Heeb

At first glance, Mitchell Joachim doesn’t look like the Ivy-league-professor type. Those long, brown dreadlocks are much too quirky for his Ph.D and Master’s degrees. Then he tells you stories about houses made of trees, inside cities built with trash, under skies filled with people riding jet-packs. And none of this progress releases even a single, solitary atom of CO2. Part architect, part ecologist, part urban planner, Joachim’s a crunchy, crazy visionary. He is Lex Luthor raised by Greenpeace, Buckminster Fuller meets the Swamp Thing. And he’s going to make you want to live inside a giant heart.

Terreform ONE, his design firm in Brooklyn, looks like an artist’s loft, but it’s really a wacky, mad-scientist lair filled with plans to overhaul society. Joachim proudly shows off drawings and prototypes of some of his creations: a gym/boat powered by exercising passengers and a personal flying machine fueled by harmless hydrogen peroxide. With each plan, he tries to counteract, not just avoid, wastefulness. “When you design a burger box, what’s the fucking point?” Joachim asks. “You throw it away. You don’t give it to your girlfriend to store her jewelry in. You don’t even store your weed in a burger box. We have no purpose for a lot of these industrially designed objects, and it’s the people who create them that put the ‘no’ in innovation.”

An ecological alchemist, Joachim imagines elements of trash, the terrestrial, and the technological creating a wild new metropolis of the future. (Picture the Hobbits’ Shire built by Philip K. Dick.) Currently, he’s working on garbage-compacting robots capable of turning the 38,000 tons of waste New York city generates yearly into building materials. But rechanneling our refuse and excess is just one part of Joachim’s plan—his organically grown habitats are even more surreal. The Fab Tree Hab design manipulates plant life into shelter through computer-controlled scaffolding—an actual tree-house. And as if that ultimate in Green tech wasn’t enough, Joachim even delves into the Red. Surrounded by bioengineering equipment purchased on eBay, a human-heartshaped model house sits in a glass terrarium. “We’re growing a house of meat,” he says simply, explaining how flesh is grown in a test tube using cells from pigs—as a potential source of “victim-less meat and leather” or even, possibly, the home of the future. Like a proud parent, Joachim beams: “It’s ugly—and we like it."

If this all sounds like a Heinlein or Bradbury novel come to life—well, that’s the idea. “Science fiction is the best indicator for what technologies will be available in the future," Joachim admits. "Economic forecasting is accurate for about five years. With science fiction, it’s only a matter of when, not how, it will be made manifest.” With his cardiovascular condos and arborial abodes, he’s probably smarter than anybody at a comic-con, but like any good geek, Joachim worries about the world. He calls the current environmental policies a joke. Even the Environmental Protection Agency’s one-million tree policy, which aims to plant just that in select cities, is far-fetched. “Do you know what one million more trees will do to carbon loading in the atmosphere?” Joachim asks. “Nothing. To solve carbon loading in America alone, we would need a forest that would go from Seattle, Washington to Detroit, Michigan; down to Madison, Wisconsin; pretty much over to L.A. — and that would reduce one gigaton of carbon out of the seven that we need.”

For better or for worse, Joachim believes that the fate of the future is in the hands of the "Homer Simpsons” of the world—that faction of people who want exciting new products that function better than the current models, and if they happen to be green— hey, that’s nice, too. “When I propose cities that have jetpacks in them, I’m thinking that maybe we can’t get people to change over to fluorescent light bulbs, but we could get them to buy jet-packs,” Joachim hopes. “It’s about being excited about that product.” And he’s right. For most of us, the fate of the environment is a genuine, important, and boring concern, but jet-packs are just awesome! Who wouldn’t want to live in a real tree-house? If he can pull it off, funneling consumer greed toward eco-loving solutions might end up his most brilliant and shocking trick. (Well, after that meat house, maybe.) Tricking technology-crazed Everymen into saving the world with flashy innovations and funky, sci-fi gadgets— what an evil genius!

Related Posts:

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About the Future (But Were Afraid to Ask)

Grave New World: Douglas Rushkoff

Grave New World: Daniel Pinchbeck

Grave New World: Howard Bloom