Category: Direct Action

Companies Reward Cyclists For Choosing Bikes Instead of Cars

Despite the fact that Toronto’s politicians want to make the city more dangerous for cyclists (by encouraging more car use and removing bike-focused infrastructure) the people of Toronto are loving bike riding more and more every year. Companies have caught on to this and some are now giving employee some rewards for opting to ride a bicycle instead of using a car.

It helps keep staff healthy and active, and “I actually think it saves money for customers,” he said.
If a consultant has to drive from the suburbs to a client downtown, the client gets charged 50 cents per kilometer, plus $25 for parking. That can add up to a $45 charge for the client.
…
Toronto Environmental Office director Lawson Oates agrees. Cycling rewards increasingly resonate with younger workers and employers, he said.
“It’s the wave of the future. (Companies) want to attract and retain topnotch employees,” and these people don’t necessarily function in “the old 9-5 mould,” he said.

Read more at The Star

Thanks to Kathryn!

Open Source Ecology Explained

Way back in 2008 I blogged on Open Source Ecology (OSE) which is an open source project to create tools and knowledge to build a fully sustainable village. The project has grown since then and they are going even further by designing tools that can be fabricated on site. Recently, they made a good video explaining more about what OSE is all about.

Via bOing

Leave Loved Ones With an Exit Plan

Get Your Shit Together (GYST) is a website dedicated to making it so that other people don’t need to experience what one mother had to go through when her husband suddenly passed away. Losing someone you love is hard enough, but what made things even harder was that the couple never planned for their inevitable deaths which meant that there were a whole series of hurdles that weren’t foreseen.

GYST provides people with the basic documents they need to ensure that whoever takes care of their estate and things after one’s death has an easier time. We all die and that means that someone will have to manage what we leave behind, so we may as well take a couple minutes and make that process easier now while we can.

Here’s the crux as to you GYST exists:

There I was, now a single mother, grieving, facing one of the worst things that could possibly happen. The trauma and grief are enough to completely level you – and yet, the fear about having our wills drafted but not signed, not knowing how much life insurance we had, not knowing the password to his phone so I could call his family, etc. – were often the things that pushed me over the edge. All of that extra stress and pain could have easily been avoided with a few hours of organization and follow through. I don’t want anyone to suffer the same way.

Doing your will is a hassle, collecting passwords is a pain in the ass. I know, I get it. But so is going to the dentist, changing the oil in your car, and getting an annual mammogram. And, we manage to do that stuff anyway

Now take a few minutes and Get Your Shit Together!

A Beer for Butterflies

Beer is delicious so it’s exciting to find out that at least one brewery is out there using their delvious suds to help a threatened species. Pelican Pub & Brewery in Oregon are using profits from one of their beers to fund the protection of butterflies from encroaching development and invasive species.

Now we have the newish Silverspot IPA, introduced last summer by the Pelican Pub & Brewery of Pacific City, Oregon. Downing one of these English-style IPAs will help efforts to increase populations of the threatened Oregon Silverspot Butterfly.

Once fairly common in northwest grasslands, the OSB (Speyeria zerene Hippolyta) became the victim of lost habitat, in terms of the early blue violet plant, also known as the dog violet (Viola adunca). It’s the great chain of ecological being—muck with this species here, and that species over there suffers as well.

The butterfly lays its eggs near the plant, which then serves as the sole source of food for the growing caterpillars.

Read more here.

Thanks to Mirella!

Social Media Helps Global Development

Social media can actually be useful for more than sharing pictures of your lunch! There is a whole collection of apps and web services that can be used to help development efforts around the world. They provide the ability to track how projects are coming along and their current status to being able to connect farmers to more information and their own local social networks.

My favourite service is one that allows people to report corruption:

I Paid a Bribe is an anticorruption movement that harnesses the power of collective voices. Protected by anonymity, users are encouraged to report on corrupt acts, through a website, email or SMS. The reports are mapped on the site and used to inform campaigns for better governance. The movement is active in India, Greece, Kenya, Pakistan and Zimbabwe, after its founder, Tawanda Kembo, was pressured to pay a bribe by a corrupt police officer, and will be coming soon to the Philippines and Mongolia.

See more examples at The Guardian.