Posts tagged with "Economics"

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

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.

Fresh off the Wordpress: Frac Attack

By Ari | Nov 28, 09 10:31 AM

$fracattackhome-launch.jpg$ I'm sure Shira will post something more detailed later, but I'm excited about a new Wordpress site we just set up yesterday, so I'll write about the tech for now!

Frac Attack: Dawn of the Watershed is up at fracattackthemovie.com. It's an evolving site (the About page hasn't been made yet, for example!), so keep checking it if you want to see it grow. We'll be adding production info, credits and thank-yous, press coverage, and, after our world premiere at Cinemapolis on Dec. 10, the film itself, so people can watch the whole thing online anytime. It is, after all, an advocacy video, and we believe in free culture. This whole project is about getting the word out about natural gas drilling so we can protect New York state!

We set the whole thing up yesterday. We've been doing more and more Wordpress sites for clients and I wanted to do one for us and see how long it would take to put up something attractive and functional. Here are the features of this little site, built in one day:

It makes use of a partnership with a local, related advocacy organization (Shaleshock; I update their website, among other things) to provide maintenance-free Take Action and background info links.
This site has AddThis social bookmarking and send-to-friend functionality, and is already collecting stats via Google Analytics. We're also using a Facebook fan page and event listings (which we link to liberally) to help people get the word out about the film on Facebook.
It's serving up a trailer hosted on social networking sites, saving us bandwidth and providing a range of online viewing options.
Graphics, and the template itself, have been designed to not need updating: The left sidebar auto-updates as authors blog and add links and pages. The right sidebar is designed to not need any updates while sending traffic exactly where it's needed, though its auto-updating Flickr badge showing photos from the production (and soon, our Premiere, and house screenings!), which keeps it feeling fresh.
Applying our ethics to our tech choices, we chose the free, open-source Wordpress, which I installed on our MayFirst hosting account. (MayFirst is an affordable membership-based tech organization that's a great hosting solution for progressive folks with a lot of websites.)
To save on labor time (and, if this were for a client, costs), we used a free Wordpress theme by Eric Crooks, slapped a header on it that echoes our poster design (thanks to Joe Fisher for the amazing photography!), changed up the colors and fonts a bit to work with the film's look and feel, and put most of our efforts into careful content creation, fleshing out the site with essential pages and carefully-chosen, useful sidebar links. A few hours later: Presto, a website. Hardly any coding to speak of. We ♥ Wordpress.

Please help stop natural gas drilling

By Ari | Nov 21, 09 08:11 AM

Please take action now to help stop natural gas drilling in New York State. We need support. Thank you!

My Life in Pictures

By Shira | Nov 14, 09 01:59 AM

Hunting for houses

By Ari | Oct 22, 09 08:56 AM

Shira and I have embarked on a new stage of our housing journey. After we read Mortgage-FREE! Radical Strategies for Home Ownership by Rob Roy, we were really into the idea of avoiding a mortgage at all costs. We figured out that we wouldn't be able to afford NYC and moved to Ithaca. We figured out we wouldn't be able to afford property alone, so we worked on forming an intentional community with other people. Then we established that that would take too long for us to bank on if we also want to be starting a family, so we focused on homesteading.

We priced out a-frames made from salvaged materials, permanent yurts, puzzled over mobile houses, tinyhomes, and kits. We made spreadsheets that carefully plot out when we could afford a woodstove and how cheaply we could assemble a DIY solar water heater, how quickly we could set up a greywater system and composting toilet so we could move in, how we could put funds into land leasing and well-drilling at once to save time and money, and other thought experiments aimed at maximizing our funds. In the end, my calculator told us the truth: Either we'd put our money into land and then slowly assemble a house from salvaged materials, or we'd lease land and plunk something down on it faster. Either way, our place would be very small. And it could take years. And neither of our affordable land possibilities seem like they're likely to pan out.

So, we're actually considering a mortgage. Seriously. A small, short-term one, but a mortgage just the same. We've got a buyer's agent, are working on our mortgage pre-qualification paperwork, and are looking at houses. Real houses. On land.

The idea of moving into a finished house (even one that needs work) with utilities and a solid roof and some land around it, all ready for move-in, is a relief. We walk around these places and I imagine a baby rolling around on the floor, a child running up and down the stairs, our cats napping in the sunroom. I imagine being able to move all of our copious amounts of stuff into the cozy space, closing the door, and saying, "we're home!" with no additional years of mud and concrete and straw and laying gravel driveways and collecting old windows to deal with. This fantasy is very alluring, even if it messes with my class consciousness, the idea of paying a bank for capital grating at my soul. Maybe this is just what you have to do, if you want to be in a house, quickly. Maybe we just have that privilege, and can do something productive and good with it rather than denying it.

This is where we're at. Who knows what my next post in this story will be - it seems it changes every day. But this time I feel like we're coming full-circle somehow. By embracing convention after running and running from it, maybe we've found a way to make convention work for us rather than against us. I feel like we understand our options and are making good decisions. Slowly, slowly.

Ari's Brother Was Car-Jacked...He's ok Now!

By Shira | Oct 21, 09 07:44 PM

For real!

New Videos for freeDimensional

By Shira | Sep 24, 09 02:08 PM

More shorts from the freeDimensional Wasan retreat...

Providing for Artists in Residence Through Sharing and Bartering in the Community from freeDimensional on Vimeo.

Negotiating the Balance Between the Roles of Artists and Facilitators from freeDimensional on Vimeo.

Defining Community from freeDimensional on Vimeo.

Fundraising for the Arts from freeDimensional on Vimeo.

Connecting the Arts and Human Rights Worlds and the Role of Emerging Art Spaces from freeDimensional on Vimeo.

If you spell something wrong, do you really deserve surgery?

By Shira | Sep 22, 09 01:33 PM

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

Ha - nice work MoveOn.org!

I just finished making this movie for the Ithaca Area Poets

By Shira | Sep 15, 09 09:39 PM

Our friends Josh and Jeci organize monthly open mics/slams for Ithaca Area Poets. They're applying for a local arts grant and thought having a video of one of their events might strengthen their submission. So they asked me to make a 5-minute piece and in exchange they hooked us up with many beautiful baskets of fruits and veggies. Yay for swapping! Here's the video - I hope they get the grant!

Another Jam-Packed Weekend

By Shira | Sep 1, 09 11:46 AM

Drying for Freedom

By Shira | Aug 25, 09 04:42 PM

I just heard about this documentary from TreeHugger.com. I guess drying your clothes outside is a revolutionary act. It's crazy that we have to fight for the right to not destroy the planet. Anyone want to join my campaign to legalize composting toilets?

Ari and I finally got clothes-pins and started line-drying...

The U.S. Health Care Debate, Simply Put: An Original Animated Short

By Ari | Aug 25, 09 03:57 PM

Via Worldchanging

Isaac is moving in!

By Ari | Aug 22, 09 10:27 AM

Our friend Isaac is moving in with us today! I kind of can't imagine a better housemate (the bag of bread pictured here is one of many delicious things he's left in our mailbox), and am very happy about the change. We've known him for a long time - we lived with him one summer at a coop he ran at Cornell, Prospect of Whitby. And he was part of the Ahimsa ecovillage project when we were having meetings, so we've been thinking about living together in some way again for a while now.

We're still working on finding land we can lease or buy affordably. Once we do that we'll start collecting a grubstake of salvaged, traded and found building materials, and will gradually build ourselves a cabin. (That's the current plan, anyway.) In the meantime, we wanted to save money on rent so we can pay off my school debt and work up some more savings, and we've seen how much fun many of our friends have living in group houses. Having a housemate (who we know and love already) join us in this place we dig so much is far nicer than having to move elsewhere!

We prepared for this transition by moving all of our furniture around to clear out the room Isaac is going to move into, and our apartment is now denser and cuter, which is a happy surprise. I thought we'd have to put some stuff in the basement, but somehow it all still fits up here. (We have a lot of stuff.) We moved most of our books into our bedroom, and now it feels cozier, homier, a place I want to hang out in more often. I'm excited to spend more time with our friend, and to see how our lives will change as we adapt to this new arrangement.

Useful way of thinking about work

By Ari | Aug 11, 09 10:42 AM

This infographic doesn't factor in bartering and working for free but it's useful for thinking about ways to generate cash... via Urban Cartography

Water catchment system for rain collection and filtration (video)

By Ari | Jul 30, 09 04:48 PM

Thanks, Sean! Via Share Tompkins.

Summer Bounty

By Shira | Jul 27, 09 11:46 AM

Last weekend we went blueberry picking in Dryden and mushroom hunting at the Cayuga Nature Center. We didn't find any edible mushrooms in good enough condition to take home this time, but we learned a lot, thanks to Danila! The blueberry place was amazing - the bushes were heavy with big, delicious berries and they were only $2 for a pound! Check out photos and videos below...

Foraging for Mushrooms

By Shira | Jul 22, 09 03:20 PM

We went foraging for wild edible mushrooms with our friends Lea and Danila from the Dacha Project in the Robert H. Treman State Park. Thanks to Ari's keen eye, we discovered a huge patch of chanterelles. In addition to enjoying them in salads and stir-fries for the last few days, we gave some to friends and traded some for sprouts and a zucchini from Dancing Turtle Farms at the Share Tompkins Swap Meet. Yay for foraging!

This is what is up

By Ari | Jul 21, 09 10:22 AM

Our garden is thriving, but slowly - all we've harvested so far is some little kale leaves. But there are little green tomatoes growing larger, and everything is huge and leafy and healthy, so I hope vegetables are on the way. In the meantime, we've been getting veggies from the coop, the farmer's market, the Share Tompkins swap meets, and friends. We hope to get more into foraging, too - we just got a big bag of chanterelle mushrooms from a walk in Treman State Park with Danila and Lea.

Housing-wise, I'm still obsessed with yurts. I made a spreadsheet outlining a three-stage budget that would allow us to buy a 20' yurt and hook it up with hot water and a woodstove and all that good stuff. I think it's doable, though it would take longer to make it livable than I'd like. But I'm impatient, and even this slow staging is faster than building a house out of wood.

Sometimes, I think: wouldn't it be easier to just get a mortgage? Yes, it would. We could do that. We could buy an old fixer-upper or a very small house, and move right in. But then we'd be selling our souls to a bank, and we're just not into that idea. We want self-sufficiency, independence, autonomy - and I don't think a 30-year commitment to a capitalist institution would help us accomplish that goal.

Anyway, we have to take it slowly, because we don't have land. We have two beautiful, wonderful, exciting possibilities on that front, and are slowly figuring out if either of them will work. And in the meantime, we're thinking about how to make our renting life cheaper - do we take in a housemate? Do we move into a group house? We're not sure, but it's nice to have less pressure as we figure it out - there are no real timing crunches here, just slow thinking and exploring.

Work is going well - we're busier than we've ever been, but on a limited number of very exciting projects. The folks we're working with are lovely and amazing, as always. And we're still managing to spend a lot of time working with our activist friends on volunteer projects. Really, a lot of time. I'm actually feeling a tiny bit burnt out (I blame it on my lyme disease...) and am having to scale back somewhat, take fewer things on. But I feel like we're reaching a sustainable level of activity.

Even so, I can not wait until we're rent-free! This is what the housing thing is all about. How do we avoid paying rent (or mortgage payments)? Imagine how much money that is in a year. Imagine you don't have to make that money, or that if you do make that money, you can put it toward whatever else you'd like. That's freedom. You shouldn't have to pay to live.

Before they settled on a name for it, our friends at the Dacha referred to their venture as their "freedom project." I think that is so apt - here we all are, figuring out ways to buy our freedom. It is hard work, but a beautiful journey.

Swap Meet Video!

By Shira | Jul 21, 09 01:23 AM

Back in May we hosted an open meeting to discuss strategies for sharing resources in our community. Out of this meeting, Share Tompkins was formed to help folks share and trade goods, services and labor in Ithaca and Tompkins County. In addition to creating a growing directory of resources, we've been organizing monthly Swap Meets. Shot at our second convergence, this video will give you a good idea of what the Swap Meets are all about. Hope to see you at the next one if you're in the Ithaca area. If you're not living around here, you should organize one in your community!

Share Tompkins Community Swap Meet #2 from Shira Golding on Vimeo.

Positive News: Gift Economies

By Ari | Jul 19, 09 10:07 AM

Positive News US has a brief article by Anya Lapham about gift economies - you can read it on page 6 of this PDF of the spring 2009 edition. It draws on the work of feminist gift economy theorist Genevieve Vaughn, whose research indicates that we and our exchange economy are already "dependent on the gift economy, yet we don't acknowledge it."

Lapham writes, "As our 'free' market's lack of human care and equity is exposed, and new research questions if this recent crash would've been different is women were running Wall Street, we can choose to return our focus to the economics which will never abandon us or run out of resources. This is because the gift economy or gift-giving as a basis for an entirely different economic system operates according to human need not greed as it arises out of women's nurturing."

I agree that women are often unsung heroes of society, carrying the firewood and bearing and raising the children and feeding our families - but then again, I wish these tasks weren't "women's work" but rather, recognized responsibilities that we could all share equally. I think increasingly, "women's work" and "men's work" are overlapping, but we obviously have a lot farther to go in ensuring that work distribution is equitable and transparent. While we work on that, Vaughn's ideas hold a lot of water... but we can all participate in the gift economy right now, regardless of our gender identities and family situations.

To find ways to access giving networks in the Tompkins County area, check out the resources page on Share Tompkins. I also hear the Red Cross is in need of donations, to help them pay for housing and caring for families displaced by a recent fire in the area.

With Ten Dollars, a Bag of Clay or Three Straw Bales

By Ari | Jul 16, 09 04:53 PM

The Pay It Forward Contest Entry (made by Lea, shot by Shira) on behalf of The Dacha Project, submitted to The Alternatives Federal Credit Union in Ithaca NY. Go Dacha!!

Summer sci fi: An AI arms race and an elevator to space

By Ari | Jul 15, 09 04:31 PM

The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke
I'm a fan of Buckminster Fuller's world-changingly-big ideas for future human housing and transportation, so this book was right up my alley. Arthur C. Clarke tells the story of the construction of a "space elevator" and couches his suspenseful, fun narrative in a rich, invented history that has so many parallels to our own it's positively believable. Clarke seems to fall in the atheist camp, but the story playing with the "Tower of Babel" concept and the idea that engineering projects of this scale bring us into conflict with the gods - whether we've invented the gods, or they invented us.

Peace on Earth by Stanisław Lem
Lem's story of the arms race crossed with artificial intelligence is a wry, witty, imaginative page-turner that brings us from a futuristic earth to the surface of the moon, where fantastical robots baffle the narrator with their technological innovations. The characters aren't very likable but they're very funny and well-written; the ending fell a little flat but was ultimately satisfying.

View all my reviews >>

The yurt obsession continues

By Ari | Jul 11, 09 09:52 AM

Yurt
Originally uploaded by Laskaris

I wrote about yurts yesterday, and then did even more reading. I learned that wooden yurts are essentially frame-built round houses; you lose a lot of the useful structural features of the tent and your job becomes more like making a very odd cabin - meaning, maybe we should just make a cabin. These kits are pricey, because someone else is doing so much work, and then shipping it across the country. And they don't include insulation, interior finishing, or the floor and foundation the yurt will stand on.

So, a tent-style yurt as a temporary (to the tune of 10-15 years) solution began to look like a better idea. We could set one up cheaply and quickly, and then be rent-free and mortgage-free, with all of our earnings going into living and into building a more permanent house, if we wanted to build a bigger place. And we'd be living on our land, making building far easier and requiring much less transportation. My thinking was that we could be grid-connected at first, and put in alternative energy later. Since a tent-style yurt is a "temporary structure," we could start with a composting toilet and deal with putting in a (required) septic system when we made our cabin. Our major expenses would be a driveway, drilled well, yurt deck, and yurt.

I learned that yurts can be hard to keep cool in the summer, even if they're easy to heat in the winter. A passive solar design would make more sense in Ithaca. Then you wouldn't have to burn wood all winter, and swelter all summer. So, yurts aren't ideal for this area - but you can avoid mildew problems and live more comfortably and efficiently if you pay for a rain catchment system, thick insulation, an openable skylight, and other bells and whistles. These features aren't just luxuries - I think a lot of them (locks, window screens, a dome opener...) would be necessities, from what I've read of the experiences of folks who didn't supe up their yurts. You could probably rig these things in a more DIY fashion, but we don't have a lot of experience and it would be cool to be able to potentially sell the yurt later, so we'd likely make a better return on our investment if we let the professionals handle it.

The recommendation from many folks is to buy a yurt from a major company that will definitely be around in the future, because parts on your yurt wear out over time and need to be replaced. Handily, the major companies (like Pacific Yurts and Ranier Yurts) offer online calculators to help you figure out how much your yurt will cost with all of the extras you'll need and want to make your place livable in your climate.

The base cost of a yurt is $5000 or $6000. But once I factored in insulation and a deck and land and a driveway and water and all of the other amenities, I realized we'd need far more to make it really happen, from soup to nuts. If we could manage to get the money together and work hard, we could be living in a very comfortable 24' diameter tent-home on an acre of land by winter. Could we actually afford it? Would the land work out? What would it be like to live in a 24' yurt? Would we hate it and wish we'd kept our money and made something from dirt and wood and clay? Would we crave natural surfaces, solid walls, soundproofed privacy? Would we bake in the summer? Or would it be awesome, and a step closer to self-sufficiency?

Free garden

By Ari | Jun 22, 09 10:58 PM

We made a garden this year almost for free. The seeds and seedlings were all given to us - someone always has too much of something, and gives away the surplus. (We too had so many seeds we passed them on. And I look forward to sharing and swapping produce!)

We made a raised bed out of an old shelf and cinder blocks, and traded for tomato cages and plant pots. We dumpstered some plastic buckets that have really come in handy. And the Dacha gave us a lot of compost they'd picked up, and we got more of that and mulch for free from Ithaca. Yay Ithaca compost! The only thing we bought was, early on and out of convenience, a couple of bags of organic potting soil. We needed it for some seedlings, right then.

It's much farther along now than it is in this photo - we'll have to post an update soon! Today we potted all of the remaining seedlings, moved everything around so they get better sun, put in mulch, and pulled out some weeds. Most of these plants are in pots, the rest in a raised bed, because the soil is full of asphalt driveway bits. The tomatoes are thriving, very tall and sturdy. There are also large pots of things we sowed directly in the soil, weeks before the last frost, that are probably the healthiest, strongest plants besides the tomatoes - onions, broccoli, carrots, and zinias, and some lavender and mixed perennial flowers from Lea. The eggplants and peppers are still very small, only a few leaves each. The cabbage, just a little bigger - maybe six small leaves apiece.

Well, that's the garden report. You can keep tabs on the action in the Flickr pool we made just for our garden (you'll get to see our old Brooklyn garden and our houseplants, too!).

Ahimsa evolves, and an a-frame emerges

By Ari | Jun 19, 09 11:01 AM

Ahimsa has evolved from an ecovillage to a network - I think. We're still figuring it out. But it seems that everyone in the group is very motivated to work around the intersections of social justice, animal rights, and environmental sustainability - and we're all into community building. I'm kind of sad to see the idea of an ecovillage be pushed off into the indefinite future, but we were working on it steadfastly and it just wasn't something folks seemed ready to build right now, so we'll see what happens. Fortunately we've met a lot of awesome people and everyone has great ideas and energy - hopefully the convergence we're talking about holding later in the summer will happen, and then we'll see what comes out of that.

So, housing-wise, Shira and I are thinking again about what the two of us can accomplish on our own - or maybe with a friend. Something smaller. Something to help us become more self-sufficient.

I'm kind of in love with A-frames. I don't always blog when learning about this stuff, but I'm not sure how many people read our delicious links (rss feed), and I do think this info is worth sharing.

Why an A-frame? They seem to be easy to build. Based on the reading I've done and the things folks have told us, natural building requires so much labor that it may not be as affordable as it appears. It turns out that using available plans and simple conventions like a pier foundation can really cut costs (including labor). With the use of salvaged and freecycled materials, limited resources can stretch even farther. We like the idea that building something ourselves will give us and education and a workout, and will allow us to avoid a mortgage. We've also considered building something mobile so we could lease land and then take our home with us if/when we leave, but it would have to be very small, and that's probably not best for packrats like us.

So, we don't have to make an A-frame. A small cottage or cabin could work too, one with proper walls. Or a yurt, we've talked about that. But basically, it seems we're headed toward buying land and building something on it.

I think the reason I love A-frames is not only their easy construction but their aesthetics. I like that they look like cute little hills. I love the weird triangular areas that people usually block off and turn into closets - I want to just keep them open and put storage bins and things back there. I love the huge open floor feeling, the lofts. Here are a few links to linger on:

I've got even more links up on Delicious, if you like looking at this kind of thing. Check out our tags, and try grouping them to find specific things! I'm pretty into tagging, that way. Here are the best groupings on this topic, I think, and some interesting other areas we've explored:

Anyone out there have even better ideas for sustainable, cheap building methods? Please leave a comment!

Check Out My Article About Food, Inc. at Documentary.org

By Shira | Jun 11, 09 02:44 PM

I had a chance to see a preview copy of the new documentary Food, Inc. and interview the Director, Robert Kenner. This is my first article for the International Documentary Association's blog, and I'm psyched to get a chance to write about a topic so close to my heart:

Here's an excerpt and you can read the full article online:
Change: It's What's for Dinner: 'Food, Inc.' Takes on Agribusiness

In a world dominated by corporations, it is no surprise that the American food system has been hijacked by the relentless drive for profit. Under the pretexts of affordability and convenience, modern industrialized agriculture has consistently ignored the unintended consequences of their "efficient" practices on our health and livelihoods, the environment and other species.
Equally implicated is the United States government, which simultaneously subsidizes and fails to adequately regulate the agriculture industrial complex. This reality, explored by Frederick Wiseman in his 1976 cinema vérité documentary Meat and more recently by Nikolaus Geyrhalter in the unnarrated montage film Unser täglich Brot (Our Daily Bread; 2005), is more explicitly tackled in Robert Kenner's Food, Inc., which opens June 12 in New York City, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and nationwide on June 19.

The issue of food and the many ways in which it affects our lives is an enormous one, and the film is a broad undertaking, exploring everything from the health impacts of ever ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup (one out of three Americans born today is expected to develop early-onset diabetes), to water and air pollution caused by intensive factory farming, to human rights violations perpetrated against undocumented workers by mega corporations like Smithfield Foods, the world's largest pork producer. Viewers are aided in processing all of this information by motion graphics created by Big Star NYC, which worked with Kenner to create an entertaining and helpful visual language for the film.

Ultimately, Food, Inc. is an examination of free market capitalism's disregard for anything other than the bottom line. "This is a film that's about more than food," says Kenner. "It's really about corporate consolidation and irresponsibility and about the relationship of these companies with government. It's not that different from what happened with the financial crisis. These companies have been totally irresponsible and at the end of the day, we're the ones who pay the price."

The cost of living for the future

By Ari | May 8, 09 08:46 AM

Lately Shira and I have been thinking about moving, to save money. Our vegan ecovillage project is going well, but slowly. (And rightfully so.) In the meantime, we're continuing to love our big Ithaca apartment - it's far larger and more beautiful than anything we lived in in NYC, and it's cheaper, too. When we first moved here we were staggered by how much you can get for so little - from our jaded Brooklyn perspective. But now that we've been here for a while, we're making connections with a lot of people who are avoiding paying a lot to live, in some very creative ways. We're realizing just how much we're spending per year on housing, and how many hours of freelance work that translates into - and it's a lot of hours!

Helen and Scott Nearing, early back-to-the-landers, figured out how much cash they needed per year - the amount of cash money they'd need to pay for the few things they couldn't provide for themselves or barter for. They worked enough to make that amount of money and then they stopped working, in the belief that accumulating profit is wrong. That meant that if they finished getting their needed cash in April, they could just make music and write and work their land for the rest of the year with no need to make any more cash at all. Shira and I have been very inspired by the Nearings and love this idea, and are working toward it, though a portion of our cash outlays will ideally go into savings each year (we're planning a family, and want to be able to give our future kids something to start off with when they're grown).

So, getting into a cheaper housing situation would be very prudent. The trouble is, moving is a real pain in the ass when you have as much stuff as we do (we have hundreds of books...), and we're really enjoying having a space where people can stay with us, and where gatherings are possible. Our apartments in NYC were sorely lacking in this department. Our Ithaca apartment feels like an event space sometimes, or a B&B - we've got two private, comfortable, extra rooms where people can stay over. Our well-stocked kitchen (thank you family and friends and freeganism!) can feed a huge group of people. We've got so much stuff in here that sometimes I feel like we've got the makings of a common house right here in our apartment - when I feel stressed about how many power tools and kitchen gadgets and art supplies and children's books and toys we have, I think, it's okay, our kids will love it all, in the future. Our ecovillage will use it all, in the future.

Some time ago, I remember feeling burdened by our stuff, and the cost of having a place that fits it all. I was reading Home Work and admiring the cute wagon-houses and yurts and tiny cabins, and I wished I had so little I could put it all in a backpack. We could pack up our few belongings and traipse off to Mexico to visit our friend Emily, or bike cross-country, or whatever. But we have cat friends now who depend on us, and our belongings aren't a burden, but a hope chest.

The question is, could we find a cheaper way to live anyway, in the immediate future, while we wait for Ahimsa to crystallize? We've been looking at smaller apartments and even tiny houses that are cheaper than this place, but we've also been looking at larger houses with friends. But would it be worth the bother - and breaking our lease - to pack up our nest and move it? Do we want to work those hours to pay the extra cost of living in such a big, bright, comfortable space?

No bosses here: A book from the past to help us work more equitably today

By Ari | May 1, 09 09:17 AM

No bosses here: A manual on working collectively and cooperatively by Karen Brandow

My review

This book was published in 1981 but activists today would do well to read it. It touches on many aspects of working in collectives, cooperatives, and other non-hierarchical arrangements, from bookkeeping to running effective meetings, to dealing with feelings and working against power and privilege. It's a quick read, well-organized and full of useful examples from collectives around the US. I think it's appropriate I finished reading it on May Day!

View all my reviews.

Some good books: DIY media labs and culture, environmental sci fi, the origins of aggression, and tantric buddhism

By Ari | Apr 20, 09 09:13 AM

Grow Your Own Media Lab by James Wallbank

My review

I found this book tremendously inspiring and challenging, and hope that others who are interested in technology and communities give it a read. It's an accessible and engaging short howto to making technology more accessible to people regardless of class and abilities. It helped me to see the importance of embracing free and open-source software, and the huge potential of dumpster diving and recycling for meeting people's technology needs economically and in an environmentally sustainable way. It also helped me understand that the key to empowering tech users is not detailed instructions, but rather, to serve as a facilitator of their interaction with technology as they learn how to educate themselves and solve their own problems - basically, teaching others the value of the DIY ethic.

The Wounded Planet by Roger Elwood

My review

Awesome different ideas about the future, written from an early 1970s viewpoint. Scary to see how little has changed about our behavior, especially considering how much has changed about our understanding of our impact on our environment.

On Aggression by Konrad Lorenz

My review

This book, though it's very pre-identity politics, had a lot of excellent takeaways for me, as a peace activist. It shows how human behavior and animal behavior (humans being animals) reveal patterns that can help us understand how to break free of self-destructive and socially-destructive behaviors like war.

Introduction to Tantra: A Vision of Totality by Lama Yeshe

My review

This book is written in an engaging style which is meant to approximate the voice of influential Lama Yeshe, who died in the late 1980s and was reincarnated to parents in Spain. The text explains how someone can use tantric (Tibetan) buddhism to reach enlightenment efficiently, which theoretically will allow you to, like Lama Yeshe, control the process of dying and rebirth so that you can help others and create a more compassionate world. It includes detailed descriptions of meditations and other exercises one can do in this pursuit, and serves as an overview of the first stages of tantric practice, encouraging readers to find a Lama they like so they can pursue further study in community.

Personally, I enjoyed the style and content and found the ideas very intriguing - but I shy away from organized religion and power hierarchies, and tantra as outlined here does seem to depend on such things. It also seems somewhat heterosexist. I hear that not all followers follow plans like Lama Yeshe's to the letter, though he does speak with such an authoritative voice that one would think that his plan is the tried and true method to attain enlightenment.

These criticisms aside, I did love reading the book, and felt many of the techniques outlined in it really are useful and do contribute to the practitioner's experience of bliss and wisdom.

Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity by Anne Elizabeth Moore

My review

This book made me reevaluate my relationship with money and has challenged me to figure out how to make a living while really retaining my integrity as a culture worker. I mean, I've been working on that for years, but the author of this book and the many interesting people she interviewed are helping me see that I could go even farther. Good stuff - and an excellent primer on the punk movement, as well as on street art's evolving relationship with commerce.

View all my reviews.

Imagine all the people

By Ari | Apr 19, 09 10:51 AM

I was just reading this article about tweens in love with the Obama girls, and I was glad to read that the Obamas are really trying to minimize media contact and coverage of their daughters - despite the awesome cuteness of so many kids obsessing over them like they're pop stars. I think people being in love with the Obamas is 100% great. I mean, yes, we should be critical and we should demand good policy and decision-making from Obama, but if tons of people love the First Family and want to be friends with them, I think that bodes well for our country. It sure is nicer than the atmosphere during the Bush presidency. Those were an uncomfortable eight years. I'd rather feel love than contempt for my elected leadership, personally.

However, love that finds its end in consumerism (the article suggests that concert tickets or DVDs are usually the outlet for kids' celebrity obsessions) or in oppression (the media spotlight and the paparazzi can be incredibly unhealthy) is not just love, it's become something else. I dream of a day when humans can love ourselves and other humans for who we all really are, without regard for artificial hierarchies and power structures. We put some people up on pedestals and obsess about them, lionize them or demonize them, over-analyze every gesture and purchase they make. Even if we love them dearly, we may be setting ourselves up for sorrow or for disappointment, depending on how their media image and their life (separate things!) pan out. Or we may subject them to such scrutiny they self-destruct (sorry Britney). This is why I don't believe in heroes.

Continue reading "Imagine all the people..." »

Weddings and freedom

By Ari | Apr 15, 09 08:40 AM

So, I kind of can't believe this, but I agree with an article in the New York Daily News. And it's called In Vermont gay marriage law, a hidden victory for religious freedom. At first I saw that headline and thought, oh damn, there's some loophole that will make it legal for the Pope to eat gay newlyweds. Or something else similarly creepy and oppressive. But it's actually really sensible: Author David Benkof is happy that the new legislation in Vermont specifically provides an out to any religious groups that have issues with same-sex marriage: They don't have to provide gay couples who are getting married with goods and services.

I'm totally okay with that. This is not a pharmacist denying the morning-after pill to an unintentionally pregnant teen. This is not life-threatening, and it's not violating some "first do no harm" mandate. This is just reason to choose a different florist, one who doesn't believe you're going to hell.

Why force people to do things they feel are wrong? I care deeply about peace, justice and sustainability - so I don't take design work that promotes zoos, "happy meat," sweatshop labor, and other things I find objectionable. People make decisions like this all the time, don't they? So why, as the author of this article points out, was eHarmony forced to create a queer dating site, if they found queerness so odious that they wouldn't allow same-sex searches on their primary, heteronormative dating site? And why would any gay folks actually use the new site by eHarmony? Why not go to any one of the many, many sites out there run by and for queer people who love queer people? If we force everyone to provide services to everyone, aren't we losing the usefulness of the niche audience - the self-selecting community? Personally, I like patronizing those I can stand behind ethically. And not everyone has my ethics.

When Shira and I got hitched, we paid our favorite vegan restaurant to cater it. We rented space from a progressive, arty Brooklyn hangout. We're not into organized, hierarchical religion, so instead of hiring an officiant to approve of our union, we asked everyone in the room to marry us with a toast to fun and love. And so on. In short, we made it our own. We made it something we could believe in, something we loved.

I just can't imagine how much it would have sucked if we'd hired people who think our love is an abomination - and how much worse it would have been to then pay lawyers to sue them, if they didn't do what we wanted. Aren't weddings supposed to be about love? I think Vermont has figured this one out, and I bet their efforts will make this legislation very hard to challenge: Everyone wins.

Health and wealth: The downfall of capitalism and the uplift of humanity

By Ari | Apr 4, 09 10:40 AM

Read this excerpt from Jobless rate bolts to 8.5 percent, 663K jobs lost (AP):

Orders placed with U.S. factories actually rose in February, ending a six straight months of declines, the government reported Thursday. Earlier in the week, there was better-than-expected reports on construction spending and pending home sales. And last week a report showed that consumer spending — an engine of the economy — rose in February for the second month in a row — after a half-year of declines.

Note that in this article, the authors and the economists they're quoting say that the following are indicators of health in an economy:

orders placed in factories
construction spending
home sales (presumably with mortgages attached)
consumer spending

All of these things involve people spending money. That is, the indicator of a healthy economy does not appear to be, "are people's needs being met?" but "are people spending enough?" But then, who knows, maybe spending a lot of money is somehow meeting people's needs. Is that so?

Continue reading "Health and wealth: The downfall of capitalism and the uplift of humanity..." »

Capitalism is dead: London Protests G20 (photos)

By Ari | Apr 2, 09 09:02 AM

Yaaaay, we're not the only ones wondering how making bankers and other capitalists richer is going to help everyone else. Check out this amazing slideshow showing London protesters clashing with police at the G20 summit, courtesy of ABC News.

While I wish that all of the protesters had remained nonviolent, it seems most of them did. What a turn-out. Seeing the huge crowd gives me hope that a world made for people and not for profit is just around the corner.

(Top photo by PA/AP, bottom photo by Andrew Winning/Reuters. Please don't sue me for using these without permission.)

Freelance America

By Ari | Feb 27, 09 09:22 AM

The economy has definitely hit a lot of people we know, but good freelance gigs still abound. Here are some headlines on these developments, from this month's Freelancers Union newsletter:
The New American Job: Are freelance and part-time gigs the future? (Newsweek)
More businesses using freelancers, experts say (CNN)

Human Scale Living

By Shira | Feb 24, 09 03:28 PM

A big part of why living in Ithaca has been so good for us is its small-but-not-too-small size. With a population of 60,000 (30,000 of which are students at Cornell and Ithaca College), there are plenty of people to create culture and innovation. But at the same time, it only takes a few social events to realize that this is a "small town." When I meet someone new, I'm no longer surprised to find out they know at least one other friend of mine, or that they've even "heard of me" - which always makes me feel warm and fuzzy.

ari teaching a freeskool class on web design
Originally uploaded by Shira Golding

When we were living in New York City we had a lot of great friends and yet we didn't ever have a sense of community. Part of this was that we dabbled in a lot of different subcultures - independent filmmakers, freegans, socialists, lesbians, radical marching bands, artists, academics, recreational volleyball players - instead of choosing one to call our own. These groups rarely overlapped and I found myself doing a lot of code-switching. Our friends were ideologically and geographically dispersed. The distance between a Red Hook freegan and an Upper East Side grad student is a lot greater than a few subway transfers.

milk with teresa, jeremy and some other folks
Originally uploaded by Shira Golding

Back in college I took an amazing course called Architecture as a Cultural System in which we explored, among other things, the concept of Human Scale. This is the idea that humans are best suited to live in an environment that is designed to meet their spacial needs. This means walkability, easy access to necessary resources, closeness to the ground and appropriate population size.

meara and serena jamming in the library
Originally uploaded by Shira Golding

According to Wikipedia, "Dunbar's number is a theoretical cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. These are relationships in which an individual knows who each person is, and how each person relates to every other person. Proponents assert that numbers larger than this generally require more restricted rules, laws, and enforced norms to maintain a stable, cohesive group. No precise value has been proposed for Dunbar's number, but a commonly cited approximation is 150."

raw vegan potluck!
Originally uploaded by Shira Golding

Ari and I counted, and in just the last week, we've had 25 different friends over to our house, some of them more than once (you know who you are...Joe). Our friends Jeremy and Teresa came over for dinner on Sunday, Ari taught a freeskool class on web design on Wednesday, we had a ton of extra veggies from our CSA share so we had a potluck/cooking party with a bunch of folks on Thursday, more friends stopped by on Friday after watching Milk together at Cinemapolis (the art house theatre on The Commons), on Saturday the Phillips family came to stay with us for the weekend and Ben and Grace stopped by to join us for dinner and on Sunday we had our second official founders' meeting for Ahimsa Ecovillage with eleven guests, including three kids.

looking at our future
Originally uploaded by Shira Golding

The amazing thing is that there are numerous ways in which all these folks are connected outside their relationships to us. This makes for a very tangible social fabric and a feeling of interdependence that I haven't truly experienced since sleep-away camp as a kid (I went to the socialist Jewish kibbutz-like Camp Moshava for six summers.)

this is what feminists look like!
Originally uploaded by Shira Golding

As we move forward with Ahimsa, our sustainable, vegan ecovillage project, human scale will be a key concept. How can we create a community that is big enough to create innovation and cross-pollination, but small enough to maintain accountability and trust? How many people does it take to be self-sufficient? How will our size and location (rural vs. urban) impact our connection to the broader Ithaca community? I don't know the answers yet, but I'm loving the process of finding out. In the meantime, I'm enjoying being part of the monkeysphere.

Sometimes Green Building Makes Me Cry

By Shira | Feb 12, 09 05:25 PM

Granted, the voice-over and music are heavy-handed, but I must confess to weeping tears of joy throughout this video.

Via Puppetgov/Rebuild Green /GroovyGreen

Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities

By Ari | Feb 11, 09 09:15 AM

Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities by Diana Leafe Christian

My review

rating: 5 of 5 stars
When I found this book, I jotted down, "looks like the way to go if you're working on an ecovillage or intentional community project and don't want to doom it to failure." Two careful reads later, I'm pretty sure I was right, and we're using the book to guide our own ecovillage project as it forms. This volume is jam-packed with insights into the many legal, financial, social, and other issues surrounding the complicated but world-changing subject of intentional community. There are sample agreements, vision documents, financial arrangements, and other useful tools. The author is a member of Earthaven community, and her book draws on interviews and research into many communities all around the world.

View all my reviews.

The Group House Handbook: How to share your kitchen without going crazy

By Ari | Feb 11, 09 09:05 AM

The Group House Handbook by Nancy Brandwein

My review

This book is really, really useful for anyone considering sharing a house, either to live in, or as a common house in a cohousing situation. It's a bit dated but provides a fun window into sixties counterculture - and it's surprising how much of the content is still totally appropriate for today. It includes sample budgets and other useful documents, and is full of goofy cartoon art of group house residents alternately delighting and bothering each other.

View all my reviews.

Shirari's Peace and Love Podcast #6: Economies

By shirari | Feb 4, 09 02:33 PM

Tune into the Wednesday, February 4th edition of our podcast to check out our snappy new format! We've broken the show into three segments to make it easier for folks to selectively listen to parts they're interested in:

Local Updates, in which we tell you about wonderful and exciting new developments in our local area, the Fingerlakes region of New York. You'll hear about permaculture organizing, the new Ithaca Freeskool calendar, and a new vegan group. (We can't wait to go to their pizza party on Friday!)
Be the Change, in which we give you two tips, both of which, now that we think about it, are pig-related. (And yet, somehow, relevant to a general audience. We think.)
Discussion: Economies, in which we look briefly at some issues with non-profit funding, venture capital, microlending, and global capitalism, as well as with socialism and other isms, before giving an overview of different interesting alternatives (featuring copyleft, coworking, freeganism, CSAs, relocalization, and other awesomeness).

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Vote for us at Podcast Alley!

Links mentioned in the show:
Hook up with other Fingerlakes Permaculture folks at flxpermaculture.net
Ithaca Freeskool
Ithaca Zine
Ahimsa Ecovillage
Ithaca Vegans Yahoo Group
Vegan Chai is so over bacon!
Ari's Twitter
Find a local CSA at localharvest.org

If you listen to our podcast, tell us what you like about it, and what could be improved! And if you don't listen to our podcast, why not? Tell us what you might like to hear, so we can do a better job of it. Thanks and peace to all who tune into this edition!

Previously:
Previous show notes

Our Friends at The Dacha Project Are Awesome.

By Shira | Feb 1, 09 05:20 PM

Our friend Lea makes videos for About.com. She's also part of The Dacha Project, "An unlikely band of six, creating a more sustainable and autonomous existence somewhere in upstate New York." These awesome instructional videos were made on their sixteen acres...

"Sometimes It's Hard to Breathe" - I finally edited my footage from our trip to India in 2006

By Shira | Jan 18, 09 06:28 PM

Sometimes It's Hard to Breathe from Shira Golding on Vimeo.

Shot in India over three weeks in November 2006, Sometimes It's Hard to Breathe is an experimental, personal travelogue. For more context, check out our photos from the trip:

Shira's India Photos
Ari's India Photos

"You are brilliant and the world is hiring!" – Paul Hawken

By Shira | Jan 14, 09 07:21 PM

Here is first part of Alex Steffen's keynote at the Hazel Wolf Environmental Film Festival. You can watch the rest at Worldchanging. I especially like when he talks about transportation and mutual-aid. Good stuff!

Shirari's Peace and Love Podcast #5: Top 8 Activist Strategies

By Shira | Dec 16, 08 05:51 PM

December 16, 2008 - 71 minutes - 95.5MB

After an update about Ithaca, Shaleshock and our vegan ecovillage project, we discuss our top eight best practices for changing the world and conclude the show with some ideas for a d.i.y. anticapitalist holiday season.

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Vote for us at Podcast Alley!

Show links:

Some Places Worth Donating To (there are so many more, here are just a few):

Arts Engine supports, produces, and distributes independent media of consequence and promotes the use of independent media by advocates, educators and the general public. Donate
East New York Farms! is a collaborative project whose mission is to organize youth and adult residents to address food issues in their community by promoting local and regional sustainable agriculture and community-based economic development. Donate
freeDimensional is an international network that advances social justice by hosting activists in art spaces and using cultural resources to strengthen their work. Donate
The Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) strives to assure that each member of every school community is valued and respected regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity/expression. Donate
Just Vision is a nonprofit organization that informs local and international audiences about under-documented Palestinian and Israeli joint civilian efforts to resolve the conflict nonviolently. Using media and educational tools, they raise awareness in order to encourage civic participation in grassroots peace building. Donate
Scenarios USA is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization that that uses writing and filmmaking to foster youth leadership, advocacy and self-expression in under-served teens. Scenarios USA asks teens to write about the issues that shape their lives for the annual "What's the REAL DEAL?" writing contest, and thousands have responded with their raw and revealing insights. Donate
Shaleshock Citizens Action Alliance is a grassroots group of Finger Lakes residents who are concerned with understanding and protecting our communities and environment from exploitation by the energy industry with regards to drilling for natural gas in the Marcellus Shale. Donate

Previously:

DIY Holidays

By Ari | Dec 7, 08 05:53 PM

he needs help sitting up
Originally uploaded by arimoore

Kirsten Dirksen and Nicolás Boullosa wrote an article called Holiday shopping guide? 15 tips, and used this photo of this little tofu guy I made for Shira to illustrate it. Thanks Kirsten and Nicolás! The gift guide is fantastic, all about creating a joyous holiday with a sustainability-oriented, "buy nothing" ethos. Yeeah!

Shale Shocked

By Shira | Dec 6, 08 03:05 AM

There are many factors that contribute to the fertility and productivity of land that are beyond a landowners' direct control. One of the major issues we need to consider in New York State is natural gas drilling. Ever since the development of more commercially-viable drilling techniques around 2000, major oil companies have been going to town on the Marcellus Shale. One of the main ways they get access to the land is by leasing land and drilling rights from local landowners. While this can be a good source of income for struggling farmers, there are numerous environmental impacts including the distribution of toxic chemicals into the soil and water table.

We've been getting involved with Shaleshock, a local resistance group, and we recently designed their logo and a new website. Check out the site to get up to speed on the issues and take action. One thing you can do now is comment on the DEC's draft scope...

The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation has released a draft scope document that outlines how they will regulate natural gas drilling of the Marcellus Shale. In addition to commenting at public hearings around the state, you can submit your comments via letter or email by December 15th.

Submit comments to:
Attn: Scope Comments
Bureau of Oil & Gas Regulation, NYSDEC Division of Mineral Resources
625 Broadway, Third Floor
Albany, NY 12233-6500

Or email to dmnog@gw.dec.state.ny.us with "Scope Comments" as the Subject

Download the pdf of the scope

Tortillas and Cider, Delivered to Our Doorstep

By Shira | Dec 5, 08 12:43 PM

A lot of people have been talking about eating local, and the arguments are pretty straight-forward: when you eat local you save energy/fuel, build community, and develop your local economy. Not to mention, your food is a lot less likely to be processed with preservatives and other nastiness.

Eating local in Ithaca is pretty easy and it seems to be getting easier every day. The Ithaca Farmer's Market is open April through December and has amazing produce - plus local crafts, live music and hot food. A lot of the stands are organic and there's even one place where everything is veganically grown - Unexpected Farm from Watkins Glen.

the glorious ithaca farmer's market
Originally uploaded by Shira Golding

live music, local food
Originally uploaded by Shira Golding

veganically-grown!
Originally uploaded by Shira Golding

breakfast at the farmer's market
Originally uploaded by Shira Golding

We've been getting most of our produce from the Farmers Market since we moved here three months ago, and supplementing from Greenstar Cooperative Market - where we're members. Greenstar is definitely not 100% local, but they have really great signage, which makes it so much easier to know the distance food has traveled. But as winter sets in, the Farmer's Market closes up shop and buying local produce at the coop gets too expensive, so we decided to join a winter CSA. We just picked up our first share last week and it was an amazing bounty - carrots, potatoes, leeks, cabbage, turnips, garlic, kale, squash, radichio, bok choi, and salad greens.

ithaca chocolate!
Originally uploaded by Shira Golding

The cool thing about the CSA model, is that it enables the farmer to get paid up front so that they have the money when they need it most for buying supplies, paying laborers, repairs, etc. And usually, by paying a fixed price at the beginning, the individual CSA member gets a really good deal on a lot of fresh, local food. It is probably the best way to eat seasonally, if you're not growing your own food.

What's really exciting right now is that all these small grassroots distributors are popping up to fill holes in the local market. A couple of months ago, it wasn't uncommon for us to go for a walk and pass by an unsupervised produce stand in front of a house on a quiet residential street.

there's a can where you can leave a quarter
Originally uploaded by Shira Golding

Recently, our friend Emily was thinking about how there are no local tortilla makers, so she started making vegan, organic, wheat tortillas and delivering them to people on her bike. And then Travis and Ellen announced on the Finger Lakes Permaculture Institute's email list that they had pressed a huge amount of cider and could deliver a half gallon or gallon to any one who wanted some.

beach or tortilla?
Originally uploaded by Shira Golding

gaia tortilla
Originally uploaded by Shira Golding

sunrise apple cider - delivered to our door!
Originally uploaded by Shira Golding

And these projects are inspiring new ones. A couple of guys who got Emily's tortillas one week, made some hummus to put on them, and it was such a tasty combination that now they're planning on making and delivering hummus. I sampled some of their recipe at the hat band party and it was amazing. I can't wait for them to start distributing!

All this activity has gotten us brainstorming like crazy, especially whenever we meet up with our new friend Joe. He's a true renaissance man - a guy who knows how to build his own house, convert engines to run on vegetable oil, code websites and play death metal. We've been talking about collaborating on a vegan baked goods enterprise in the future.

But with all these microbusinesses launching, it seems like we could take this whole thing a step further. What if once a week, we all met up in one centralized location (maybe a rotating potluck at different people's houses) and we just swap stuff - no money involved. So Emily could bring her tortillas, and Travis brings his cider, and Ellen brings tea, and Dusqkee brings hummus, and Ari brings vegan cookies, and Joe brings vegan muffins, and Danila brings garlic, and Mer and Uriel offer massages, and Rachel teaches yoga, and I bring knitted hats and cozies etc. etc. And instead of paying each other, we would just swap in a mutual aid, take as you need kind of way. And maybe it's one big coop and we all put in cash when we can and take it out when we need it. And there's a local community center with an industrial kitchen and craft studios and workshops. And before you know it, we're a totally self-sustaining community.

This is where we are heading!

Prop 8: The Musical

By Shira | Dec 3, 08 01:21 PM

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

Recycling...The Least You Can Do

By Shira | Nov 13, 08 01:23 PM

Did you know that November 10-16 is International Recycling Week? Neither did I, until it showed up in one of my RSS feeds. Recycling is a good thing, but really, it's the least you can do. If there is a recycling system set up in your region, how could you not wash out your cans and bottles and put them curbside? In Ithaca, recycling actually saves you money because it's free, whereas you have to pay for garbage collection by weight. The problem is that so much public campaigning goes into promoting recycling, and very few people know that there are much more drastic ways to reduce your waste.

For the past month, I've been participating in the Ithaca freeskool reading group on permaculture. We're reading David Holmgren's Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability. In Holmgren's chapter on waste, he outlines that in an ideal system there is no "waste" - only material that can be repurposed for food, fertilizer or some other utility.

Most people have heard "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" in which the first is preferable and recycling is only what you should do after you've exhausted use, but Holmgren adds a couple more key Rs to the list - Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle. To refuse is paramount, especially in the United States, which is disproportionately responsible for resource consumption and carbon emissions. To refuse is pretty easy when you start asking yourself "Do I really need this?" before purchasing new stuff.

Repair is another key step. Do you always get holes in your jeans in the same place - how many times have you patched your pants and kept wearing them? It might be easier to get a new DVD player when yours breaks but why not get it repaired - even if it takes a little more time and maybe even more money? The problem with our culture is that we're focused on convenience and money and have lost our understanding of true cost and true wealth.

Recycling is great and definitely something we should be doing as a society, but it is still very expensive and frustratingly limited. Even in a green oasis like Ithaca, there are only certain containers that can be recycled and the rest go to landfills. And don't even get me started on Tetra Paks.

So, while it's International Recycling Week, and I have your attention, why not think of some significant ways you could reduce your waste before recycling? Here are a few things we're doing:

Buying very little and whenever possible, getting stuff for free or stuff that's been owned and used by someone else first. We're planning on building our future home from mostly salvaged (and natural) materials.
Buying local to reduce the amount of resources and waste that go into transporting goods across the world.
Using tote bags instead of plastic/paper bags and buying food in bulk in reusable containers. The Greenstar coop has an awesome bulk food section, including shampoo and cooking oils!
Fixing stuff. Ari has a knack for sewing and has breathed new life into many pieces of clothing. When the cassette tape part of our stereo broke, we found a shop in Brooklyn that could fix it. Now we can keep listening to our cheesy tape collection from the 80s and 90s and there's one less piece of electronics in a landfill.
Composting. We're looking forward to having our own land and building a composting toilet. My dream is to convert methane gas produced by our poo into energy. In the meantime, we compost all of our organic material. We drop off our food compost at the coop, but in the spring, well put it into our garden.

So yes, recycling is good, but it's still a compromise when it comes to consumption and waste. Don't forget to first refuse, reduce, reuse and repair!

Previously:

Art for feminist, socialist healthcare

By Ari | Nov 11, 08 04:07 PM

Thanks to Liz Henry of Composite: Poetics and Tech for using an illustration I did for her excellent post, Argentinian feminists in the early 1900s.

You can also see and comment on the art here: "socialist heath care" on Flickr. This art was originally an illustration for an article in Socialist Women, about a woman's struggle in the U.S. healthcare system. If anyone out there is still afraid of socialists, read about Socialist Party USA's wonderful healthcare campaign.

"The role of trust in high tech work- The case of Freelance Web-Designers in NYC"

By Ari | Nov 10, 08 03:36 PM

A while back I participated in a study by a Columbia sociology student named Matthias Thiemann, who has written a 120 page thesis in German based on his research. He's translated a four-page section of it which may be published as a chapter in an upcoming book, which I really got a kick out of and wanted to share here: The role of trust in high tech work- The case of Freelance Web-Designers in NYC (PDF)

Some highlights that I really identify with (and I guess I should, since I was part of the sample):

In sending away clients to cheaper, better suited competitors or building little devices free of charge, freelancers establish a reputation of putting the clients’ welfare first, generating trust. Such acts of gift-giving then can lead to overcome the volatility of market-demand by generating referral networks for the freelancer and binding the gift-recipients for the long term.

I totally do this! I learned this from Tekserve, where I first worked when we moved to NYC - and it's not something I do to get something out of people, with the expectation of returns. I do it because, like Tekserve, I care about the people I'm working with, and about their projects, and if I can do something that's perhaps small and easy for me, but of great value to my clients, I'll do it in a heartbeat. This is also why Shira and I sometimes refer clients to other designers - if we know someone who can do a given job better or more economically for some reason, we pass it on, because it's in our client's interest. And rather than losing us clients, often those same clients come back because they know we did them a good turn.

In the sample, the more successful freelancers deserve special attention to the communication process, attempting to include the wishes of the customers and providing them with the feeling that they are in command. This strategy does not only bind their clients to them and leads to several referrals due to the pleasant process of cooperation, it is also a lucrative strategy in itself. The increased trust into the interaction partner seems to arouse the desire to actively engage in the process of production. This not only increases the satisfaction with the final product, it also increases the amount of work time spent on a project which adds to the income of the designer.

Here too, we don't use this strategy so we'll spend more time and make more money, though of course those are nice side effects which do happen on some projects. Shira and I treat every design job not as merely a service for pay, but as a cooperative partnership - we specialize in helping to give form and reach to our clients' ideas. The result is that the client is usually very, very happy with the product, and the product is very, very useful to them. We do give advice and make calls as designers, because we often have a deeper understanding of communications strategy and visual design principles than do our clients (which is, after all, why they hire us), but we don't steamroll our clients into accepting things they don't dig. We like to work with people to make things they love, and which will last. It's good for the client, and Matthias's study is helping me see how good it is for us, too.

Click here to read the paper, and let me know if you too are a web designer who'd like to talk to Matthias. His research goes on...

The Ithaca Green Buildings Open House

By Shira | Oct 17, 08 04:25 PM

Ari and I spent the first weekend of October climbing on people's roofs, investigating their toilets, and befriending their goats. No, we weren't being inappropriately nosy - it was all part of the 2008 Ithaca Green Buildings Open House!

In partnership with the American Solar Energy Society's National Solar Tour, Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County, Ithaca Green Building Alliance and the Northeast Sustainable Energy Association organized the two-day event in which twenty-seven sites were open to visitors.

As aspiring owner-builders with a vision for a naturally-built, sustainable ecovillage, the tour offered an amazing opportunity to see what building and energy techniques work locally, and to meet a bunch of really cool people. In addition to a lot of photovoltaic systems, we checked out some amazing living/green roofs, unconventional stoves, outhouses, vegetable gardens, and really, really long driveways.

Folks were using a variety of building-techniques including timber-frame, strawbale, earth-berming and round construction. We also learned, not surprisingly, that a lot of green home-owners love animals. We made friends with many cats and dogs and even a couple of goats!

We managed to visit six homes, but my favorite was the first - Sarah Highland's straw-clay timber-framed house-in-progress. Sarah designed and is building the house herself, with help from friends. It's surrounded by beautiful land featuring a pond, an adorable sauna, and a composting toilet outhouse, which Sarah and Liz lovingly refer to as their "room with a view" and which is also temporarily housing their solar panel equipment.

While some of the other homes on the tour were just as beautiful, Sarah had designed and built the house mostly by herself, which is pretty damn impressive. The masonry stove itself, is something to behold.

All in all, it was a great tour. My take-aways are:

It's all about the land.
If you're not too far from the road, being on-grid has some benefits, even if you're generating most of your own power.
Wood is a beautiful building material.
Solar systems are easier to maintain if they're not on your roof. Unless of course, if you have a solar hot water system on top of your earth-bermed green roof like the Bensons.
Water catchment is easy - all you need is a barrel.
Being a bit of a gadget geek is good.
It makes sense to design a home where you can age in place.
Salvaged and vintage stuff is awesome.
Make friends with your local saw mill.

Here are some of my favorite photos from the tour...

liz says she likes big "crazy" ideas like bike generators - me too!

approaching tina macdonald's place

visitors on the bensons' earth-sheltered living roof

the bensons' roof is so cool...

Hopefully it won't be too long before our home is part of the Ithaca Green Buildings Tour...

Wall Street bailout: Making the rich richer and the poor poorer

By Ari | Sep 28, 08 12:36 PM

Bad News For The Bailout (via Bob Torres):

In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.

"It's not based on any particular data point," a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. "We just wanted to choose a really large number."

Um. What?

Here's how I feel about the bailout: The dudes who have been draining the American people's blood on Wall Street and in these so-called "Investment Banks" are rich. They do not need help. Their "financial instruments" which they sell to us are a big ol' rip-off. We pay twice as much for our houses when we get mortgages (did you know "mortgage" means "death-pledge"?), and we have to pay for insurance just in case we get sick because health care is completely unaffordable otherwise. You should not need to get a loan to provide for yourself. Things should not cost as much as they do. We should be able to support our families ourselves, without committing to giving half or more of our money to rich guys.

If I could work, unpaid, but be sure that my neighbors were there for me in turn, I would jump at that opportunity. The doctor gives health care, the builder makes houses, I make websites and do outreach, the farmer grows healthful food, the teacher teaches. We all enjoy each other's services and goods freely. Yes, I'm talking about anarchism, about socialism, about collectivism. These ideas are not scary, they're beautiful, they're freeing. You know why? The rich guy who's profiting off of other folks' work isn't part of the picture - or rather, he's down on the same level with all the rest of us. Exploitation is exploitation no matter how you try to hide it. This bailout business is a big scary joke. I don't buy it.

UPDATE: Click here to contact your elected officials about this issue.

UPDATE, 10.1.08: Straight from the House's mouth: Why the bailout bill failed. Also, note this figure, which an activist sent out to an Ithaca mailing list I'm on: "$700 billion divided by 301 million Americans equals, $2 million 325 thousand for every man woman and child." So, um, that would solve a lot of problems, wouldn't it? I'd like to be a millionaire. Then I wouldn't need a mortage to own my own home, and I could pay off my school loans. Hell, maybe I wouldn't even need health insurance anymore, either.

Nebraska and safe haven - for all or just for some?

By Ari | Sep 28, 08 12:00 PM

Has anyone else out there been following this safe haven thing in Nebraska? They created a safe haven law that allows kids up to age 18 to be dropped off at hospitals and such, with no penalty to the parent. Then a ton of kids all got dropped off, and the media and politicians said "Whoa, too many kids are being abandoned! Better limit the safe haven law to only allow kids up to 5 year old or something."

So I read these stories, and was shocked that this was the response. I mean, if so many kids are being dropped off who weren't before, isn't that, dare I say, a good thing? Ostensibly the parents really don't want them or can't handle taking care of them. Why on earth would it be preferable to keep them in their homes if this is the reality of the situation? Why should it ever be considered wrong or illegal - or an offense worthy of punishment - to put your kids in a safer, healthier situation? If we don't allow folks to safely turn over their kids to others who can care for them (and here I know I'm glossing over the painful problems with the foster care and adoption industries), then won't we end up with more horror stories of kids locked up in closets for years, or killed, or abandoned on roadsides?

Anyway, today I finally came across a story that I think helps put the whole thing in context and which is very sympathetic to these parents and their horrible situation - and to the kids who could really benefit if we extended this broad safe haven law to the whole country: Nebraska Must Not Change Child Safe Haven Law by Vigilant Watch. When I saw this I breathed a sigh of relief that I'm not the only one who thinks this safe haven law is not "backwards" but a very, very good idea. Now if only we could extend it to all kids everywhere. They say it takes a village to raise a child, right? Let's act like it and take responsibility for the kids who need help - and work to erase the problems that lead to families falling into this situation in the first place.

Rev Billy on Fox Business Happy Hour

By Ari | Aug 8, 08 01:32 PM

Check out this incredible video of Reverend Billy of the Church of Stop Shopping dropping some science on Fox News. The host really gets into it, though she's a little shocked by his indictment of capitalism. On Fox! He dissed capitalism on Fox! You have to watch it. Oh, and stop shopping!

Via the Stop Shopping Monitor
Previously:

Heinz UK Pulls Ad Showing Two Men Kissing

By Shira | Jun 25, 08 01:31 PM

I'm not sure what's more shocking - that this ad was pulled because of complaints or that it was aired in the first place. I can't imagine Heinz putting an ad this gay on U.S. television, Americans are way too homophobic. Further evidence that capitalism serves profit, not people, and definitely not the chickens whose eggs go into Heinz mayonnaise.

Now if Heinz is looking for new ideas for the American market, they need look no further:

Utopia now

By Ari | Jun 5, 08 08:29 AM

We're reading Chris Carlsson's Nowtopia, and just happened upon Real Utopia. Good stuff! No matter how fast we read, there's always more amazingness out there we've never even heard of.

The basic premise of these books is that not only is another world possible, it's actively under construction, right now. If you're worried about peak oil, despairing about politics, or fearing the end of capitalism will never come, I highly recommend reading books like these for a healthy dose of hope and happiness. Nothing can restore your will to act and create change like reading accounts of many other people who care about this stuff and are working to build a better tomorrow today.

Vermont Commons: The Decay of Capitalism

By Ari | May 6, 08 11:05 AM

Richard Davis's short opinion piece, The Decay of Capitalism, sums up how I've been feeling about the state of world affairs for a long time. Back when I read (parts of) Marx's Capital in school, I remember this graph showing capitalism's inevitable crash - there are only so many workers and resources to exploit before you run out of room for profit and the whole thing has to come tumbling down. I think this article does a good job of tying it all together, from fuel prices to the mortgage crisis to the healthcare industry's problems: "How did we get to the point where we replaced ethical principles and a sense of common good with profits at any cost? It is the natural evolution of the capitalist system in societies without a soul."

Lest this post sound too depressing: let's not forget that people are (and have been for some time) constructing socialist alternatives all over the world. Read Zapatista Encuentro: Documents from the Encounter for Humanity and Against Neoliberalism, La Realidad, Mexico for just one glimpse of the new worlds being forged to take the place of the old.

"Conscious consumerism"

By Ari | Mar 16, 08 03:05 PM

A little while ago, Brooklyn activist/art collective Change You Want to See / Not an Alternative banned Raw Revolution products from their gallery space, issuing a kind of anti-greenwashing/consumerist manifesto along with the announcement: The Real (Raw) Revolution:

A line is here drawn against alternative capitalist products. Revolution is not a candy bar or an energy drink. Don't get us wrong, we recognize good intentions, but good intentions alone are no solution for avoiding the road to hell. All products that represent themselves as "sustainable solutions" are hereby banned from The Change You Want to See Gallery. Creating an economy where fairly traded, organic, vegan, healthy, (and even free) products are the norm rather than an anomaly is something we encourage. We believe however that to achieve this, a stand has to be taken against any commodity that is packaged as the embodiment of an alternative or a revolution. Consuming "Raw Revolution" will never be a meal replacement for actual revolution. Please... continue to invent, build, create, fight, force the limits of the capitalist system. Bring the results of your work to the Gallery, we want to and will continue to help you promote your work. However we will no longer provide a cover for a guerilla marketing campaign. If "false revolutionary", "fake alternative" "politically correct" "do-gooder" products are brought to the Gallery their packaging will be removed at the door.

(Via Stop Shopping Monitor)

Here's the video version:

I really dig the sentiment behind this move. We've been trying to figure out what we can possibly put in our own shop that would pass our ethical muster. We don't like using new materials or toxic art supplies. We don't want to ship things all over the place, requiring shipping suppplies and fuel as well as causing pollution. And we don't really like having money relationships with people anymore, either - though that's hard to avoid when you live in a capitalist society and sell your skills for a living. All of this rather limits what one can sell in a shop, if one decides to keep the shop at all.

There's such a fuzzy line between people working for social change and trying to make a living at the same time - and people who are more in it for the money, but who may do some good along the way. Where do you cross the line into exploitation, or are you always there, so long as you're participating in capitalism?

On the other side of this equation is consumerism of different sorts. In our ongoing efforts to reduce our impact we've found that there are certain things we've needed to buy that require shipping. You can find used books on alternative energy at a local bookstore, for example, but what about that washable shower curtain that requires no plastic liner (or other hard-to-find but highly efficient replacements for conventional housewares)? You'd think in our massive city we'd find it (and yes, if we were craftier, we'd make it), but no luck. But buying online from a company like Simple Family Living Homegoods or Gaiam has a broad impact (supporting capitalism; using packaging material; and polluting the air, using up fuel and clogging up a highway, during shipping). At what point does it make more sense to just buy a damn curtain that requires a liner, imperfect a solution though it might be?

I know we can't be perfect, but we can do our best to do the right thing for the planet and our neighbors. In the society we've set up for ourselves though, it can be hard to know what the "right" decision is.

UPDATE, 3.26.08
Lest I sound too negative about Simple Family Living Homegoods and Gaiam, I wanted to put in that these two companies - and Simple Family Living Homegoods in particular, which is much more indie than Gaiam - are both really great places to get things that will help you move toward a lower-impact life. Reusable, washable mesh produce bags will help you avoid using plastic ones, reusable cloth gift bags and handkerchiefs will help you avoid the use of wrapping supplies, soap nuts and a collapsible drying rack will help you avoid detergents and use less power when doing laundry, and so on. If you can't - or won't - make these things yourself, and if you can't find them locally (which is all too often the case, hence this post), these are indeed very good places to find them.

Posts tagged with "Economics"

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

Bread and roses

Radical thinking: How to solve the housing crisis

Fresh off the Wordpress: Frac Attack

Please help stop natural gas drilling

My Life in Pictures

Hunting for houses

Ari's Brother Was Car-Jacked...He's ok Now!

New Videos for freeDimensional

If you spell something wrong, do you really deserve surgery?

I just finished making this movie for the Ithaca Area Poets

Another Jam-Packed Weekend

Drying for Freedom

The U.S. Health Care Debate, Simply Put: An Original Animated Short

Isaac is moving in!

Useful way of thinking about work

Water catchment system for rain collection and filtration (video)

Summer Bounty

Foraging for Mushrooms

This is what is up

Swap Meet Video!

Positive News: Gift Economies

With Ten Dollars, a Bag of Clay or Three Straw Bales

Summer sci fi: An AI arms race and an elevator to space

The yurt obsession continues

Free garden

Ahimsa evolves, and an a-frame emerges

Check Out My Article About Food, Inc. at Documentary.org

The cost of living for the future

No bosses here: A book from the past to help us work more equitably today

Some good books: DIY media labs and culture, environmental sci fi, the origins of aggression, and tantric buddhism

Imagine all the people

Weddings and freedom

Health and wealth: The downfall of capitalism and the uplift of humanity

Capitalism is dead: London Protests G20 (photos)

Freelance America

Human Scale Living

Sometimes Green Building Makes Me Cry

Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities

The Group House Handbook: How to share your kitchen without going crazy

Shirari's Peace and Love Podcast #6: Economies

Our Friends at The Dacha Project Are Awesome.

"Sometimes It's Hard to Breathe" - I finally edited my footage from our trip to India in 2006

"You are brilliant and the world is hiring!" – Paul Hawken

Shirari's Peace and Love Podcast #5: Top 8 Activist Strategies

DIY Holidays

Shale Shocked

Tortillas and Cider, Delivered to Our Doorstep

Prop 8: The Musical

Recycling...The Least You Can Do

Art for feminist, socialist healthcare

"The role of trust in high tech work- The case of Freelance Web-Designers in NYC"

The Ithaca Green Buildings Open House

Wall Street bailout: Making the rich richer and the poor poorer

Nebraska and safe haven - for all or just for some?

Rev Billy on Fox Business Happy Hour

Heinz UK Pulls Ad Showing Two Men Kissing

Utopia now

Vermont Commons: The Decay of Capitalism

"Conscious consumerism"

Shirari Industries