D: Today, we are going to be exploring the concept of appropriate technology in our own nation, and a practical process for grass roots innovation, which can lead us from the failures of one technological fix after another, to a technology with values, technology which serves people and the planet, both now and in the long term. That is an important concept too.

Our guest today, Tommy Cichanowski, will help us understand the lessons hidden in the mysteries of Nature, and how Nature can lead us toward the kinds of earth-friendly and people-friendly technologies we will need as we enter this next millennium.

So, That's what is on tap for today.

C: You are listening to Community Connections. I'm Carly Newfeld.

D: And, I'm Diego Mulligan.

You are listening to Community Connections, live from Santa Fe. Today's guest is Tommy Cichanowski and our topic is Appropriate Technology. And we are going to be exploring many different things in the next forty-five minutes or so, here on Community Connections. Welcome to the program, Tommy.

T: Good Afternoon.

D: Tommy, you have been working in Albuquerque for a number of years now. Two years. And, you have been working in some advanced material science. That seems like a pretty amazing thing to be working on. But, you didn't start off right in that. Give us a little background on what brought you into technology innovation.

T: Well, I have an incredibly diverse background. I was born into a family of crafts people. Most of my relatives have their own small businesses. I have always had tools and junk parts to play with. So in my youth I developed this insatiable curiosity as to how things work. That curiosity later focused on Nature and her mysteries.

D: I bet you were one of those kids, who with a screw driver and pliers went around the house taking everything apart.

T: Yes, especially in grandpa's clock shop.

D: Ahh ... grandpa's clock shop.

C: I grew up in one of those also.

D: Ya, Carly's father was a Uhrmacher.

C: Truly, a watch maker.

D: A watch maker from Vienna. Go ahead Tommy.

T: In my teens I worked summers on a cousin's dairy farm and later at a dairy.

In college, I majored in psychology, with minors in engineering and speech and drama. I paid for college working as an electrician. First for a commercial contractor, then a candy factory and then an advanced materials company. We produced the carbon filament that is used so widely now for so many things.

D: Like what?

T: Oh, graphite golf clubs and tennis rackets. My brother uses it for some of his We•no•nah Canoe models.

D: You know, I've got some of that in my heart! I have carbon fiber as a part of an artificial heart valve that I have. There we go, the cat's out of the bag now folks! I'm great though. As long as Carly winds me up each morning, you know, I can just about keep it together for the day.

C: You really do go tick tock in the middle of the night.

D: Ya, its true! So you worked on that?

T: Yes, I worked on the machines that made it and the lab equipment for testing it.

At this point, I ran away with the Rock & Roll Circus and spent ten years working in the music business building advanced sound and lighting equipment for studios and outdoor concerts.

Then, while in Milwaukee, I started working for other industries there. I learned how to use machine tools at Ottmann Engineering and learned the basics of metal casting, fixing things at a foundry.

Paul Ottmann introduced me to a company, Nitragen Sales Corporation, which pioneered the culturing of nitrogen-fixing bacteria, back in 1896.
Take a Slide Show Tour of the Factory.

C: Could you say that again? Culturing what?

D: Nitrogen-fixing bacteria.

C: Which do what?

T: These are bacteria which attach themselves to the roots of legumes and they are even working on other species now.

D: Ya, plants, such as pea or bean plants.

T: These rascals get their nutrients, their food, from the plant. They then take nitrogen from the air and make ammonia. Now the plants can't use the ammonia directly, but other bacteria feed on the ammonia and convert it into nitrates which the plants can use.

What results, is a symbiotic relationship between the plants and the bacteria. The bacteria feed on the plants, and in turn produce plant food for the plants.

If you look at Nature, you will find these symbiotic relationships everywhere. Animals produce a hormone in their urea called uroxin. This hormone has the ability to stimulate root growth in plants. So when there are animals grazing in an area, this hormone produces a positive feedback mechanism which increases plant growth in that area.

D: Does that work for human urea as well?

T: Yes, definitely!

D: I have heard that human urea in a mixture of one part in ten parts water is a wonderful hydroponic-type watering solution for your plants, especially outdoors. I know people raising incredible gardens using urea.

C: It's really interesting; this is regarding another part of the body and our show on breast-feeding that we will be doing next Wednesday, but there is a new piece of information out regarding hormones that are secreted into breast milk that are used by the babies twenty years later, beginning during puberty!

D: Amazing! So Tommy, you are talking about your early days and the sorts of things that brought you into this new way of looking at technology through the eyes of Nature, in a sense.

T: Basically, I have been interested in developing sustainable communities about as long as you have, Diego.

D: Ahh, come on!

C: You two guys go back as friends for a number of years.

D: Oh yes, that's true. So where were you, regarding sustainable communities, say, ten years ago?

T: Ten years ago, technology wasn't anything like it is today, but working as an electrician for those number of years to pay for college, I was able to study older buildings and learn the old crafts and old techniques, and some of these good ways of doing things just aren't being used today, and we need to use some of those again.

However, the important thing is, I was able to see the potential there, to create a sustainable, self sufficient housing unit. Then, one day I was talking to a friend, David Odland, and he told me about the Magic Tortoise. The Magic Tortoise is described in the Chinese I Ching.

The Magic Tortoise is a creature who requires only sunlight & Air to sustain itself and grow! I found this very fascinating and I said to him, "Hey, I'm working to build a mechanical version of that!"

D: Sounds like magic to me.

C: Is this actually a Chinese animal or a mythological animal?

T: The Tortoise is a mythological animal, with a lesson to teach. The lessons are presented in a series of children's books I've been working on, where the Magic Tortoise takes a boy and introduces him to a lot of his friends, each of whom has a special talent and a novel outlook towards nature. Eventually, the boy learns the true meaning of the Magic Tortoise Myth. The Magic Tortoise, in reality, is the planet Earth!

D: Ahh !

T: But, there is a real creature that lives in warm shallow seas, named Hetero Stigana, and this rascal only requires sunlight and sea water to provide for his needs. When this creature begins his independent life and leaves his parent's "building", he starts out in a two chambered structure. When one looks at this creature under a microscope, you can see that one of these chambers is definitely a greenhouse. As the creature grows and develops, it adds chambers to its structure. At some point they start producing offspring and then follows a scurry of activity.

I think that the parents tell the little ones, "Out Now. Its time for your mom and me to retire to our own little place!"

And at this point, a large number of these little two-chambered units, leave the main structure, each with a share of the plants from the main structure. The main structure is abandoned, and it settles to the bottom of the ocean and ultimately becomes limestone.

D: Yes it does. What is this guy called?

T: Hetero Stigana. My fascination has been, how does he do this from just Sun light and sea water? So, this is where we get into material science.

The last two years I have been working in a collaborative effort with the National Labs, the University of New Mexico and private companies at the Advanced Materials Laboratory, across from the stadium in Albuquerque.

D: That's quite a place! Tommy took me on a tour around there and they are doing some incredible things. Build a better mouse trap, they say, and the world will beat a path to your doorstep. And I think the same could be said for anyone who develops a better light bulb.

T: Yes, that's one of our projects. Dr. John Milewski, a retired Los Alamos researcher, has acquired a patent for using a single crystal fiber as a light bulb filament. And since lighting is a major issue in growing plants and for personal health, I was happy to be able to gain some hands-on experience with this technology.

I'm one of these people who is seasonally effected by a lack of light. The doctors call is SAD, Seasonally Affected Disorder, but I call it a tendency to hibernate!

We need light from the blue-green portion of the spectrum in order to suppress melatonin production.

D: Is that a hormone?

T: Yes, It's a hormone given off by the pituitary gland that stimulates hibernation. Additionally, this hormone is also involved in our body's healing process. So, if you need to heal, you need darkness so that your body increases melatonin production.

C: Are you saying that we actually do need this hibernation factor? That this is normal for humans? So that those of you who are effected with Seasonal Affective Disorder, that is actually in fact, not a disorder, but is something natural to the human species?

T: Yes it is natural. I think in some of us, the pituitary is a bit over-active. If you think for a moment: before the light bulb, it wasn't wise to wander about in the dark. There were wild animals out there who would like to eat you. So Nature gave us a way so we could sleep longer in the winter and then perk up again during the longer light hours in the summer. So this is one of the body's natural mechanisms, and there are many people who can benefit from more blue-green light from daylight fluorescent tubes or one of these new light bulbs we are working on when we get them on the market.

C: What are these light bulbs above us here? Are these just regular fluorescent?

T: These bulbs have "cool white" phosphors. Their emissions in the blue-green part of the spectrum are not as great as the output from "daylight" tubes. It takes about twice the number of "cool white" tubes to produce the effect that you can get from "daylight" tubes. "Cool white" bulbs can be used for light therapy; it just takes a larger number to do the trick. About six tubes will do it.

D: And we've got three in here.

T: So its dark in here.

D: Well, ya.

Tommy, moving along now: so you've helped to develop these new single crystal filaments, in Albuquerque at the labs there, at the Advanced Material Labs. This sounds pretty incredible! Right now, we use tungsten. This looks like a new step that is really going to save energy.

T: This is the first major innovation in light technology since the tungsten filament, and that was the most advanced since Edison. So, we have really only gone through one generation, after Edison, of light bulb improvement.

A lot of people are switching to fluorescent lights these days, but let me caution you: fluorescent lights have mercury in them and Mercury is Extremely Toxic!

D: Let's now take a trip back to the early days, the relationship between people and the chemical industry, and plants and the chemical industry, too, because, I think this will link this all together here.

What role has the chemical industry played in terms of people's health over the last fifty years? I know you've got a lot to say about that.

T: Well, there is more than one viewpoint.

D: We are talking about your viewpoint.

T: We could talk about everything they have done wrong, but what they actually have done, from my view point, is that they have identified, purified and made available various chemicals, that I can then take and use for projects like hydroculture.

I started working with hydroculture about twenty years ago.

D: Hydroculture, the culture of plants in some sort of liquid nutrient solution.

T: You use a liquid nutrient solution. In hydroculture you use rock or some inert granular material in the pot instead of soil for the plant roots.

And then we mix the chemistry together, in hyper-critical quantities, and when your solution is optimized for a given species of plant, the results are outrageous. You can control how meaty a tomato is, and even the number of blossoms. This can all be controlled just with the diet of the plant.

If you do dry leaf analysis of plants, you find, basically, that about sixty elements are common in plants.

D: So its more than just nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium.

T: Much, much more. My problem is, just because the elements are in the plants doesn't mean that the plants are using them. In general, a plant will have some of everything that is in the soil.

When I started out, we didn't even have copy machines readily available to help with documentation, but, over the years, I've gathered information not only about the nutritional needs of plants, but I have also been gathering information about the enzyme systems in humans and animals.

The agricultural community has adopted the idea that only seventeen different atoms are required for healthy plant growth. I did several experiments with plants that convinced me otherwise. So I started analyzing the different systems in our bodies on the atomic level and have so far determined that at least eleven additional atoms are required for healthy people. These atoms are required in such small quantities that it is very hard to analyze for them.

I include these atoms in my hydroculture solutions in the parts-per-billion range.

D: That sounds almost like a homeopathic proportion.

C: I have a question which relates to that. Are plants able to absorb all the different minerals from the soil that we need to stay healthy?

T: There are many things which effect how and which elements a plant absorbs: things like water content of the soil, and how well aerated the soil is. Some elements aid the absorption of other elements and conversely some elements inhibit the absorption of others.

C: Tommy, I've heard people who say that you don't need to take vitamins and minerals because you can get everything you need from the five food groups. And, I personally understand that that is just not true anymore. We take lots of vitamins and minerals, and so do the kids, as supplements, because I believe that our food is not providing enough. Are we correct?

T: Partially. Theoretically, you can get everything but vitamin C from a balanced diet. Out of the animals that have been tested, that I have learned about, only humans, apes and guinea pigs, don't have a system in their bodies that naturally makes vitamin C. Say, for instance, that we had a two hundred pound rabbit. He would be making ten grams of vitamin C in his body each day.

Regarding other nutrients, the soils throughout the country have become heavily depleted.

C: That's what I mean.

T: So, if we want to talk about health care, we should be talking not to the doctors but to the farmers. The nutrients in the soil need to be brought back into balance.

Lets consider the element selenium. Until recently, selenium was known to be a growth promoter in plants, but wasn't considered essential for humans. Today we have more research available to us, and we know different. Selenium is at the heart of an enzyme system that makes ATP and without ATP you couldn't even move a muscle.

C: ATP?

T: Adenosine TriPhosphate the equivalent of gasoline for the body's cells.

Another element, chrome, for example, is part of the enzyme system that creates and regulates insulin. So having the elements that make up these various enzyme systems available in the soil, is very important.

C: Tommy, we have to take a break now. This is great stuff. We're going all over the place here. Let's get back to some of it in just a few minutes.

D: When we come back, I want to get more of Tommy's opinions about the chemical industry and also about Ether energy and how it might be harnessed as an alternative source of energy that we can use for supplying energy for everyday life. Sound like fun, Tommy?

T: Right on.

D: All right. We'll come back in just a minute with our guest Tommy Cichanowski, who is a mad inventor. Ha, Ha, Ha, indeed he is, and one that I like very much too.