This is a multi-billion dollar business.
Who has the audacity to try to do it?
Background story by Bruce Camber: I often have my crazier ideas while sitting in highway traffic. In a daydream I thought, “I could walk faster.” Then it hit me, “Why not?” Why not have walking paths all over the USA? Why not have an uninterrupted walking path from the Atlantic to the Pacific.”
And then I asked, “What kind of a ludicrous idea is that?”
The traffic was at a standstill, so I asked, “Why not?”
My answer was simple, “It re-creates the continuity of land.” Then I thought that the symbolic start of this multi-billion dollar project would be to build the widest-possible, natural bridge over the busiest highways that divide the largest tracts of open land in the USA and then work down from there. This effort would end up connecting existing walking paths or hiking trails to most other walking paths and hiking trails.
Perhaps this statement is a little like the one Bill Gates made when he said, “Put a computer on every desktop.” It took many years to get that wagon rolling; maybe we can get this one in motion a little more quickly!
That’s crazy. But, every time I’d get stuck in a traffic jam, I would find myself thinking about it again.
Company name: Ecology Mountains. Each one could be numbered from #1 to #10,000. The construction company might be called something like, The Natural Bridge Construction Company.
Expertise: Very special bridges over every major highway between places that go nowhere.
Think about it. A walkway with no cars, no trucks, first over the major highways, then over the busiest roadways, then over all but the dirt roads. Once it is marketed and created East-West across the country, others could go north-south. The Appalachian National Scenic Trail (pop up) is already a good beginning on the East Coast In the USA. Yet, this model could readily be used in every nation of the world.
More thinking. Well, it wasn’t long before I was in another traffic jam.
I thought, “How are these natural bridges going to get funded?”
I had plenty of time to think about it and one crazy idea often leads to another.
Funding: Most of the highways will not have exits where these natural bridges need to be built. Get a few good geologists involved and create sanitary landfills that not only cover these very wide natural bridges, but also become the beginnings of an Ecology Mountain, literally a landfill mountain where students continue their studies of waste, decomposition, and the processes to capture and use the resulting methane gases.
The concept of an Ecology Mountain is another billion-dollar business and it should be more fully analyzed by professionals. Suffice to say that these Ecology Mountains could be research laboratories and natural retreat centers for local schools and universities in their collaborations with energy-related businesses.
Then, I began thinking how every city and town in the USA could create paths that could get connected to the big path across America. In the town where I grew up, Wilmington, Massachusetts, Interstate 93 slices right through the middle. If there were a perimeter path around the town, it would have to cross that Interstate Highway twice. I suggested to an old scrub-football friend of mine, Mike Caira (who grew up to become the town manager), “Come on, Mike, let’s do it. Be the first town in America to build a hiking trail clear around the town right on the border, sort of the inverse of the Parisian Périphérique or a beltway or highway loop around our cities today.”
Of course, Mike thinks it is a crazy idea. But such a crazy idea could transform a town and make it so much more livable. Why not?
You do it! I’ve been in plenty of traffic jams since then — this is one of those long-term abiding ideas that just won’t go away.
I don’t have the time to do it. So, why don’t you do it?
I just checked, NaturalBridgeConstruction.com was available.
EcologyMountain.com is as well. That was on March 28, 2009. Not long ago, just because I like it so much and nobody had registered it, I registered Ecology Mountain (.co, .com and .org) on November 4, 2010. I still believe these both could readily become multi-billion dollar businesses and new industries. -BeC
Go to page about growing a business from $0-to-$1 Billion in less than a lifetime.
The Ecology Mountain movement will unfold within the http://contextsensitivesolutions.org environment sponsored by the US Department of Transportation, Federal Highway Administration.