Who started this?

Is LifeBubble just another impractical Utopian dream?

Impractical? No!

Utopian? Yes!

Well I guess I would have to admit that Dean Cameron (yes that's me) is a dreamer - I mean in the good sense of the word. I see myself more, though as a "futuresmith" - someone teaching himself to become skilled in the art and science of making the future. Yes I think it's something you can learn and get skilled at - if you stay a kid. You need to keep the sense of wonder that a child has about everything. For those who are interested in teaching themselves to become FutureSmiths, I have put down some philosophical ramblings on the topic that I hope you will find helpful.

It's funny how one's life can arch around in a big circle. As a little kid I had a dream to make a secret underground cubby house in the forest amongst the ferns. I even made one in the back paddock before I was old enough to go to school. It was little more than a trench near the rabbit warren. It was covered by ferns and an old sheet of something, I can't remember clearly what it was. I loved it and the dream stayed not far below the surface for 40 years.

Life led me down some seemingly disconnected paths and taught me some skills and lessons that I now recognize as remarkably apt for this venture. I feel like a bear waking up from its long sleep and knowing instinctively what it has to do next because of who it is and what it knows.

Some years ago I started to really look at and think about how nature decomposes organic matter. It's every bit as mysterious and fascinating as bringing all the bits together to make life! Biolysis (bio-lysis) mostly takes place on moist soils, on the edges of swamps and around streams. I looked closely at the patterns that emerged as cow manure breaks down. Carcasses too have the same micro-architecture in their decay patterns. I looked also at the humus-rich soil under a dense bat colony near my home in Maleny, Queensland.

I then mimicked nature's examples to create a business that eventually through a combination of bad luck and poor business decisions failed. Boilytix is still a great technology - one that is still evolving - for treating waste ecologically, using worms and soil organisms rather than electricity to treat human waste and used water.

I experimented with applying these unorthodox ideas and was soon so fascinated by the amazing power of nature to regenerate life from waste and death that I wanted to team up with her to make the perfect habitat for a biolytic ecosystem to do it's wonders. I made the mistake many inventors make of going into business to make the process popular, and to show the world that it is ridiculous to burn up fossil fuel to "treat" sewerage and food wastes, and even more ridiculous to waste the valuable nutrients and water produced by disposing of it into the sea or water or atmosphere. I also wanted to bring this fantastic knowledge I had gained - that paradoxically, death and decay are the secret elixir of life, the true source of fertility and fruitful abundance - to as many people as possible, and especially to the 2.6 billion people on our planet who still tragically do not have access to safe sanitation or healthy food.

So with this vision in mind, a few years ago I set about re-engineering the treatment system housing so that it could be mass produced at low cost but would still transform sewerage and food scraps into living gardens of food right at the fingertips of the world's poorest and hungriest people. One thing led to another and I started Joinlox - another chapter in my life that pushed me one step closer to the LifeBubble vision.

Joinlox started out because I stubbornly refused to give up on the idea that a tank could be injection moulded in segments and more cheaply transported, then joined at the destination, enabling it to be made into small or large, above or below ground tanks. But the engineering challenges needed to crack this one were not as simple as meets the eye in the finished concept. It turns out that the powerful joining technology, which emulates the way clams and mussels hold onto rocks, has a lot more uses than just joining large plastic parts together.

After I had invented Joinlox, several people have come to me with basically the same challenge - how to make building structures more cheaply using Joinlox technology. Many years ago, Buckminster Fuller came up with buildings using the geodesic dome principle - joining many strong straight segments at their apex to produce relatively strong structures once all the segments are in place and bracing each other (also because of their basic dome shape). As you put these shapes together it becomes obvious that if they were made of panels that were joined on their edges, the shell structure they formed would be even stronger. The geometry of a geodesic dome, especially the large multi-segmented ones, is quite tricky. But if you go for a great circular dome instead, then the whole structure can be formed with just one relatively simple shape. Joinlox is the key to making this a practical reality. In searching for a solution to poverty and declining health and soil fertility, I had inadvertently stumbled upon a solution which would make a dream I had had since I was 5 years old come true.

There are some fantastic natural examples that point the way to LifeBubble. Take a trip to Tunnel Creek in the Kimberly district of Western Australia in the sweltering late November 53 ° Celsius heat and you will witness first hand a naturally created open topped life bubble that is staggeringly effective. Or to the limestone caves of south western Australia. I especially like Bob's Rock, a natural ovehanging rock, from whose shelter fisher folk would have probably looked out over the sea for thousands of years. In the Cederbergs of South Africa, the Bushman cave art is graphic witness to the fact that such places were a magnet to humans over hundreds of generations. There are thousands of such natural sub-terrarium gardens in gorges, sink holes and cave mouths throughout the world. So the concept of an earth coupled micro-climate is an undisputed fact of nature.

The wonderful subterranean-like houses of Cappadocia, the underground city of Derinkuyu, or the city of Petra, all show that people had naturally grasped the thermal benefits of coupling with the earth thousands of years ago. What puzzles me is why, when the technology for excavation is so evolved now, has it taken so long for us to recognize that the same thermal benefits could also make our most precious food plants more comfortable and productive? It is my conviction that now is the moment in history for the concept of the LifeBubble to inflate. And better late than never!

Having experienced first hand some wonderful natural and man-made examples, I was inspired to experiment over the last 12 years with a prototype life bubble, an earth-sheltered shell with a green house attached on the solar side. This has been a great working prototype and has taught me heaps about the thermal dynamics that interplay between the thermal mass of the earth-coupled shell and the transpiration energy interchange of solar energy, water and humid air. Many other bioneers too have experimented with attached greenhouse and earth-coupled structures, most notably Michael Reynold and his Earthship Biotecture, Bio-home and on a grander scale the Eden project in Cornwall UK. The next stage could be for all such futuresmiths to start to work together to evolve the LifeBubble concept further into an elegant art form.

LifeBubble is a name which attempts to encapsulate these concepts and expand them into a non-proprietary philosophy around the creation of human ecosystems that are like mini biospheres that contain not just us, but our soil and our plant life-support ecosystem. I see LifeBubble as an ongoing public art, science and technology project that anyone who is curious and wants to help co-create the sustainable cities of the future can get involved in. It is not about denying that humans are technological creatures. We can never go back to some idealized neolithic state of the noble savage, but we can chose to use our intelligence, science and technology to make elegant, stable, long-lasting ecosystems that only need humans to live in them to make them work harmoniously.

I'm convinced that life bubbles can work in any climate, from humid tropical to arctic tundra and an evolved form of life bubble could theoretically even work as a biosphere on Mars. But let us get our act together here on earth first!

I would love to hear from anyone who can advance this movement or would like to take me to task over some of my grandiose ideas. I would love it even more if you join us and become a future maker.