those winds for electricity production and I explained that I was in the wind business in Canada with my brothers.
She said, “Not industrial scale wind I hope.”
Drat. I was at odds again. It is “industrial” scale wind. My brother Glen has built 13 turbines in two discrete parts of Ontario, and each one is 1.6 megawatts or better. They have 40-meter blades, require a big gust to get them started, and they are beautiful when they are spinning. Hold the protest for a moment: we need to harness wind energy if we are to sustain human life on this remarkable planet.
In North Carolina, wind is something we write poems about. Not something we use to power our economy. And guys like me, who invest in “big wind,” are suspect at writers’ retreats.
It made me reflect on vocabulary. “Industrial” is synonymous with pollution, environmental racism, corporatism, war, and all that is wrong with the world.
That’s too bad for me. I’m not an activist. I’m an industrialist.
I work at Piedmont Biofuels. That’s a grassroots sustainability project that started in my backyard, became a cooperative fuel-making venture, and ended up as a community scale biodiesel plant. Our project sprawls across an abandoned industrial park that is currently home to over a dozen discrete, like-minded businesses ranging from hydroponics lettuce, to biopesticides, to sustainable produce, to worm castings.
For a long time everyone on our project referred to our little biodiesel plant as “the Coop,” and to our “big” biodiesel plant as “Industrial.”
“Industrial” was the place with the stage for live music, the playground, the giant chess set in the yard, and the place where people gathered for soccer night. In our town, Industrial is where you might be headed for lunch, or to pick up a box of sustainable produce, or to attend a Pecha Kucha presentation.
For many of us, industrial is an honorific term.
By now the boilers have largely been extinguished on the industrial age in America. Most of our manufacturing has moved away. But “industry” is a term that I would like to reclaim. Industry can evolve. It doesn’t have to look like the industry of our fathers. Ants are industrious. People can be industrious. And industry can be a good thing. Ours is an industrious project.
On one occasion I gave a tour to Pamela Bell, who was one of the founders of Kate Spade. Unlike me she really is a captain of industry, with an intimate knowledge of the textile trade, outsourcing, and global commerce. We finished our tour and pulled up a couple of rocking chairs overlooking Piedmont Biofarm. She has an insatiable appetite for business ideas, and she was smitten with our little eco-industrial park. She’s the one who coined the phrase “Industrial Evolution” as the title for this book.
“Evolution” is something I know considerably less about. My friend Michael Tiemann once hosted an international meeting of the Open Source Initiative in Pittsboro, where our plant is located. Some of his guests were stranded in an air traffic tangle in New York, and he was unable to start his meeting. To kill some time he brought those who had arrived for an impromptu tour. I led them around for an hour or so, and when I was done, he suggested that most people have misinterpreted the work of Charles Darwin.
“People sum it up as survival of the fittest,” he said, “but really On the Origin of Species is about adaptation.” He then went on to explain how Piedmont Biofuels had been forced to adapt time and again to shifting trends in the global marketplace, and to ever-changing government policy that is not quite sure what role biodiesel will play in America’s fuel mix.
In the end, I’m just a storyteller. The stories I tell are the ones I have lived, which makes me sometimes wonder if I should shift to fiction so that I could suffer less. My first two books have occasionally inspired others to start projects or take action on changing their worlds.
I think of Megan, who started the farmers market at the marina in Lion’s Head, Ontario. And of Tammy who threw in the towel on her rat race life in Atlanta to create an asparagus farm in Southern Pines, North Carolina. I think of Cole, who after a day at our park with his elementary school insisted that his parents allow him to plant peanuts in their backyard. And I think of the many smallscale biodiesel projects we have inspired along the way.
In my travels, both on the Internet and in 3D, I have learned that we have many people cheering for us, and hoping our project will succeed. As such I frequently find myself conflicted when I’m asked, “How can we replicate that here?” Whether I’m on stage as a speaker, or on the net, or simply having lunch, it’s a question I can’t easily answer.
I don’t have a specific system, or a plan, or a solution. But I do have some stories to tell…
WE TURNED ON OUR BIODIESEL PLANT in the fall of 2006. It sort of sputtered to life. We would make some fuel, then screw up some oil, then make some fuel, then throw a batch away. And by the time we had the hang of it the weather had grown cold. Cold is not your friend in the world of biodiesel.
So we adjusted our plant, and tweaked the process, and putzed around through the winter and by the spring of 2007 we were ready to make some fuel.
Chris Jude was at the helm. He singlehandedly kicked out forty thousand gallons of fuel, and for the first time in my biodiesel life I had a sales problem. I’d been making fuel since 2002 and never had enough to go around. When our plant began to spin like a top, our terminal filled up and I needed to get busy.
Sales problems don’t scare me. I’ve been a traveling salesman for most of my adult life, and I thought it would be fun to move some fuel. So I visited almost every petroleum company in the Research Triangle Park region of North Carolina.
Petroleum enters the world in a strange and complex way. I had a sense of it from Lisa Margonelli’s book, Oil on the Brain, in which she starts at a convenience store in California, and attempts to follow it back to its source. I entered the tangle just above the gas station level, at those firms who are delivering fuel “to the street.”
On the distribution side, small family-run oil distributors have what are called “bulk plants,” from which they fill most gas stations. They typically have a large investment in trucks and tankage, and they are essentially in the logistics business.
Chris Jude, Piedmont’s first intern, went on to drive our early production efforts.
Everyone buys from the “rack,” where petroleum enters the state, and from there it finds its way through an octopus of trucks and tanks and dispensers. In North Carolina, petroleum fuel enters primarily from two pipelines that terminate in Charlotte and Greensboro, and begin in Louisiana. (We have limited coastal offloading capability as well.) Which means that when a hurricane slams into Louisiana, North Carolina runs out of fuel.
When I arrived at the door of the petroleum marketers I was generally treated as a curiosity. Almost all of them have the same story. It begins with “My granddaddy got a short truck and started hauling fuel for the…” and “My Daddy built up the business…” and so on.
Today, family-owned petroleum distribution companies are in a quandary. Most
