we are continually told we are bringing fundamental change to the region, Elrond Hubbard finds himself agreeing with Fred Kaplan’s warning on Slate that, for all the times Bush repeats it, “Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to say.”

George Will sees virtually no realistic alternatives to paying high prices for oil from the Middle East. If we really look like we’re getting in to alternative fuels, he says, the Saudis will just lower oil prices to make potential investing in alternative fuels look less appealing. Anyway, where in our lifestyle are the worst impacts to the environment accrued? Perhaps not so much with carbon dioxide from conventional cars, but in the nitrous oxide and methane, as well as carbon dioxide, emitted in the production and delivery of a hamburger; or the stripping of land by the mining of zinc to make batteries for hybrids, he says.

Elrond Hubbard looks into the smog of hopelessness and thinks that the road to true change is paved not by hardliners with their cries for more war, or by those resigned to the status quo, but industrious folks who don’t waste time preaching about how people ought to live and instead look at what we need and say, “Fuck it. Let's just grow it.”

Friend and utilitarian "G" once lived with Elrond Hubbard. Now he runs a non-profit company New Harvest which plans to someday grow meat as tissue culture, relieving the world and its animals of much of the burden and suffering of factory farming.

Cultured meat isn't natural, but neither is yogurt," says [“G” in an interview with Wired.] And neither, for that matter, is most of the meat we eat. Cramming 10,000 chickens in a metal shed and dosing them full of antibiotics isn't natural. I view cultured meat like hydroponic vegetables. The end product is the same, but the process used to make it is different. Consumers accept hydroponic vegetables. Would they accept hydroponic meat?

Meanwhile, PetroSun Inc. has been growing crude oil from carbon dioxide taken out of the atmosphere, in an industrial algae farm of a sort which does not need to be located on cropland, in Opelika, Alabama, which is not in the Middle East. In August of 2007, the company will hold a three-day demonstration of their facility for invited guests who will need to sign non-disclosure agreements. Guests will be presented with samples of this home-grown crude oil which they can test in their own facilities. PetroSun should invite George Will. The company expects to begin selling crude oil to the biofuel industry in the first quarter of 2008. What could be more patriotic than that?