The Future Looks Green: Hemp, Algae, and Ideas for Ecovillages and Cooperative Life

How plants can make medicine, food, bricks, clothes, fuel, compost and more all while sequestering carbon and how we can collectively work towards autonomy and ecological regeneration.

If you’ve followed me for a while you know that I tend to focus on actionable things during climate collapse. What can we do now to take steps towards a better future? Not far flung fictional machines, or high tech techno fixes, but what can your average person - or more importantly, what can we do collectively to build the alternative while also smashing the current system?

Hemp and algae are just part of a larger ecosystem of plants that can have a huge impact on the way we live, the things we make, and how we impact the ecosystem in a rapidly changing world and ecosystem. From what I’ve seen so far they can be staples when it comes to creating a sustainable community. I’m coming at this from the assumption that these changes can be done on an individual level, but not an individualistic one. One person doing this won’t solve things. But if we act collectively, combine ideas, work together as a community to harvest all of it, grow it all, process the materials - on a larger scale, we can really see things change.

Uses and possibilities, it all sounds like science fiction but it’s reality!

Hemp has been considered a miracle plant for thousands of years and has been cultivated globally for just as long. Here is a list of the various things you can make with hemp:

Textiles (clothing, shoes, bags), paper products (writing paper, cardboard, packaging), building materials (hempcrete, insulation, particleboard), food products (hemp seeds, hemp milk, hemp oil), body care products (soap, lotions, balms), CBD products (oils, edibles, topicals), biofuels (hemp biodiesel, hemp ethanol/methanol), animal feed and bedding, rope and cordage, automotive parts, plastic composites, supplements (hemp protein powder), art supplies (canvas, paint), mulch, medicine (epilepsy and pain management), jewelry, beer (hemp beer), and much more.

Algae also has a wide amount of uses including as food when edible varieties are grown. The main thing I want to focus on is Alginate, which is a core ingredient in making bioplastics, biofilms, bioleathers, and biodegradable plastic-like substances.

One issue with bioplastics is that they can become brittle, and sometimes can’t withstand certain forces as well as other materials. But fiber reinforced bioplastics/films/materials are way stronger, and the fiber can come from the parts of the hemp harvest like the stalks - that aren’t often used - to help reinforce these goods.

So a community could grow hemp, create a myriad of products with it, and even use it to help create biodegradable and locally producible biomaterials for packaging or plastic replacements.

Things like hydrogels and biofilms can be made that can directly replace plastics, and they eventually break down in the ecosystem unline traditional plastics. The idea of making a plant based hydrogel is also interesting because things like Atmospheric Water Generators(AWGs) can use a type of hydrogel to help pull drinking water from the air in areas that don’t have access to clean water.

Circular systems, stopping waste, and regenerating the ecosystem

Looking at the uses of both hemp and algae, we can start to think about how we can fundamentally change our ways and methods of manufacturing away from a hypercapitalist, profit-driven, and petrochemical obsessed system to a free and open, collectivist, global and local, biomaterial system that doesn’t destroy the ecological foundations of our lives.

We can start to imagine closing the waste system loops. Things aren’t made with petroleum based plastics, then shipped across the world on ships fueled by fossil fuels, to be sold only to the people who can buy them, to be packaged with plastic that will never degrade, only for the product to end up in a landfill because it can’t be repaired because a corporation wants to increase it’s sales. This model is pure insanity.

To close the wast system loop, we can look towards nature as a teacher, to understand that all life systems follow the waste recycling loop. Seeds are planted, they grow and transform and transport nutrients, they interact with the mycelial web and share resources with other plants, they suck up CO2 and help filter contaminants, they eventually die, they rot and decay back into the soil ecosystem to feed the microbes and other insects and life that make up the soil web, only to act as the base to grow more life. That is how we should look at everything we do. If we decide to do things in this world, it can’t be permanent. It has to eventually breakdown and return back into a natural form that won’t impact the ecosystem, and ideally, it should actually help the ecosystem. That doesn’t mean that we can’t have permanent structures, say for instance a terracing system that can stay intact for thousands of years, but that system will actually help the environment long after we are out of the picture, because it’s a beneficial system. We should make our only impacts to the ecosystem a positive one.

So how do we look at these materials and start to close the waste loop system? Well with this we can grow hemp and algae literally anywhere, because they both are easy to grow and fast growers. Meaning the things we make aren’t locked into a global economic and trade system. To make clothes we don’t need to ship raw materials from South America to China, to be made into fabric that is shipped to Vietnam to be made into a garment that is shipped and sold in Germany. We can produce the things we need right in our own local communities. This is less efficient in the capitalist mindframe, because ideally, we would have an economy of scale. But this means that the economy of scale comes with a trade-off of ecological destruction. And so we can move the idea from a global system, to a regional one. This cuts down on the need for specific ways of manufacturing that tend to harm the environment.

Hemp is also an excellent plant for bioremediation and would be a great companion to mycoremediation, because of hemps ability to pull heavy metals and chemical contaminants from soil. This should be paired with soil tests to make sure the areas where the hemp is grown can be used for things that humans consume. But even if hemp has absorbed contaminants, we can still use it for industrial uses that removes those contaminants and locks them into things that are less likely to breakdown into the environment.

Circular energy production

Following the life cycles of natural systems, we can use the decomposition phase of natural materials to generate alternative forms of energy that decouple ourselves from both the capitalist system and the fossil fuel systems that use extremely detrimental resources to extract natural gas specifically with fracking.

This means that we can produce our own combustible fuel by fermenting the spent harvests of hemp and by using algae specifically grown for this purpose. We could also use edible algaes, or edible algae that my have been contaminated and isn’t suitable for human consumption as our feedstock for biogas digesters.

We can use this as an alternative fuel source when other renewables are out of service or can’t produce enough to meet demand. I’ve made my own DIY off grid solar panel system and have seen first hand what can happen if you have a long term storm system that blocks out sunlight, or enough to where your demand will exceed how much your panels can produce. There was a large storm system that stayed for close to a week and by day three, my solar system could only run small USB powered devices. If we are talking about a future where renewables are the mainstay of electrical generation, or if we were in an emergency and needed power say to power medical equipment our options would be limited. This can be a way to supplement things not only on a home basis but as a larger scale and on a municipal level to generate power. We might not need to burn the gas in a stove, but burning the gas to drive generators or to power turbines in emergency situations can help in tricky situations.

A problem with methane is that it’s an incredibly bad gas, and pollutes more than CO2 when it comes to climate change. This gas is created by decaying matter, but also as a byproduct of the fossil fuel industry. A huge producer of methane is the global meat industry, because cow dung creates massive amounts of methane gas.
However, there are ways to cut down on the gas being emitted. These biodigesters can also take in animal dung, and help trap that gas to instead be used and burned.

A note for this: burning methane still creates carbon dioxide, and will still contribute to climate change though at a much smaller rate compared to coal fired power plants. It also needs to be taken into account, the net cost of carbon and pollution for various industries. If we moved to a biogas combustible fuel source, that would cut the need for fracking and other methods of extracting natural gas. It could replace coal, which requires massive mining operations that cause tremendous ecological damage. This would also cut the emissions related to transporting and producing fuels because they would originate closer to the source of use. So there is a trade-off involved in talking about this. Same thing with wood based heating, outside of using dead or diseased timber, the timber industry cuts down a tremendous amount of trees for fuel and for goods, we can stop that by instead using biogas as a fuel source for heating.

Hempcrete, Earthships, Suburban Retrofits, and Living During Climate Collapse

Another part related to hemp is the creation of hempcrete, which is an interesting building material that is made with hemp, lime, and small amounts of portland cement. The hemp parts used for this are considered industrial waste, and so this can be a method of creating building materials that cut down on portland cement production (which is a huge producer of CO2) while also reusing parts of the hemp plant that is thought of as useless.

Hempcrete is interesting because of the PH of the bricks themselves, insects hate it because of the PH, and mold doesn’t grow well on it for the same reasons. And so it’s a great candidate where other natural building materials might not cut it.

Hemp also can be made into insulation, so not only can you build a structure using hempcrete, but you can also insulate it as well with hemp. So we can see the circular system of using these natural materials as a basis for building natural homes.

Going with the same thread of thinking, we can also change how we build homes if we don’t focus on profit as the main motivator. Which means we can create strong, insulated homes for everyone that requires less electricity and resource usage, and can be made of natural and recycled materials. In comes the ideas of Earthships.

An Earthship is built to be passive, oftentimes the air conditioning comes from a pipe system buried under a large mound behind the structure, that naturally cools the air entering the pipe, so this cuts down on the need for electrical-based air cooling. Same thing with heat in the winter, these are designed to absorb heat and store it in the structure itself. The greenhouses also help to create heat and regulate the temperature overall. These homes also recycle all of the water, including the sewage that can be used to fertilize and water plants outdoors, but in this case we can also use biodigestors to ferment the waste and turn it into usable biogas. These homes can be models for living as the climate changes and more volatile weather patterns happen compared to traditional homes, Earthships are much more resilient to the elements.

This can also be a method towards building universal housing for all, creating self sustaining homes where people can grow their own food, capture rainwater, reuse water, create their own energy, all for very little compared to a traditional home.

This carries over into rethinking how we approach the suburbs, urban life, and urban planning, and this too ties into hemp production as a great insulator and building material into revamping the suburbs from ecological deserts into ecological havens by changing our ideas of what life could look like.

Building a Better Future

As someone who writes solarpunk fiction, this all seems like the plot to something fictional but this is a reality. When I think of a anarchist, communist, social ecological, ecosocialist future, approaching things in this way comes to mind. Noticing that we aren’t separate from the natural systems, and to learn from nature instead of destroy it. To get rid of profit and money as a main driver of life, and towards actually helping humanity and the ecology. We can make sure that all people have access to good food, clean water, community, shelter, everything they need to live happy lives, all for free - save the hard work to make it all happen. This can all be done not just on a small scale, but on a larger scale as well.

On a municipal level this can go from direct action groups and ecovillages making things to city wide and regional solutions. We can collectively build alternative housing on degraed land, to restore the natural ecosystem and give people a home. We can create housing that requires far less resources and that can be run nearly entirely passively. We can retrofit the buildings we have with natural materials that serve in a wider system of reuse.

This is all a small sliver of what can be done, and I hope this acts as a seed to sprout your own action, ideas, and movements.

A better future is possible.