Category: Direct Action

Local Currencies Have a Good Return

Doulgas Rsuhkoff is guest blogging on boing boing and today he wrote a neat post on his small town. A restaurant owner there is trying to expand, but in order to do so he needs to raise cash. The owner turned to the community instead of a bank by selling local credit.

So Halko’s idea is to sell VIP cards. For every dollar a customer spends on a card, they receive the equivalent of $1.20 worth of credit at either restaurant. If I buy a thousand dollar card, I get twelve hundred dollars worth of food: a 20% rate of return on the investment of dollars. Halko gets the cash infusion he needs to build the new restaurant – and since he’s paying for it in 20% tab adjustments, it just comes out of profits. He gets the money a lot cheaper than if he were borrowing it from the bank, paying back in cash over time. Meanwhile, customers get more food for less money.

But wait, there’s more: the entire scheme refocuses a community’s energy and cash on itself. Because our money goes further at our own restaurant than a restaurant somewhere else, we are biased towards eating locally. Since we have a stake in the success (and the non-failure) of the restaurant in whose food we have invested, we’ll also be more likely to promote it to our friends. And since we have already spent a big chunk of money on Comfort’s food, we’re more likely go get food there than dish out more cash for a meal somewhere else.

Grow Your Own Food in a Small Space

A grow box is a small container that can be used to create a large quantity of food, the people over at Eat Drink Better have guides to create your own grow box.

With a small amount of space, a nominal investment in supplies, and a little bit of sunlight, you too can have delicious, fresh produce at your fingertips in the middle of the city, the country, or even (gasp!) the ‘burbs! Oh, and you’re going to be pulling CO2 out of the air and fixing it in a very delicious form.

If you want to affect global climate change, why not do it through fresh, homegrown food? Oh, and if you live in USDA plant hardiness zones that have double digits, you might be able to do this until November or later. Lucky!

DIY Alternative Energy, Build Your Own Solar Power

Ever wanted to build your own energy network? Well, now you can!
This guy made his own solar power unit.

So what is a solar panel anyway? It is basically a box that holds an array of solar cells. Solar cells are the things that do the actual work of turning sunlight into electricity. However, it takes a lot of cells to make a meaningful amount of power, and they are very fragile, so the individual cells are assembled into panels. The panels hold enough cells to make a useful amount of power and protect the cells from the elements. It doesn’t sound too complicated. I was convinced I could do it myself.

I started out the way I start every project, by Googling for information on home-built solar panels. I was shocked at how few I found. The fact that very few people were building their own panels led me to think it must be harder to do than I thought. The project got shelved for a while, but I never stopped thinking about it.

The Greenest Cup of Office Coffee

The Green Lantern (the cute name for Slate’s enviro-advice column) answered the question of which kind of cup to use in the office. The answer isn’t as clear as you think, as always, there are many issues that need to inform your decision. In sum, use an old mug (don’t buy new ones) and wash using environmentally friendly soap.

The Lantern uses a mug for office beverages, but he’s chosen to go the scavenger route—using an old one someone left in his office. Your colleagues’ instincts are right to avoid polystyrene, but they shouldn’t buy brand-new mugs as a replacement (even the kind that come with cheeky green messages). Unless you absolutely need to drink your coffee on the go, ceramic is better than stainless steel. And when you wash, do it by hand, using phosphate-free soap and cold water. (If you want to use hot water, see if you can share washing duties throughout the office, so the water doesn’t need to be heated separately for each mug.)

What if you get your coffee at the local Starbucks on your way to work? The nationwide chain deserves credit for including 10 percent recycled content in its cups, and paper—unlike polystyrene—has the advantage of being a renewable resource. But in other ways, the wood-based venti cups are even worse than office polystyrene: They’re heavier, which means more energy used to create the cup and more waste once the cups have been crushed. Other coffee retailers are experimenting with cups made out of plant-based material, which can then be composted—a positive step, although one that raises a question of where all that extra corn will come from.

The Ecology of Work

Environmentalism is something that cannot be compartmentalized, at least that’s how I’ve always seen it. For example, I don’t see how someone working for an oil company can even hint at the idea that they are environmentalist, considering that their living comes from a very destructive industry. I’m glad that Curtis White agrees with me in his essay The Ecology of Work– and he says what I’ve been thinking in a much more logical way.

Here’s a choice section of the essay:

Aldous Huxley provided a very different and a very human account of work in The Perennial Philosophy. He called it “right livelihood” (a concept he borrowed from Buddhism). For Huxley, work should serve other people, provide learning experiences that deepen the worker, and do as little harm as possible. (You will note that there is nothing in this description about a competitive compensation and benefits package.) But what percentage of American jobs conforms to this description? Five percent? Even in the new “creative” information economy where the claim could be made that computer designers and software technicians are constantly learning, is it a learning that deepens? That serves others broadly? And what of the mindless, deadening work of data processors and telemarketers—our modern, miserable Bartlebys and Cratchits—locked in their cubicles from San Jose to Bangalore? Our culture’s assumption that there is virtue in work flatters us into thinking that we’re doing something noble (“supporting our families,” “putting food on the table,” “making sacrifices”) when we are really only allowing ourselves to be treated like automatons. We all have our place, our “job,” and it is an ever less human place. We are diligent, disciplined, and responsible, but because of these virtues we are also thoughtless.