Shirari Industries

Home > Blog

Adventures in making art and living sustainably.

I wrote an article about how to organize a community swap/barter meet for Shareable

By Shira | Feb 4, 10 12:47 PM

Shareable, a website that "tells the story of sharing,” invited me to write a how-to article for their site and I seized the opportunity in the hopes of inspiring similar efforts in other communities.

Read the article: How to Throw a Community Swap Meet

Information everywhere: Pattie Maes and Pranav Mistry demo SixthSense

By Ari | Feb 2, 10 08:30 PM

Some updates

By Ari | Feb 1, 10 07:49 AM

Some quick updates...

I've been so busy. So busy. Oh my.
Our Share Tompkins Really Really Free Market this Saturday went really well - we had a huge turnout and a massive amount of stuff was redistributed! Mad props to Melanie, Greg, Cor, and the rest of our Freeskool friends for the awesome games and sports. And a huge thank you to Danielle and Wishing Well for making this thing happen!
Lily is going to stay with us for a while. Yay!
Shira and I are going to Mexico next week! For almost a month! By train and bus! We look forward to meeting up with Marina and Lea, finally hanging out with Emily in Oaxaca, and seeing Alicia and Max and their work at Guapamacátaro.
Check out Subcultural, a new blog by Lea and Danila.
I've been learning a lot about different insulation types and am posting the highlights to our Delicious links.
Also: I've been reading a lot of lefty sci fi. I've switched from caffeine to drinking grain coffee. Our kitty Snow is all healed up from her surgery, like a new cat. I dream daily of building an A-frame cabin.

New Ithaca Freeskool Mushroom Hunt Video

By Shira | Jan 12, 10 11:58 AM

Renowned local fungi expert Carl Whittaker led a Mushroom Hunt and Identification on August 30th, 2009 as part of the Ithaca Freeskool summer session, and I finally got around to editing the footage. Enjoy the beauties of the Danby State Forest while learning about many species of edible and inedible mushrooms.

Mushroom Hunt and Identification - Ithaca Freeskool Distance Learning from Shira Golding on Vimeo.

Bread and roses

By Ari | Jan 9, 10 07:44 AM

REAL communist revolutions must reject "efficiency" and nurture communalistic attempts to create a more humane society instead...
Che tried to set a different standard for Cuba, and for humanity in general. As Minister of Finance, he managed to distribute the millions of dollars obtained from the USSR to artists, and to desperately poor farmers who in the U.S. would have been considered, shall we say, "poor risks."

Revolution Guided by Feelings of Great Love: Learning from Che Guevara, by Mitchel Cohen

Radical thinking: How to solve the housing crisis

By Ari | Dec 9, 09 09:58 AM

There are many empty buildings, and ample building materials.

Also, there are a lot of people without homes, and a lot of people who are in danger of losing their homes.

If the two above items are true, what is keeping us as a species from all living in safe, secure homes?

Please leave an answer in the comments. Thanks.

It's the little green things

By Ari | Dec 6, 09 04:25 PM

Here are some things we've done in the past year to lighten our impact on the planet:

Began sharing our space with an awesome housemate, shrinking all of our footprints by sharing space and utilities
Grew some of our own food and traded design work and artwork for local, organic produce
Participated in local activism and volunteered in support of our environment
Threw out even less trash, composted and recycled and reused even more, saved and reused food containers instead of recycling them
Carried tote bags, water bottles, cutlery, and other things with us to avoid using disposable items and generating waste when eating out and shopping
Continued to use washable cloths instead of paper towels, handkerchiefs instead of paper tissues, loose tea instead of disposable tea bags...
Supported locally-owned and operated businesses and independent producers
Gave handmade or second-hand, locally-bought items as gifts
Made cat toys from recycled materials and grew our own cat grass
Joined a winter CSA (Community Supported Agriculture - a subscription-based bi-weekly farm share)
Made an effort to buy mostly locally-grown produce (bananas and avocados are rare in our kitchen now; coffee is still something I'm not ready to kick)
Picked a lot of berries and froze them so we could have them in the winter
Baked some of our own bread
Began drying our clothes on a clothesline (but stopped when it got cold)
Lowered the temperature settings on our washer and dryer
Insulated our hot water tank
Got better about turning off / unplugging unused appliances
Switched from using Seventh Generation housecleaning supplies to using ultra-cheap, non-toxic concoctions of baking soda, white vinegar, tea tree oil, hydrogen peroxide, Castille soap, and hot water
Bought even less and worked at being even more ethical, which for us means getting vegan things as locally and fairly as we can, including avoiding supporting capitalism when possible
Made less use of planes and trains, walked or biked more often

And here are some things we want to work on in the coming year:

We want to begin washing our clothes by hand or in a hand-cranked washer, spinning them, and then drying them on the line or on a rack (right now we're still using this building's electric washer and dryer)
Drying, pickling, canning, or otherwise preserving produce when it's in season
Reducing car and plane use
Buying fewer items that come in packaging, reducing packaging waste
Getting better about turning things off
Selling, trading, or giving away things we're not using