Posts tagged with "Environment"

Stop 'N' Swap on Saturday - NYC

By Ari | May 8, 08 09:59 AM

Build It Green is having a Swap Fest Block Party this Saturday in Queens, 11am-4pm. Like a Really Really Free Market, this is a great opportunity to get rid of stuff you're not using anymore (and maybe pick up some stuff you need), in a really local/community-centered and environmentally-friendly way.

Build It Green is a very cool place to wander around any day. If you need any low-cost salvaged building materials (or even furniture), this is the perfect time to get to know these guys and to check out the warehouse. Good stuff!

Travelling the land and opening the mind

By Ari | May 7, 08 12:49 PM

A friend of ours is traveling to a jungle in Peru to take ayahuasca and is getting ready for the trip in his usual thoughtful style:

What helps us plug in, and stay plugged in, to stories of reality that disempower us? Certainly all forms of media, including advertisements and billboards. But I'm guessing that on a deeper level the very structures of our lives, the very things I'm supposed to miss such as electricity and toilets, keep us plugged in to a "modern American" reality that is simply our story, a story not shared by everyone on the planet.

I really identify with this idea. I found that the trip Shira and I took to India was eye-opening in ways I never expected. There's something about flushing your toilet with a bucket, taking cold showers, and being sold handmade items in bags made out of recycled newspaper instead of plastic, that makes Western environmental activism and "conservation" look woefully inadequate. It was that trip that made Shira and I get into low impact living, waste reduction, and drastically reduced consumption with more depth and enthusiasm and understanding than we ever had before. Today these practices are a huge part of our lives, but it was traveling and seeing different ways of living firsthand that turned everything around for us.

Combine a trip like that with ayahuasca and I imagine the effects must be even more profound. Keep an eye on Bunnykitteh's blog for updates.

Our Eutopic Vision at Forbes.com

By Shira | Apr 11, 08 06:08 PM

Ari's rendering of our eutopia

When Ari and I posted our vision of a Radical Solidarity Ecovillage to the Intentional Communities Directory, we really didn't know what to expect. So far, we've gotten a couple of email inquiries from potential members who we're going to connect with in Ithaca, and we're eagerly awaiting more interest.

One thing we certainly didn't expect was to be contacted by Forbes.com. After Elisabeth Eaves interviewed us for her article Ecotopia we were kind of nervous. She had never heard of Community Supported Agriculture, not to mention Freeganism or an assortment of other strategies that we discussed. Considering that Forbes is entrenched in capitalism, we worried that maybe our earnest ramblings might be used against us.

Luckily that was not the case! In fact, we're right up at the top of the article, and we don't sound (too) crazy:

After six years in the city, Shira Golding and Ari Moore want to try something new. The two 27-year-old artists came to New York after college, but now yearn for less urban and more affordable living. Rather than retreat to suburbia, the two are trying to recruit like-minded souls to join them in an artistic, vegan commune, which they plan to form in upstate New York.

"The number of people doesn't matter so much as shared values," says Golding, who then elaborates on a philosophy of animal rights, ecological sustainability and "freeganism," in which "you abstain from capitalism by getting things for free or [by] barter[ing]."

Golding and Moore's utopian vision is in its infancy, but they aren't alone in their desire to build their own self-contained community.

If we're going to be picky, freeganism doesn't really include "bartering," as much as giving and taking freely, and we prefer "intentional community" over "commune." But what really matters is that the mainstream media is paying attention to alternative visions for sustainable living. If Forbes.com, whose tagline is "Home Page for the World's Business Leaders," is doing a whole feature on utopias, who knows what's next!

Which brings me to the word "utopia." As our friend and wordsmith Orion pointed out at our Peace and Justice Passover Seder last year, “utopia” comes from the Greek for “no place” or “nowhere.” In other words a "utopia" is a better society that does not and cannot exist. That's not very optimistic. Orion suggested "eutopia" as an alternative spelling, meaning a "good, happy place." The article Visions of Utopia or Eutopia? at CommonDreams.org, puts it this way: "Eutopia is a vision of a preferable place - but one with a bridge that gets us from here to there. Visions of a better society don't attract a critical mass of people. Only future visions with a visible, viable bridge can do that - a lesson many progressives have yet to learn." Let's start building those bridges!

E-waste recycling event at Tekserve Mac shop - NYC

By Ari | Apr 10, 08 03:55 PM

Our favorite Mac shop and my one-time employer Tekserve, who recently sold us our new and amazing video editing system (THANKS!), is having their second annual Electronics Recycling Event, together with the Lower East Side Ecology Center. These sorts of environmentally-friendly shenanigans are just what I'd expect from Tekserve, home of "Fair Weights and Square Dealings." The event will be April 26th-27th, right here in NYC.

More tips on recycling things you just don't know where to recycle:
GrassRoots Recycling Network
EcoCycle
GreenDisk

My Feminist Review: Bipedal, By Pedal!

By Ari | Apr 5, 08 11:47 AM

My review of the great critical mass zine "Bipedal, By Pedal!" is up at Feminist Review. Anyone out there done a critical mass bike ride? I'm embarrassed to say I haven't yet gone on one - I'm afraid of cars when on a bike. But this zine made me want to join up...

Earth Hour, Blackout Sabbath, and other symbols of sustainability

By Ari | Mar 29, 08 10:37 AM

Today I was happy to see Google blacked out in support of Earth Hour, tonight's hour of energy awareness (8pm - 9pm). Turn out your lights to participate, if you're into it.

However, reading about Earth Hour, I couldn't help but think Rufus Wainwright's Blackout Sabbath - 12 hours of no energy use at all, on the summer solstice, June 21, along with setting personal goals for sustainability - is a lot more hardcore. The World Wildlife Fund, who's behind Earth Hour, should have talked to Rufus and set their sights a little higher, pushed people a little harder!

On Rufus' short sample list of actions one can take for the environment, he even includes going vegan (my fingers are SO crossed right now that he'll join our vegan ranks... c'mon Rufus, you can do it...). Veganism is such an obvious step toward sustainability that it gets a little infuriating when I see Treehugger and WorldChanging and the like continually ignoring it as an option and suggesting people find "sustainable fisheries" and "happy meat", as if that solves much else besides making people feel a little better about oppressing animals.

I don't think I'm going to participate in Earth Hour, but I do think I'll do Blackout Sabbath. I loved the blackout too, and I think it could be magic to spend that time making art about the earth and the future, or writing by (vegan!) candlelight about the times to come and how we can make it beautiful. I like setting goals for myself, and I like participating in consciousness-raising events like fasts and the like, because I like, well, raising my consciousness. These events are symbols, but important ones: They're fissures in the wall of separation we put up between our energy-consuming, self-centered, here-and-now lives - and the future, our children's future, the future of the earth. We don't like to look over there, to see what we're actually setting up for ourselves. If it takes an hour (or 12 hours) of reflection and awareness to really take a good look at what we're doing and how we can change, then that symbolic act is a very useful one.

But in the end, we need more than just temporary observances and symbolic acts, right? If you're out of a room for over two minutes, there shouldn't be a light on in there. If you've got appliances with power indicator lights on them that are plugged in all day, they're just sitting there sucking up energy, and should be unplugged until they're needed. If your home just doesn't stay cool in the summer or warm in the winter, maybe you need to fix your insulation so all of that energy doesn't just fly our the window. In every situation we have the power to make decisions that add to the problem, or that make the world a better place. There are easy little things we can all do every day, all day, to go beyond symbols and toward true sustainability. What do you do? And do symbols help, or distract from this larger, deeper movement?

Vegan Treasures from My Mom

By Ari | Mar 17, 08 06:05 PM

My mom runs an online business selling vintage women's clothing: Vintage Lucy. I wanted to help her make the leap from eBay to her own shop, and I thought I could make her a PayPal shop using Movable Type - but I don't usually do jobs that involve animal exploitation, and Mom's amazing collection happens to contain some wool, leather, and feathers. I did end up making the site, and am now helping her do some outreach.

I have to admit that I'm really glad that I compromised my ideals to work with her on this site! 100% vegan though it may not be, it can help my mom make a living. And it so happens that Mom has become increasingly open to animal rights ideas over the years. She dabbles in vegetarianism and veganism and is constantly educating herself and changing; she cares for and loves many animals, and recently has done a little animal rights activism. She added a new category of items to her site called Vegan Treasures - as she points out, "wearing vintage & pre-worn is recycling, saving precious animals & the Earth." Check it out - there's some very beautiful stuff in there (all of the photos above are from this category): Vintage Lucy Vegan Treasures (No animal products used in these beauties.) Who knows, maybe this is only the tip of the vegan iceberg for my mom...

"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.

Tiny houses = small footprint

By Ari | Mar 9, 08 11:10 AM

A tiny house means fewer materials and less energy used in construction, lower fuel-use and emissions. It also (potentially) means that more of your land is left undeveloped, leaving room for our free-living neighbors to move back in.

Here's an adorable video of Tumbleweed's Jay Shafer giving a tour of his tiny house:

Another tiny house company: Martin House-To-Go
See also: The Small House Society, Tiny House Blog

Vegans feeding people

By Ari | Mar 2, 08 04:05 PM

I was just doing some research into overlaps between veganism and mutual aid, and was a little shocked at how few programs for hungry folk are run by vegans. It's too bad, it seems like a really good idea! It's safer to prepare and handle than animal-based food, and can be cheaper, too - and giving cruelty-free food to people who need it seems like a natural extension of the vegan ideal of ahimsa (most good / least harm).

Here are a few organizations that are vegan or vegetarian - anyone know of any others?

Food Not Bombs - freegan, anarchist free vegan food movement
Vegfam sustainable, vegan agriculture projects aimed at reducing hunger and providing disaster relief
Food for Life Hare Krishna-run lacto-vegetarian food aid and disaster relief program
The People's Potato worker-owned vegetarian soup kitchen
Freegan.info freegan feasts, trash tours and community meals

Radical Solidarity Ecovillage

By Ari | Mar 1, 08 03:57 PM

Hey, any activisty, creative vegans out there interested in cohousing, intentional community, or ecovillage life? Shira and I just posted a listing for a forming community, Radical Solidarity Ecovillage, in the Online Communities Directory.

We're relocating to Ithaca, New York, at the end of this coming summer, and are talking about buying a house, seeking freedom from rent - but do we really want to lock ourselves into a 30-year mortgage on a conventionally built house, is that freedom? We're very attracted to intentional community, co-housing, ecovillages, and other alternatives, but no matter how cool they are, we just can't stomach the idea of putting our labor and money into animal exploitation. (Unfortunately most communities incorporate some form of "animal husbandry".) So we thought we'd put a listing out there, see if we can find some kindred spirits. Check it out and let us know if you or anyone you know would be interested in something like it.

For a great overview of a family's experience building their own earth-friendly, mortgage-free house, check out A Low-Impact Woodland Home.

And for a glimpse at what ecovillage life can look like, check out The Farm's Ecovillage Tour:

If Only All Capitalists Were Ed Begley, Jr.

By Shira | Feb 20, 08 05:29 PM

Go, Ed Begley, go!

Loving mama earth, one day at a time

By Ari | Feb 16, 08 02:00 PM

There have been a lot of locavore for a year / vegan for a week / freegan for a month projects going on lately, usually resulting in a book or article. I worry that rather than inspiring lasting change, these sorts of projects frame these actions as extreme (and temporary, limited) experiments by extraordinary people. As Vegan Freak Radio says again and again, there's nothing extreme about living ethically and with compassion. Our individual actions do affect the future of our planet, and each of us has the power to reduce our negative impact and even make our impact a positive one.

I think the secret is to make changes at a pace that's sustainable. If you rush it and try to go vegan or zero-waste overnight, odds are, your plan will backfire. But if you can identify an area in which you want to improve your actions, make a change and see positive results, that change is more likely to be a lasting one - and you'll be more likely to go on to work on another thing you want to improve.

For example, by making small changes over a period of over a year, Shira and I have gone from throwing out a big bag of trash at least once a week, to throwing out a tiny bag of trash every two weeks or so. Where did all that trash go? Well, it wasn't "trash" in the first place - it was compost, recyclables, and reusables. And in many cases, because we've been working on reducing our consumerism and choosing items with less packaging, it no longer comes into our apartment in the first place. And this wasn't a temporary experiment - it's just what we're doing because we love our earth and want our future children to be able to enjoy it, too.

Want more perspective on why sorting your trash is worth the effort? Long before The Story of Stuff came Jorge Furtado's Ilha das Flores, a Brazilian documentary short that shows how one person's trash becomes another person's food. Here it is with English subtitles.

Here are some resources and groups working toward a zero-waste / low-impact future:

The art for this post is from a Shell ad that was pulled because it was deemed misleading - since Shell is, after all, an oil corporation and not an envrionmental activist organization. But damn did they make a pretty image - and they're right, don't throw anything away - there is no away!

Books: Searchable, free, earth-friendly, and extremely organized

By Ari | Feb 15, 08 10:29 AM

I read a lot and am always keeping lists of books I want to read. After cutting and pasting into text documents for years it occurred to me there must be a better way to do this; sure enough, there is. I tried LibraryThing (not free after 300 books!) and Google's My Library (lousy interactivity and no way to add notes). Then I actually typed "track books want read" into Google and Ask Metafilter came to the rescue.

Folks seemed to really like Goodreads, and now I know why. It's free and very interactive, and offers fields for notes/reviews and recommendations. It also automatically offers you "read" and "to-read" bookshelves, with the capability to add as many other shelves as you like - useful if you want to offer lists of recommended titles on particular topics.

In the process of all of this catalog-perusal, I realized something that I guess should have been obvious if it wasn't. I've long been annoyed by not being able to hit Command-F ("Find file...") in the real world. I mean really, wouldn't this make life a lot easier? With books it's particularly infuriating - unless I take copious notes and write in my books like crazy, I know the likelihood of my actually being able to find a quote or idea in the future is pretty slim. Wouldn't it be awesome to be able to search your shelves for "nonviolence," say, and find all references, across genres?

Well, at first I thought it was silly to input books you already have into a catalog tool like this, but now I get it. It's surprisingly easy and quick to get them in there, and then, you can search your shelves. This is where Google is supposed to be better, allowing you to actually search within books - but for me, the interactivity of GoodReads outweighs the usefulness of that feature. In any case, I'm now able to hit Command-F and then find the result on my shelf, and however imperfect the system is, it's made our library more useful.

A major issue I have with all of these sites is that they usually offer purchasing links, and those links all send you to giant corporations who send new books through the mail. My ideal book is a used one my neighbor hands me - no new printing and paper, no shipping materials or freight fuel and pollution, no participation in global capitalism. Unfortunately none of these sites allow you to customize the book purchase links that come up while people are looking at your catalog, so the best I could do was put a list in my profile. Here it is, if you too like to get books but want to do it in an earth-friendly way:

FreeCycle - facilitates swapping free used stuff in your local area
PaperBackSwap - book/DVD swapping community
BookCrossing - used books sent/left and tracked, sort of a worldwide booksharing system
Better World Books - Carbon-offset shipping, profits support literacy programs worldwide
Alibris - used books, for sale
Abe Books - used books, for sale

Simulated stupidity

By Ari | Feb 3, 08 02:05 PM

Recently I saw a big ad for EA's "Sim City Societies" that shows three (fake) people and the societies they've built, one of which is obviously meant to be an earthy crunchy green city and another that's insanely capitalist. Curious what options the game would actually give you (can you make a sustainable anarchist community, for example?), I checked out their site.

The game does seem flexible, poking fun at both capitalists and utopians and hinting at the idea of creating a balance. ("Mix and match societal values — productivity, prosperity, creativity, spirituality, authority, and knowledge — to determine the core attributes of your city... Witness the evolution of your city as its appearance and sounds adapt to reflect these values.") But right up at the top of the home page is a prominent "Learn more about alternative energy" link that leads to a BP-branded site explaining that this game is the result of a partnership between the oil company and EA.

While I appreciate that BP is apparently doing a lot of work in green energy development, and that this game will allow users to experiment with wind farms and other green technologies, this looks like a massive greenwashing campaign to me. BP paints itself here as a green energy company, with nary a whisper of its record as one of the ten worst corporations in the world.

With BP so intimately involved in this game's development, my guess is that folks who want to set up oil-guzzling societies will be conveniently prevented from causing the oil spills and oil refinery explosions that characterize oil's real-world impact... which sort of negates the whole point of a game that supposedly serves as a mini experimental laboratory for various energy options, doesn't it?

Related: Games for Change: Serious Fun

Another Reason to Love Canada

By Ari | Jan 27, 08 04:46 PM

Stop Idling!
Originally uploaded by Vegan_Butterfly

Can you imagine the U.S. government distributing a flier called "Idling is Killing Our Environment"? I can't.

Hotelling, coworking, and other evolutions of work

By Ari | Jan 23, 08 10:57 AM

zora's tummy
Originally uploaded by arimoore

I just read Treehugger's post on "Hotelling". Apparently this is an old practice that's come back in vogue, whereby businesses keep a lot of their workforce mobile, rather than providing office space and expecting people to stay there all the time. Honestly, I don't see how it's very different from telecommuting. Except that the name is cuter. Anyway, this earth-friendly practice (as Treehugger points out, it results in "few people commuting, [and] less space being built, heated and cooled") got me thinking about connections between work, play, and learning.

I'm a fan of unschooling (self-education without the institution, or even the structure). The educators who advocate for unschooling point out that kids learn naturally while playing, all the time. And studies have shown that if you let kids learn on their own, they'll learn the material better than if you force it on them.

Work seems to be similar: People actually like working. Nothing like the satisfaction of a job well done, right? (Read Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano if you don't agree.) But if you make people work, and force them to do it under circumstances over which they have no control, it becomes less attractive. Take away the desk, let people roam (or better yet, make the business a worker-owened cooperative), and you've got a recipe for increased happiness, and efficiency.

This isn't a too-good-to-be-true pipe dream, either: Hotelling, telecommuting, freelancing, coworking and other alternative forms of fitting work into one's life are all in active use all over the world.

For an application of similar ideas to a conference/ meeting/ retreat setting, see Opening Space for Communication and Collaboration with Open Space Technology. (Link via Josh A.)

Ch..ch..ch..changes

By Shira | Jan 21, 08 07:22 PM

zora checks out the new mac pro tower
Originally uploaded by Shira Golding

It's still hard to believe that Shirari Industries is my full-time gig. My days feel longer in the best possible way, and I fall asleep excited about the next morning.

We just got a new Mac Pro, and it's pretty awesome. My old iMac could barely run iPhoto without crashing, so with me working from home, it was definitely time to upgrade. The cats were almost as excited about opening the boxes as we were. So far, I'm a happy customer and I'm especially psyched about the new iApps. Unfortunately, I think I might have some major issues getting sound recording set up as there are Panther incompatibility issues with the MBox and the Oxygen8 - bummer!

Technology is weird. Somehow, no matter how incredible a device seems when it first comes out, it feels slow and useless only a few years later. Has the device degraded or have we, as individuals, just upgraded our expectations? I recently read Victor Papanek's 1972 book Design for the Real World. (He was a friend and colleague of Buckminster Fuller, developer of the geodesic dome.) The book presents an indictment of planned obsolescence, the notion that corporations purposefully perpetuate a disposable, commodity-driven culture by creating products that aren't built to last, and by always pushing the newest model while discontinuing support of older editions.

The moment I started up GarageBand on my new Mac and tried to record a song using my MBox, only to discover that the device is "not yet supported," Papanek popped into my head, and I felt a rush of guilt. Should I really be investing in more machinery that's probably going to end up in a landfill in a decade or sooner? At least I can console myself with the fact that my Samsung monitor had an Energy Star sticker on it and that Apple went a little greener in 2007.

Button Patrol: They Said It Was Going to Snow

By Shira | Jan 14, 08 08:10 PM

It didn't snow today, but it might snow tonight!!!

What Michelle Williams and Chelsea Clinton Have in Common

By Shira | Jan 11, 08 06:22 PM

michelle williams, hilary clinton, veggies, local, organic, csa

Doesn't it suck how much attention celebrities get for superficial things like weight gain, what they're wearing, and where they choose to shop? I was walking along Fifth Avenue one day and saw a bunch of paparazzi staked out on the sidewalk outside a J. Crew. Apparently, Keri Russell was buying some jeans.

Actually, I do think the famous among us should be held accountable for their consumer choices, as we all should. So, what do Michelle Williams and Chelsea Clinton have in common? They're both into local, organic, sustainable agriculture. I spotted Chelsea at the Union Square Farmer's Market with a bag full of produce, and a few months ago, when we went to pick up our last Hearty Roots farm share of the season, Michelle Williams was volunteering to help distribute the veggies. It was pretty awesome.

For those of you who don't know what a farm share is, it's time to learn about CSAs, a.k.a Community Supported Agriculture. They're a great way to support local farmers, eat well, and protect the environment. While farmers markets give communities access to local food, farm shares go a step further, enabling individuals to help farmers financially when they need it most - at the beginning of the season. You sign up for a share in the winter, pay for your veggies up front, and pick up the bounty at prescribed times and locations over the course of the season, usually late spring through fall. In addition to enabling local agrarians to stay afloat, you get really high-quality produce at bargain prices. Now's the time of year when folks start signing up for spring shares, so don't miss your chance.

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