ARTICLE BY CHARLES KOVESS
“A VISION OF OUR MAGNIFICENT FUTURE IN AN INDUSTRIAL HEMP WORLD”
This is a parable.
This is a story.
It’s a short story, but it will convey the essence of a much longer story that is probably on its way, depending on other demands on my time.
This is my vision of a magnificent future that is available to Australians and everyone in a new, industrial hemp world that I am highly confident is on its way!
Publishing my vision and sharing it with you will help to speed up the arrival of this future, and I reckon
now, in the middle of house arrests globally disguised as ‘lockdowns for our own good’, is a good time to share my optimism.
So, put on your imagination hat, to steal a metaphor from Edward De Bono.
Come on, start daydreaming, and join in to this story. Now is when you actually do have time to do some daydreaming!
This story that, in the near future, will be very close to your real experiences.
You wake up at 5.45 am in the morning, enveloped by beautiful, warm, highly-energised natural fibre hemp sheets on your Queen-sized bed. Sleeping between hemp sheets is a truly unique experience, and you learnt that you need to start with one sheet only for the first week, and then graduate to both sheets.
Why?
Because the sheets are almost living things and until you become accustomed to them, they can keep you ‘buzzing’ all night.
You easily jump out of bed, because you are so healthy, and you’ve had a most refreshing and nourishing sleep.
Your home is made of hempcrete, a wonderful material that breathes all year round, contains no chemicals, and keeps your home at a steady 21 degrees centigrade without the need for heating and cooling. Your gas and electricity costs have plummeted!
Why are you so healthy? You can discover that by the end of the parable!
You drink your (legal) CBD-infused filtered water, and then get into your exercise regime after your normal 20-minute meditation about, and envisioning of, your upcoming day.
Your exercise gear only needs to be washed once each week, thereby preserving and protecting the quality and valuable materials and saving you plenty of money.
On your breakfast cereal and fruit, you sprinkle your hemp seeds, and you enjoy the toasted hemp bread smothered in lovely, natural butter (no margarine). The hemp bread is so tasty, you don’t need anything else on it, and because it’s organic or, even better, biological bread, you don’t need more than two slices because it is so nourishing.
Your high-fashion work outfit, and low-fashion casual day outfit, are all made out of hemp textiles, or hemp and organic cotton blend textiles. Shirts, suits, underwear, socks, jeans and t-shirts: all made out of hemp.
And do you know what’s amazing?
You can wear hemp clothing for weeks on end without washing and without any smell or body odour. It is a naturally antibacterial and antibiotic fibre that stops your perspiration bacteria from replicating, so there is no smell.
Just imagine how good this is for your teenage boys and their socks!
So, you choose today’s outfit, and as you dress, you again consciously appreciate the energetic feel of the wonderful hemp fibres.
Your cosmetics and body care products are also all made from, or uses, healthy hemp-based oils. No harm is caused to your skin and body, unlike many standard commercial cosmetics.
Now, it’s off to work you go.
You get into your electric car, whose panels are made entirely of hemp composite materials. They are light and stronger than steel, resulting in excellent energy consumption efficiency.
The lubricants for your car are all made from hemp seed oil, and, if you don’t have an electric car, your fuel source is ethanol made from hemp hurd, the core of the industrial hemp plant.
Road noise during the night didn’t bother you because the freeways have incredibly effective noise barriers along them, made out of hempcrete again. Hempcrete is a carbon sequester, not a greenhouse gas emitter, unlike the concrete production process.
Local councils have all woken up to the benefits of hempcrete, made from locally grown industrial hemp crops with local farmers, and so almost anything that can be made from concrete is being replaced with hempcrete.
Hemp farmers are wonderfully profitable and able to keep their families successfully on the family farms. Rural and regional areas are all booming, due to such profitability, and the pressures on major cities from population increases from the agricultural sector have reduced.
Traffic flow has improved.
And farmers know they can’t grow too much hemp because there are so many ways to utilize their crops. There will always be profitable markets for hemp.
Your morning tea is a beautiful hemp seed biscuit, accompanied by excellent coffee or tea or your favourite herbal tea. I don’t recommend dispensing with your real coffee hit: I’m a coffee addict, and it works for me, as long as I do plenty of other healthy things.
Your office is also constructed of hempcrete, with much of the fittings inside made of hemp composite materials. The office has much-reduced glues, chemicals, formaldehydes, and other building products that can accumulate over time and impact on your immune system. Buildings that are built of hempcrete are cheaper to run and have government incentives for their reduced net carbon emissions.
So, your day goes on.
Your lunch includes hemp seeds sprinkled over your salad, and hemp seed oil, fresh, infused into the salad; the chef knows by now that you don’t heat hemp seed oil. Its omega-6 and omega-9 nutrients, among many others, are damaged by heating.
You are feeling incredibly energetic.
You aren’t hungry, because your food with plenty of hemp ingredients is so nourishing.
You drink plenty of water, but because your office doesn’t need air-conditioning, you avoid the tiring, dehydrating negatives of such an environment.
Because you’ve been able to be so productive, you leave the office by 4.30 pm, in time to have a great time with your children and spouse, all wearing hemp clothing, prior to a wonderful dinner that also contains hemp-based portions of many different possibilities.
No-one gets bored with the hemp foods because there are simply so many menu alternatives and choices!
Your washing loads have reduced, as has your consumption of chemicalized washing powders. As a consequence of so many people wearing hemp clothes, the volume of washing powder waste pouring into our rivers and oceans has reduced dramatically.
Your waste disposal volume has also reduced to a remarkable extent.
Most packaging is being made out of hemp materials that are compostable, recyclable and biodegradable.
Some packaging is even edible: made out of potato starch, strengthened by hemp fibre, and after use fed to farm animals.
Forests don’t need to be cut down so often, because hemp fibre is used for recycled cardboard rather than tree fibres.
You then settle down to watch a great program on Netflix or Stan on TV. Your electricity needs are powered by your solar system on your roof, with hemp composite roof tiles, but the government has also utilized hemp-based ethanol to power electricity generators to make up for renewable energy shortfalls.
So, it’s off to bed you go, your children having been ‘dispatched’ earlier. You are looking forward to once again enjoying the amazing feeling of those natural, warm, inviting hemp sheets.
You feel healthy.
You think healthy.
You have the energy you need to live the life of your dreams.
Your family is healthy.
A hemp-based future will do that.
Why?
Because hemp gives us HPx4 –
- Healthy products
- Healthy people
- Healthy planet
- Healthy profits!
I can see this future.
I can see it coming.
I hope you can too.
It is a magnificent, global opportunity for all of us on Spaceship Earth.
©Charles B. Kovess
CEO, Textile & Composite Industries Pty Ltd
Secretary, Australian Industrial Hemp Alliance