Wayback Machine 1934: Henry Ford on Biofuels and Bioplastics
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 11. 2.07
Henry Ford tells Modern Mechanix about his vision of a future made of biofuels and bioplastics, in 1934:
“I foresee the time when industry shall no longer denude the forests which require generations to mature, nor use up the mines which were ages in the making, but shall draw its raw material largely from the annual products of the fields,” he declared.::Modern Mechanix“I am convinced that we shall be able to get out of the yearly crops most of the basic materials which we now get from forest and mine. We shall grow annually many if not most of the substances needed in manufacturing.
“When that day comes, and it is surely on the way, the farmer will not lack a market and the worker will not lack a job. More people will live in the country. The present unnatural condition will be naturally balanced again. Chemistry will reunite agriculture and industry. They were allowed to get too far apart and the world has suffered by the separation.”
So, we don't always have to be moving forward blindly. Maybe we could look to the past to learn a few things about the future(crazy concept, I know!). I mean, look how many of the native americans lived. They were pretty green way back when!
we neeed someone like henry ford to do for the solar/renewable energy industry what ford did for the auto industry with advent of the assembly line
Too bad Ford didn't act on what he said. Perhaps this could be the earliest recorded greenwashing?
I find it particularly ironic that the original diesel engine was powered with peanut oil. For some years afterwards, diesel engines ran exclusively on vegetable oil. In the 1920's, car manufacturers then needed to redesign diesel engines to make them more suited to the use of petroleum derived diesel.
George Washington Carver (1864-1943), a scholar, inventor, visionary, philosopher, artist, botanist and agricultural researcher, said something very similar:
"I believe the Great Creator has put ores and oil on this earth to give us a breathing spell... As we exhaust them, we must be prepared to fall back on our farms, which are God's true storehouse and can never be exhausted. For we can learn to synthesize materials for every human need from the things that grow."
For all his foresight, it's a bit surprising that Ford didn't see the population boom comming.
How counter-intuitive it now seems that back then he saw mass agriculture as an *alternative* to "denuding the forests"!
I would imagine he would be sad to see that agriculture has come to be the main mechanism of wilderness destruction - making mining & managed forestry seem nearly harmless by comparison.
Henry Ford was a visionary. This is simply one more proof of his genius.
Toyota is another.
Shifting our focus back to locally based food, fuel and fiber to sustain us will require that urban living refocus on renewable, closed-loop systems that operate much like natural systems. Using solar voltaic and other renewable energies to power the grid will have to replace the limited fossil fuels, which we have relied on over the last century. Yet, growing simple food and biofuels via sunlight may reawaken the awareness that we are of the earth, rather than temporary masters of her through technology.