A Vision of a World of Hemp
by Justin Thomas, Virginia on 09.28.05
There is a theory that optimizing use of hemp in modern society would be a startingly effective move in terms of our manufacturing capabilities. Many people do not grasp the range of benefits that would be realized. Here is a full vision presented by John Roulac in his book Hemp Horizions: The Comeback of the World's Most Promising Plant:
So imagine that one day within the next ten years, you wake up in a house whose walls, roof, flooring, insulation, and paint are derived of hemp. You feel great after sleeping on your hemp-stuffed mattress, covered with soft linens spun from hemp fiber. Your feet sink into the hemp carpeting as you get out of bed and open the hemp drapes. It's a beautiful morning.You jump into the shower, where you soap, shampoo, and hair conditioner made from hemp. You step out onto the hemp bath mat, drying yourself with a superabsorbent hemp towel. You clean your ears with H-Tips (better than the old cotton swabs), and apply hemp-oil lotion, moisturizer, and lip balm. You make a mental note to buy some more hemp toilet paper, recalling how it wasn't too long ago that we were still cutting down centuries-old trees just to flush them away.
Opening your closet, you dress in hemp jeans, shirt, and jacket; put on hemp socks and shoes; tie the hemp laces; and grab your hemp wallet, which holds checks and currency printed on hemp paper.
You're hungry, so you walk into the kitchen with its hemp-based linoleum floor. You make some wheat-and-hemp-flower toast, and pour a glass of fresh, organic hemp milk. After eating, you make a salad with hemp-oil dressing to take to work. Then you wash your dishes, using hemp-oil dish soap and a hemp pot-scrubber, and put the dishes away in a cabinet built of hemp fiberboard. Sitting down on the hemp-framed and upholstered couch, you glance at a newspaper printed with hemp ink on hemp recycled paper, and learn that the hemp industry is now the largest agribusiness and the major job provider in your state. You turn on the stereo, which sits on a hemp fiberboard cabinet, and listen as music vibrates from speakers also made from hemp fiberboard. They contain specialty hemp paper for the speaker cones and are covered with black hempen cloth.
Leaving the house for work, you open the door of your car, built of strong, lightweight composites that include hemp. Relaxing into the driver's seat, luxuriously upholstered with hemp textiles, you rest your feet on floor mats that look like rubber but are made from hemp. As you drive to your job at the new hemp-fiber processing facility, you pass farmers harvesting some of the locally grown hemp that is revitalizing your community's rural economy.
A beautiful morning indeed, but it would be even more beautiful if you knew how environmentally friendly and healthy your new hempen life actually is. The rubber-like mats in your hemp mobile are all natural and 100 per cent biodegradable; the roots of the hemp plants that line the fields of your county help enrich and solidify much-needed topsoil and therefore increase the yield of other rotational crops. You smile while spreading hempseed hummus on your hemp-wheat toast knowing it is the single most complete source of non-animal protein on the planet - and tastes much better than tofu. The smile increases as you pour hemp oil on your salad, knowing it is high in essential fatty acids that help you think better, boost your immune system, decrease your chances of cancer, and reduce the risk of high blood pressure, platelet coagulation, and hardening of the arteries. Lastly, before heading off to work, you opt for your hemp skateboard instead of the hemp mobile, as it is a brilliant, bright and sunny day.
The fact of the matter is, this beautiful morning has no imaginative end. The only thing keeping us from achieving the dawn of a new tomorrow is our monopoly cotton and paper industries, and a government which seems to be supporting those industries by restricting and limiting hemp production permits and also by unleashing the DEA on would-be hemp producers (despite the fact that it has NEVER been illegal to grow hemp in America).
Incredible. I know the industries and their lobbying capacities seem endless - but we all have to remember that in the end, the bottom line can be changed by consumer demand. Each of us TreeHuggers can do our part by buying these products online, and asking our locals shops to carry them.
Anybody know what sort of permits are needed to grow hemp (and what hoops need to be jumped through to get them)?
Hemp Plants
not
Nuke Plants
We should plant and harvest hemp to use the suns energy to run steam generator power plants instead of promoting and running nuclear plants.
The Security/Industrial Establishment could increase their "man"power by building barbed wire fences around the hemp fields and hiring guards to patrol the parimeter of the fields.
If something went wrong, a hemp "spill" :)
would be less of a disaster
then a nuke spill. :(
Hemp alone would bring agriculture back to contributing to U.S. revenue and financial growth. My family are farmers, the best crop as far as a money maker is Milo. If we were allowed to farm Hemp we could make 3 times more than Milo per acre. Eliminating the need for pesticides, and less likely to have crops totaled by one summer storm. With Nebraska summers hot, and going days or weeks without rain. Hemp is still resiliant enough to go longer without irrigation.
I've always been a big supporter of the return to hemp production and use.
For some reason, though, reading this article made it seem almost scary; I wondered where all the other plant products had gone.
I had a quick vision of myself screaming "Can't I find anything NOT made out of hemp? I wear hemp clothes, I live in a hemp house, my god I even eat and drink hemp..."
Would that we were so lucky to complain about that.
:)
I have hemp oil in my fridge. It actually tastes really good. It's a nutty sort of oil taste. I do mix it in my homemade (chickpea, not hemp) hummus. Go Hemp! Go Lobby! Vote, Protest! I say legalze Hemp, AND give 10 cents per aluminum recycled, nationwide.
This is one of those articles that make hemp advocates sound crazy! Why is that a better world? Oh, everything is hemp, umm, so? Try talking about why!
Henry Ford made a car out of Hemp along time ago. I saw a picture of him swinging an ax at it, and the axe just bounced of the car with out even a small scratch. So why do car companies use this flimsy metal, that even the lightest contact makes a dent? For instance in a storm a few years ago it hailed, dime sized hail; the hail couldn't of weighed more than an ounce, and it still dented my car.
hello,
although I find it scary that everything would be made of hemp only (a hemp-monopoly is still a monopoly)
but you forget one thing. Hemp to make bio-diesel.
Having everything made from hemp would obviously be a bit extreme; How boring would life be without diversity?
This is essentially an excerpt from John Roulac's excellent book that illustrates the possibilities of hemp. The book is an great resource on the why's and other information.
Keep in mind that most people in N.A. don't own a single item made from hemp because of restrictions associated with production and R & D with the crop. Thusly, none of these product scenarios mentioned have begun to reach their full potential (with the exception of textiles which have had significant improvements in the last 2 decades.)
The point here is the illustration of the possibilities if we are allowed by government to grow something natural and harmless (why would we need to guard a crop that everyone can grow very easily and you can't get high from industrial hemp BTW).
Even if we concentrated all of our R&D efforts on hemp products starting tomorrow, this scene would not be realized for at least a generation.
PS at one time it was illegal NOT to farm hemp in the US.