old interview of Robert Plarr / Worldsnest/Angelsnest fame

TAOS, N.M. — Robert Plarr is a doer.

Over the last 30-plus years, he has taken it upon himself to find ways in which humans can live in their environment without doing more damage to it.

His experiments in home design led him to build a passive solar underground home. At the time in 1976, the home featured the world’s largest privately-owned wind turbine, a 45 kW Mehrkam design.

"We’ve been talking about this stuff for 40 years, and when you join our group, we actually make a change," Plarr told the Iconoclast. "The young people don’t have time to wait around for another 40 years for some environmental movement. Change is now. They can join forces with us now, and we can start implementing it now."

As a response to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Plarr said he poured his energy into the Angel’s Nest Retreat in Taos, New Mexico.

Billed as a model for sustainable-energy homes of the future, the 8,000-square-foot retreat is designed to be entirely self-sustaining with integrated solar and wind energy production systems, an internal sewage water recycling system complete with its own "rainforest," and an air-to-water system for fresh drinking-water.

"I started building a structure because I wanted to build truly a Homeland Security home," said Plarr. "When you have a home like this, you aren’t held hostage by anyone or anything.

"I’d like to say to President Bush, ‘Sir, I’m an ex-Marine — always a Marine. I reported for duty and did what you asked and we have a Homeland Security home now."

The Iconoclast’s Nathan Diebenow spoke with Plarr recently about his successes and failures early on in his career, the design of his new home concepts, and the untapped opportunity and growing necessity to manufacture these concepts worldwide.

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ICONOCLAST: What is your critique of the environmental movement?

ROBERT PLARR: I don’t know if you saw the website.

ICONOCLAST: Yeah, it’s pretty indepth.

PLARR: Yeah, it is indepth. It’s one of the unusual things because we actually do something. The rest of the — what I call psychobabble, the environmental movement, has basically failed in the last 40 years because they dance in circles and they don’t produce anything.

I believe in building things and working can actually change the world instead of just talking about it. Having grants, dropping theories, and getting paid for the rest of one’s life does nothing. One of the things we do is have a research building that does the things we talk about. A lot of it is on the 99 yard line.

We actually have to build these things in the tens of millions, very inexpensively, to save this planet because this planet is finished. We’re not sustainable. We’re poisoning every well and stream in the country. Our country s collapsing under the weight of pollution and global warming, and we have a solution. We’re not a flavor of the day environmentalist. We actually live it and actually do it, as you can see.

ICONOCLAST: How did you get the title of "father of sustainable energy’?

PLARR: I don’t know why they call me that stuff. I don’t know why somebody called me that. But I started building my first one in 1975 — a 6,000-sq.-foot earth shelter home and the world’s largest wind generator. I’ve been doing this physically since 1975. There’s probably nobody in the country that has made more mistakes than I have, I’m sure. There’s a lot of stuff that you think is going to work, but until you actually build it, it doesn’t.

The reason the new building works so well is because I actually lived in an earth shelter building since 1976. I did a lot of experimenting to see what would work past the solar greenhouse generational things through trial and error. Obviously, it wasn’t very popular back then even though during the Carter administration when all the gas lines were long, gas became cheap again, so people forgot about it.

We’re at a point now in our world where we have a building that is — well, I call every other home in the world "Katrina candy" meaning that once your electric goes out, you have a useless home. Our buildings are water resistant, fire resistant, hurricane resistant with these new materials, and if something happens like a power-outage, when you have a sustainable home you’re not held hostage by terrorist attacks or natural disasters.

If every home is its own infrastructure where it has its own water plant, sewage plant, and energy plant, then you don’t need to build these huge infrastructure systems that cost in the United States trillions of dollars that has failed over the last couple of hundred of years. We have the oil plants and the nuclear plants where you have to run lines thousands of miles. You have to run sewage lines, so if there is a disaster, you lose 100,000 people or a million people or five million people.

When everyone has their own individual system, no matter what happens out there, no one is going to go down in a crisis. You don’t have to build all this infrastructure. One of the things that is happening overseas that is great in China and Third World countries is that they don’t really have the infrastructure and they can’t afford the infrastructure. They can actually build these buildings now. The phone systems in China are terrific because they’re using satellites. They didn’t have the money to buy these phone lines like we had over the last 100 years.

ICONOCLAST: How cost effective are these individual dwellings?

PLARR: They are very cost effective. Obviously for me, doing it for 31 years, it wasn’t cost effective because I’m in a research and development situation.

They are very cost effective because you’re eliminating materials and labor, and, more importantly, you’re not using the things that cost a lot of money; wood has tripled, steel has tripled, and concrete has tripled. They’re unaffordable. They’re junky. Anytime something happens, they fail, and you saw what happened to Katrina. All those homes fell down because they were built improperly with junk materials that can’t withstand a Category 1 or a Category 2 hurricane.

We’re using waste stream materials like volcanic ash, foam cups, and those kinds of things that are considered waste are really gold. When you put in little percentage points of concrete in mixing these products, they are very strong. They last forever. With the new materials, we can actually get a home up in a day — the shell, the roof, the walls — and we’re looking at a seven- to 10-day home with putting in the prefab black-and-grey water system and the energy pod.

ICONOCLAST: So there are no plastics involved in the construction of these homes?

PLARR: Depending on the location and what your waste stream materials are, there could be foam cups; it could be one of the ingredients that you would use, like fly ash, volcanic ash, or anything like that. It’s a blend. It’s sort of like a concrete mix where you’re blending all these materials together, and depending on your region — like in Scotland, they have a lot of granite, they call them crusher finds, available, and if you’re in China or if you’re in Arabia, there’s a lot of sand, so it depends on your regional material. It’s different mixes for different sites.

ICONOCLAST: Inside these homes are little rainforests. Are they totally organic, pesticide-free?

PLARR: Of course. When you have your own rainforest in your house, and every building we have a rainforest of some size, it’s your black-and-grey water system. It is your sewage system.

Basically, your building catches water. It recycles it six times, and at the end of the cycle, we use an air-to-water machine to take the water out of the air. There’s nothing leaving the building for septic or sewage, so it’s harvested, and if everyone did that, we wouldn’t have the biggest problem in the world. Ninety-nine percent of the world’s water is unpotable. In Mexico City, right now, they’re telling you that you can’t drink the water or shower in it. Most of the wells in the United States are poisoned with MTBE, and it’s just getting worse by the day because seven billion people are dumping their sewage and chemicals and everything back in the ground water.

It’s getting the point that even the water companies can’t meet the federal mandates, so the point of it is that you’re obviously going to have to take the water out of the air. There’s three quadrillion gallons of water in the air because that’s the cleanest form of water because you can just use an air filter and a few other things to clean that water before you turn it into drinking water.

All of our ground water systems worldwide wreak havoc. Everybody dumps their stuff on somebody’s neighbor, some river, or some sewage plant that dumps it in the ocean, so basically, once we flush the toilet, we don’t want to know where it goes, and we’re trying to push it on to someone else.

In each one of these buildings you don’t do that. You’re self-contained. Each structure cleans it. There’s nothing to harm the planet. Our goal is for zero impact buildings. We’re very close to that. We’re very close to building them in mass. We know we can do them inexpensively. What our research center up there did was to prove systems for 30 years. Now our group is gearing up to implement this in mass.

One thing great about our building is that our products are on the 99-yard line, meaning that they’re up, they function. Now we get them to a manufacturing plant, and we start marketing and implementing them. That’s where we’re at now. We have working prototypes, and now it’s just a matter of getting them to the next level, which is very advanced. We’re very excited about it.

ICONOCLAST: One of the interesting things I noticed was your use of the polonia tree. They’re used to cut greenhouse gas emissions and also to use as a cash crop. What type of tree is it? Is it the princess tree?

PLARR: It’s a hybrid. It depends on where you get them from, but the nice thing about the polonia tree, especially with our situation is that it’s all indoors, so if we build you an 800 sq.-foot guest house or house for you and someone else, probably a 100 sq. foot of that would be a nice little rainforest, so on the black water side we put polonia trees in which have big beautiful leaves and because of the climate control situation in your building, it’s not going to get below 40 degrees in that room.

There’s something that’s always going to grow. You don’t have to deal with being outside in 20-below zero or something like that in the winter time. When you have a rainforest in your structure connected to the house, it’s a great medium for those to function very well, and grow and produce green sewage and a lot of oxygen.

So what happens is that you can’t do anything about the outside. The world is chopping down the rainforests, but with every home we build, we replant a rainforest, an ecosystem, so you get oxygen, medicine, and food from your little rainforest. There’s a tremendous amount of clean air. The banana leaf or polonia leaf is so powerful it takes carbon fibers out of the air so you really have clean room no matter if you’re in L.A. — the most polluted city in the country — as long as you’re in your house, you have clean air and water.

My partner Victoria (Peters) made sure that it was acceptable to the general public instead of idealists — maybe one percent of the people who would stay in a caveman house, but we made them acceptable to the general masses.

ICONOCLAST: You mean the layout and design?

PLARR: Yeah, the layout and design has to be like a regular home. It has to function like a regular home. When you walk in, you have to flip the switches on. It has to do everything a typical home does, but the difference is you’re off-grid and you’re basically walking into a beautiful rainforest that gives you all this great sleeping because when you sleep in our place, you have a great environment because plants clean.

Right now most people live in a rug apartment. Indoors is 10 times more polluted than outdoors with all the glues and the dry walls and all the chemicals and the plastics and all these mixed materials, so people are living in toxic soups. When you have plants that are a part of your living space , they clean the air. They provide you with tremendous oxygen. You want things that are in the building that actually clean things for you.

ICONOCLAST: So this specific tree is a hybrid, but what I’ve read is that these trees can become like weeds if you don’t take care of them.

PLARR: They can to some extent. You can groom them. If you’re using them to clean sewage and toxic waste dumps and stuff, you don’t really care. If you’re using them for lumber, what you do is you plant 1,200 trees an acre, and then what they do is strip the leaves off every year.

The other things they’re used for is cattle feed or to put in a gas fire to make hydrogen. But they groom them; they let the center root become a straight tree so every four to five years they can clip it off and sell it for lumber and it grows back up.

My understanding is that they have six to eight cuttings over its lifetime, so yeah, if you’re using them for lumber, then you groom them in one way. If you’re using them to just clean up toxic chemical areas, you can let them grow like weeds depending on what you’re need is.

ICONOCLAST: I see, I see. The other component to this is the hydrogen component, and this is where the Texas connection comes in. Can you explain to me how that process works?

PLARR: Hydrogen to us is going to be very critical because what is now coming into play is very inexpensive fuel cells that would run on methane and hydrogen. They are 50 to 60 percent efficient compared to batteries which are about 12 or 15 percent.

We have electrolyzers. I imagine we’ll have 100 things operating in that building, but what we’re looking at is that when you take electricity and you split water, you produce hydrogen.

You store that in a low volume under 200 psi like in a propane tank if you want to and you can store that as an energy source and then you can run that through a fuel cell that will run your electricity and hot water. It becomes 65 to 75 percent efficient. It’s very inexpensive to run buildings like that. We’re showing a different way.

The way they do it now is that they use solar, and I have that up there, too. I have the new and old ways where you have a solar bank and there are storage batteries which are very inefficient and expensive. Now, we are going to run our hydrogen through a plastic fuel cell which we are beginning in the next month or so.

We’re going to work with a whole lot of fuel cell companies. As long as you have hydrogen to run it through these fuel cells it is very cheap and efficient. And you can store it in a propane tank like in a back yard and low psi, so it’s very safe. This will be very common in the next few years.

ICONOCLAST: How do you create the hydrogen?

PLARR: What you have is excess electricity from wind or solar or high diesel which would be hydrogen mixed with diesel — all these kinds of things. You have this energy, and you run it in a electrolyzer, and the electrolyzer splits the water, so you use two or three kilowatts to split water to make this hydrogen. And you store it in a low volume tank.

ICONOCLAST: You’re not going to need to transport any kind of fuel across state lines then, right?

PLARR: You make it onsite.

ICONOCLAST: But excess energy, are you going to pipe it?

PLARR: What’s nice about this hydrogen is that you’re storing excess energy. You can store a month’s worth if you want depending on how many tanks you put in the ground. If you want three months worth of storage, you could store that excess energy that you’re producing onsite.

ICONOCLAST: One of my concerns is — and this is from what I understand through reading about the work of your partner Chris Sanders — how to use microbes to extract more natural gas from the Burnet shale.

PLARR: This is exciting because, evidently, this has been out for a few years. I don’t know technically how it works, but I understand there’s a microbe under the ground, and that if you stimulate it with carbon dioxide, it makes natural gas and oxygen, so you can pump the oxygen into the air and replenish the atmosphere and also make sustainable natural gas.

This is exciting because you’ve got a double bonus here. You’re solving two huge problems. Of course, that’s one of the great solutions.

The cheapest form right now of making hydrogen is splitting natural gas products. They spend a couple of billion dollars a year making hydrogen from it and then they use it in the refineries to make fuel, which to me is a waste. And they use it to launch the space shuttle. But the nice thing is, we’re going to come into the hydrogen era. It’s very clean. The exhaust of hydrogen is water. We’re going to move away from the old ways of doing things.

We’re finding better and inexpensive ways of doing things. As gas goes up which it is — it’s probably going to go up $100 a barrel pretty soon — China and India are going to be more like America, using more fuel, so this is critical because we’re running out of fuel from the standpoint where we can’t make it in the U.S. Something like 60 to 70 percent of the fuel comes from overseas, so we are held hostage.

If we do energy through agriculture, if we do these energy pods and the way we are producing energy onsite, and then the oil companies combine with Chris on these energy ranches where there are big land tracks making gas and oil and then they can put (polonia farms) out there; we can build the air-to-water plants and produce a 100,000 bottles of fresh water a day or you can water the cattle with it.

You’ve got solar farms, so what happens is that you’re forming a fully sustainable oil ranch platform, and if the oil runs out, then it doesn’t matter. You’ve still got solar, wind, and water plants, and polonia tree farms. This is a very logical way to make money in five or six or seven different ways instead of just oil and gas. It just makes sense.

I know he’s doing leases with farmers and ranchers that include solar and wind which is the same law as doing oil and gas and minerals. Now we’re doing water and polonia trees, so it’s terrific. It makes our world sustainable when you do things like that and it helps clean the planet up at the same time.

This is exciting. It’s something I think all the oil companies will jump right into because if they can make money in oil now and they can make money in gas and in polonia trees and in making fresh water ... and you put all these products on there that are cleaning the air and making the freshest water in the world — oil companies are going to love it because they’re making money in all these other pieces, too.. It cleans the planet, makes them heros, and phases out all the oil and gas in 15 to 20 years.

I’m really pumped up about this the most because there’s no doubt every oil company will jump on this. It’s a money maker for them and it’s not a threat to them. It’s a terrific win-win-win. Nobody is going to be against us because everybody is making money. You’re not putting somebody out of business.

This is seeding the greed. I’m an idealist. One of our homes is going to be 20 to 30 percent cheaper than any existing home and you live for free for the rest of your life, not worrying about natural disasters, what are you going to do? You’re going to build it, so all we’re doing with the oil companies is saying, "You’re going to make twice as much money. You’re going to clean the planet. And you’re going to have great PR. What do you care? You’re making twice as much money." And that’s what they’re in it for. It’s great PR, too. It really is. They need this stuff, and they have the infrastructure and manpower to do it.

ICONOCLAST: Just recently we saw BP’s oil line break and now we understand that they’re not reinvesting in their infrastructure, so how do you get the oil companys’ attention to at least fix their own stuff?

PLARR: Well, that one is pretty expensive. That’s about 2,000 miles of stuff that they — and I’m sure BP wasn’t the first guy to have that place. It probably went through four or five company changes, but one of the problems was they knew about this 10 to 15 years ago, that the lines were deteriorating. It’s an old story. Nobody puts the stop sign to the accident until it happens.

Do you know how much the Alaskan pipeline would cost if they built it today? Nobody would ever do it. What I’m saying is that this is very inexpensive what we’re asking them to do on their rigs, and it would be sustainable. That’s the key. When you run those pipelines, they’re not sustainable. Everything they’re doing up there, they need massive amounts of infrastructure and massive amounts of energy to run all these things and pump the oil through there.

What we’d do is basically when we build one of these sustainable ranches is ... we’re going to make maximum use of the oil fields which you’re probably aware is where most of the natural gas in the world get flared off. If you look at the Mideast and all these places, we could put bottling plants on Saudi Arabia next to the oceans in the humidity.

ICONOCLAST: Have your guys gone to Saudi Arabia to pick this idea?

PLARR: Yeah, in fact, they are very excited. In fact, I’ve been meeting with some people in L.A. that are involved with that and they are very excited because the biggest problem they have over there is that people are using desalinization which is very expensive and it’s nasty water. They use RO water which for every clean gallon of water you have to throw away four gallons.

In our case, we take it out of the air very inexpensively, and like I said, there’s three quadrillion gallons of water in the air. Obviously, you want a place that has relative humidity when you do that, but boy, you’ll be making more water than you can dream of.

Let me tell you what’s happening. There’s a revolution with air-to-water. Everybody in the world is going air-to-water because of one reason: the well water is poison. This is what everybody is interested in — can we provide you with a cheaper home that withstands earthquakes, hurricanes, and other natural disasters and terrorist attacks? Yeah. And the fact of the matter is, everyone wants what we just talked about. We’re about to be able to deliver them.

ICONOCLAST: Where? I thought I saw something where you were in Michigan.

PLARR: There are a lot of places right now. Mexico, China, and Singapore — the Third World countries are much easier because they don’t have infrastructure. It’s easy. They just say, "We’re going to do this."

In America, you have all this infrastructure. It’s a problem. You’ve got zoning boards where three people come in and say, "I don’t like clean water. I don’t like clean air." They could pull it up, but in the Third World countries, they have to have it, so they are implementing it.

Right now, we’re just putting it out to the zoning boards, and they’re very interested. All of them say, "We’re out of water." In fact, up in Taos, they’re not letting new developments go up because there is no water, and you have to provide the water.

We have a way now to build these buildings in the middle of nowhere with no electric and no water and produce the stuff right out of the air, so it’s going to be very inexpensive to do. You don’t have to buy a $25 billion sewage plant and road system and sewage lines and all that. You don’t need that when you build these type of homes.

There’s a lot of places in Texas and all over the country — I’m getting thousands of calls saying, "We can do it here." And the other thing that can happen is you can connect to the utility, but that means you’ll be selling your excess power and you can connect to your sewage. The sewage line won’t be used, but if you’re in the city, you can still build one of these and not use the systems even though you’re inner-connected. That means you make extra money selling your excess power to the power company, so you don’t have to build these huge coal fire plants.

We’re saying you can do it in any home. You can retro-fit or use one of our new designs. We’ve got a guy who is building a 12-acre facility out here in Malibu, Calif. There are going to be about 14 buildings in it. It’ll have the latest technology. It should start in about eight months, but this is going to take hold around the world because if you were staying in one of our places right now, you’d be going, "Oh, my God!" You’ll feel secure. You’re growing your food. You can fill your vehicles. If you want your own hydrogen fueling station, we’re building one so you can fill it up overnight.

The young people today are very scared because they don’t think there’s a future. We call our buildings Homeland Security, Social Security, insurance, and wellness because all those things are your generation. You’re never going to see health care or social security because 76 million Baby Boomers are going to wipe that out the first day they start collecting. There’s just not enough young people to support one older person very well.

So the only way you can do it is to build a system of sustainable homes. I call it "currency" because that’s the only currency in the world that will be worth anything. With the world filled with natural disasters, global warming, and terrorism, if you have a sustainable home, that is more precious than gold itself because you can actually live there no matter what happens and not be effected by the outside world because nothing can shut you down and that home will function.

ICONOCLAST: How many people must live in these houses in order for them to function?

PLARR: We’re looking at building 750 sq.-foot homes starting with. That’s the average Japanese size home. That’s a great guest house and a house for a family of four and on up. Those will be very quickly and easily built, a pre-fab sustainable home. We’re really pumped up about it. Once we get these going en mass — I can build one or two of them, but so what? We need tens of millions — hundreds of millions of these buildings.

ICONOCLAST: Are you working with organizations like green builders?

PLARR: Yeah, we’d love to. They’re just finding out about us, and what we’ll do is share what we do. We want to teach them all because our job is obviously to teach. We want to have a million contractors come out and learn this worldwide, so they can implement it.

That’s the only way they can be built. It’s not brain surgery. This is not some sort of secret to build these homes. It’s general contracting practices. It’s a better, cheap, faster way of building, and once they learn how to do it, it’s a no brainer.

All the contractors I talk to go, "Robert, steel has tripled, wood’s tripled, and concrete you can’t get it. There’s a moratorium on a lot of it, so we don’t want to build this way. This is all we have. This is all we know. It’s just killing us." By the time they put a house out, their costs have gone up, so if they can do something like this, they’re just thrilled.

ICONOCLAST: So you see the slowing down of the housing market as an opportunity?

PLARR: It’s a great opportunity because obviously ours will be cheaper. And think about it. You can get a house, but can you afford to live in it with all the costs of air conditioning, of heating, and everything that goes with it? People get in a house, and they find that it’s a deep black hole. Costs, costs, costs, costs. Repairs and this and that. We try to design a home that is virtually zero impact on the planet and virtually maintenance free. We want something that lasts the test of time.

INFO
www.worldsnest.com/
www.angels-nest.org/