Home Sweet, Homeland Security — Interview with Robert Plarr, Green Home Builder

Over the last 30-plus years, he has taken it upon himself to find ways in which humans can live in their environment without doing more damage to it.

His experiments in home design led him to build a passive solar underground home. At the time in 1976, the home featured the world’s largest privately-owned wind turbine, a 45 kW Mehrkam design.

“We’ve been talking about this stuff for 40 years, and when you join our group, we actually make a change,” Plarr told the Iconoclast. “The young people don’t have time to wait around for another 40 years for some environmental movement. Change is now. They can join forces with us now, and we can start implementing it now.”

As a response to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, Plarr said he poured his energy into the Angel’s Nest Retreat in Taos, New Mexico.

Billed as a model for sustainable-energy homes of the future, the 8,000-square-foot retreat is designed to be entirely self-sustaining with integrated solar and wind energy production systems, an internal sewage water recycling system complete with its own “rainforest,” and an air-to-water system for fresh drinking-water.

“I started building a structure because I wanted to build truly a Homeland Security home,” said Plarr. “When you have a home like this, you aren’t held hostage by anyone or anything.

“I’d like to say to President Bush, ‘Sir, I’m an ex-Marine always a Marine. I reported for duty and did what you asked and we have a Homeland Security home now.”

The Iconoclast’s Nathan Diebenow spoke with Plarr recently about his successes and failures early on in his career, the design of his new home concepts, and the untapped opportunity and growing necessity to manufacture these concepts worldwide.

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ICONOCLAST: What is your critique of the environmental movement?

ROBERT PLARR: I don’t know if you saw the website.

ICONOCLAST: Yeah, it’s pretty indepth.

PLARR: Yeah, it is indepth. It’s one of the unusual things because we actually do something. The rest of the what I call psychobabble, the environmental movement, has basically failed in the last 40 years because they dance in circles and they don’t produce anything.

I believe in building things and working can actually change the world instead of just talking about it. Having grants, dropping theories, and getting paid for the rest of one’s life does nothing. One of the things we do is have a research building that does the things we talk about. A lot of it is on the 99 yard line.

We actually have to build these things in the tens of millions, very inexpen