Category: Abundance and Prosperity

Looking at abundance as not necessarily monetary–how to get your needs met and desires fulfilled without necessarily needing money to do it.

By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Green Business Tagged with , , , , , ,

Two commentators demonstrate why solar continues to be viable, and why the dramatic and very public failure of Solyndra has nothing to do with the viability of solar.

On Huffington Post, Graciela Tiscareño-Sato writes, in “A Teaching Moment About the Green Economy,” of several brilliant entrepreneurs who are helping us take big steps toward a green economy, emphasizing multiple benefits such as saving cost and carbon and creating jobs at the same time. Her examples (all from the Latino world, incidentally) cover the building industry (specifically, solarizing schools in California), fashion, eco-consulting, and more.

And in the New York Times, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman points out that Solyndra’s failure was directly related to the success of solar. Solyndra’s model was based in high prices and scarcity, but as solar becomes more popular, the energy equivalent of the computer industry’s Moore’s Law kicks in; we get ever-more-powerful, cheaper, more effective systems as the quantity goes up. Solyndra couldn’t compete with the new low-cost solar providers. (Note: this is a different aspect of the same article I blogged about yesterday.)

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Green Business Tagged with , ,

A lot of visionary people out there are convinced that pretty much anything in the waste stream can be turned to more productive use. And quite a number of them are building low-cost houses out of other people’s discarded junk.

The above link takes you to several articles, with cool photos, about various people who are doing just that. (Note that the first, second, and fourth links all cover the work of one man, Dan Phillips of Huntsville, Texas—but with different pictures and narrative).

What I love about this kind of approach is that it simultaneously accomplishes multiple goods:

  • Provides low-cost housing at a time when so many have lost their homes
  • Reduces landfill waste, and thus extends the life of our landfills
  • Demonstrates the viability of other approaches than throwing stuff to rot slowly in a huge heap
  • Reduces the need to harvest virgin materials, and thus cuts back on environmentally destructive practices such as clear-cutting and strip-mining
  • Eliminates the release of significant carbon and other greenhouse gases compared to construction from new materials
  • Encourages all of us to use our creativity and ingenuity  to address the problems of our time
  • Shows yet again that one person can make a difference
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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,

I love this! Recognizing that they need to be part of the solution and not just the agitation, permaculture experts have started some deep green initiatives including graywater recycling–at Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan, home to the original Occupy Wall Street demonstration/encampment.

Once again, the protests remind me of the remarkable communities we had during the Seabrook occupation and our subsequent incarceration at various national guard armories, back in 1977.

Note: if they can do permaculture in an impermanent camp in a city park, we should be able to do it all over the country and the world in our permanent dwellings.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Green Business Tagged with ,

Fascinating article by Marc Stoiber on how Patagonia’s latest environmental initiatives tells customers not to buy what they don’t need, and to make what they do buy last forever. And if it doesn’t last forever, Patagonia will take it back and recycle it for you.

It may be counter to common logic, but Stoiber thinks this will increase sales, and tells why. And I agree, for reasons I cite in my latest book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green—that caring and an envirnmental/soial justice agenda build fans and build the brand.

Patagonia is always a great company to watch and learn from, and this initiative does not surprise me.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , ,

Conservation measures in the northwest, with a three-year overall payback, saved enough energy to power 153,900 homes: 254 megawatts.

And in the last 33 years, that region has saved enough energy to meet Seattle’s energy needs four times over.

That is A LOT of power savings, and totally replicable elsewhere in the country. Makes a lot more sense than building more coal or nuclear plants!

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People Tagged with , , , ,

Hooray for Antioch College, an education innovator all the way back to its founding in 1850, when it became the first college to admit women and men, blacks and whites, all as equals.

The college, which just reopened after being closed for several years and separating itself from Antioch University, is taking its golf course (which had been disused even during my student days in the 1970s and turning it into a farm that will both supply food to the campus and provide a framework for integrating hands-on sustainability into the curriculum.

Bravo!

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, poverty, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , ,

In the South Bronx, once a deeply distressed urban area of New York City that the cops had dubbed “Fort Apache” because it had been so dangerous, a lot of the comeback has been around sustainability (thanks in no small measure to years of terrific organizing by Majora Carter and Sustainable South Bronx). A new initiative I just learned about creates three wins at once:

  • Cleans up polluted water
  • Creates clean and usable biofuel that doesn’t sacrifice agricultural land
  • Creates jobs and a general economic boost in a depressed area

Read about this triple win here. More and more, I think we’ll be seeing development projects like this. (I know of many others around the country and around the world.) The key is to look at waste from one process and see how it could be used as an ingredient for the next process. Another great example is The Intervale, in Burlington and South Burlington, Vermont, where beer waste becomes a growing medium for mushrooms, which in turn feeds fish. This thinking shift is one of the major principles of true sustainability.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , ,

I finally got up the courage to visit our garden, which had been swamped by Hurricane Irene.

Our Garden and Barstow's hay and cornfields, 8/29/11
Our Garden and Barstow's hay and cornfields, 8/29/11

The Friday before the storm hit, we busied ourselves hauling out tomatoes, soybeans, basil…anything that was ready to pick. Sunday, when the rain stopped, we thought we’d come through unscathed—until Monday morning, when we got up and saw that the Connecticut River, normally in that area at least 500 yards from the state highway, was lapping at the edges of the road. The entire corn and hayfield surrounding our garden was under water. The gate, about three feet above the ground, was at the water line.

While the water receded within a couple of days, we were strongly advised NOT to eat anything else from the garden—and once we found out that Greenfield, farther upriver, was not treating its sewage after the storm, we weren’t all that interested in harvesting anything else anyway. and I couldn’t bring myself to even go down there to view the wreckage until now.

On the good side, the hayfield is coming back. Fresh green growth has come up over the silt and if you don’t look too closely, it looks normal.

But the garden was another matter. All the corn, sesame, tomatoes, some of the broccoli, some of the beans, and nearly all the eggplant was dead. The whole place stank. About the three of the broccoli plants and one eggplant had survived, and the broccoli actually looked quite good (not that I was going to take any). One eggplant had grown on the surviving plant.

While I recognize that we got off very easy compared to neighbors just a few miles north, or the farmers whose farm we live on who lost 30 acres of cow corn and hay, it still made me deeply sad.

Next year, perhaps, we’ll start a small garden up by the house, which is on a hill and stayed totally fine during the storm.

It made me thank about how lucky we are to have essentially unlimited supplies of food; when our garden fails, we do not starve. We can go buy some just a few miles away. Many people in the world are not so fortunate, and if their crops fail, they face starvation. As a society, we should set up distribution networks to eliminate that kind of threat.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, Ethics in Government, Ethics-International, Green Business Tagged with , , , , , , ,

According to the New York Times, it seems the Chinese want to have their cake and eat it too when it comes to electric cars. With only a minuscule budget for R&D, the Chinese want to coerce their way into access to expensively developed technologies for electric cars by making that access a precondition for foreign manufacturers who want to sell electric vehicles in China, if they want the same subsidies that Chinese-made electric cars enjoy. (This happens to be a violation of the World Trade Organization’s rules, and China is a WTO member)

Here’s how I think that would play out:

  • At least some foreign automakers, wanting access to the vast and rapidly growing Chinese market, make the devil’s bargain and share their technology secrets
  • China begins a crash program in its state-owned car companies to bring cars to market using this technology
  • After one to three years, the foreign automakers find themselves closed out—and sitting on a big useless pile of expensive infrastructure—as the Chinese rush cheap and shoddily built EVs to market using American, European, or Japanese technology

General Motors is actively resisting and protesting; Nissan doesn’t even want to go into the market under these conditions; yet Ford apparently plans to cave.

This is one time I find myself agreeing with General Motors. This is a bad idea!

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