Step Two of the plan is to build great big greenhouses large enough to contain our living neighborhoods.
Because of the increase of weather fluctuations due to climate change we are going to require huge areas of land covered in greenhouses. I used to think geodesic domes would be the way to go for this but now it seems to me that they're more romantic than practical.
A geodesic dome is a hemispherical thin-shell structure (lattice-shell) based on a geodesic polyhedron. The rigid triangular elements of the dome distribute stress throughout the structure, making geodesic domes able to withstand very heavy loads for their size.
~Geodesic dome (Wikipedia)
The larger a dome is the more efficient it is. Bucky Fuller proposed putting domes over entire cities. J. Baldwin wrote about "neighborhood domes" that covered whole city blocks:
Consider a sample dome 300 feet in diameter. That gives us about 1.6 acres of climate-controlled space. If housing were in a raised berm around the perimeter and the housing units had a 30 foot frontage inside and outside the dome, there would be pace for 30 homes—perhaps 120 people. A 1.6 acre bioshelter could supply them with all their food—except perhaps Twinkies—with a substantial cash crop left over.
~ "A Dome Bioshelter as a Village Component", J. Baldwin, The Journal of the New Alchemists, Vol. 7, 1981
For applications like sports stadiums where you want a large clear span geodesic domes have a role to play, but for mass greenhouses you don't necessarily need that. There's no reason why a large greenhouse couldn't have posts inside it. On the human scale normal methods of construction work well and I suspect conventional structures would prove easier to maintain than vast domes.
The important thing is that you want them to mitigate weather fluctuations due to climate change. If they are big enough you can just put your house under there too. So we want to make them large enough to fit housing but not so large that they become a maintenance headache. For growing a complete diet Ecology Action's GROW BioIntensive System requires 450m² (5000ft²) per adult while Alik Pelman uses 750m² (8100ft²), so that's about two or three tennis courts per adult. Add one for housing and one for "cyborg wetlands" and that gives us a lower limit on the size of our greenhouses per adult.
It's also important to remember that these greenhouses are not just to keep the plants warm, in many cases they will need to be able to keep the plants cooler than ambient temperatures. This is sure to be the case at Green Hills as the summer temperatures there get so hot that most plants can't survive without protection.
If you can afford it you can just buy greenhouses off-the-shelf and have them installed. There are lots of companies that manufacture greenhouses and will gladly provide you with whatever you need. There's a certain embodied energy associated with mass manufactured glass, plastic, and metal greenhouses. If you can't afford them or don't want to incur the ecological overhead of industrial greenhouses then we have to figure out ways to build them cheaply and with low embodied energy. Ideally we hope to construct greenhouses from materials that we can grow ourselves in our greenhouses.
Tubes made from leaf paper and waterglass glue (fireproof), and membranes made from bioplastic cooling fabric: "Homemade Machine Turns Bioplastics Into Cooling Fabric", NightHawkInLight.
Mycelium leather panels and insulation?
to be continued...