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, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , ,

In Part 1, I looked at my own history as a bicultural who is at home in my native New York City as well as in the farm village of 200 people where I live now. Part 2 looked at the context of going no-impact in present-day NYC, and how in some ways it’s easier now, and outlined Colin Beavan’s choices in attempting to live a year with no net negative impact on the environment.

In this final part, I close the circle and direct my bicultural lens on Colin’s choices.

First, I have enormous respect for what he and his wife did. They telescoped into a matter of weeks lifestyle choices that took us decades to evolve, and with considerable personal sacrifice. No  movies, no eating out, no curling up with a great book long after the lights are out.

Second, I understand why they took it to the extreme they did. Their lives were so far out of balance that it took radical surgery to set it right, and it was clear at the end of the movie that as the cycle ended, they would reintroduce some of those comforts, starting with electricity.

But I don’t go quite that far. I’ve always had a goal of low negative environmental impact, rather than no environmental impact.

When I lived in Northampton, I walked or biked constantly—but I could get to town in three minutes by bike, or eight on foot. Now, I live in a place that is not served by public transit. And while I’ve been biking more frequently to Amherst or Northampton, I don’t always have the two hours to bike round-trip, versus 30 to 40 minutes by car.

On the other hand, I eat very locally. In the summer and fall, about 75% of our diet is hyperlocal, either from our own garden or from the CSA farm three miles away (and yes, we often pick up our veggies by bike). Another big chunk comes from local farmers markets eight miles away, whose vendors are mostly within 20 miles. But that still leaves us eating plenty of stuff that doesn’t grow around here.

And I’ve had a consciousness about local food for 30 years—something that’s very common here in the Valley even among the most mainstream people. Living here, I see the cycles of food in a way that’s difficult to experience in New York City.

I live in a single family home that could be better insulated, and now that the kids are grown, it’s a lot of space for two people. Certainly more than we absolutely need.

On the other hand, we’ve added solar hot water and photovoltaic, and the house, built in 1743, long ago amortized the carbon footprint of its construction.

Colin chose to give up toilet paper in favor of rewashable cloth, because he didn’t want to be responsible for cutting down trees. I am not sure that’s actually the most eco-friendly option. First of all, toilet paper NOT made from virgin wood is widely available. In New York City, at least four brands of recycled toilet paper are easily available, including Marcal, which actually uses New York City’s junk mail to manufacture its paper goods, and has for 63 years. So using that solution actually reduces landfill impact. And second, in order to avoid a BIG problem with germs, the water to wash those cloths has to be really, really hot. And hot water, unless it’s solar-heated, is an emormous draw-down of energy and user of fossil fuels.

If were to be eco-purist, I could find 100 little inconsistencies to carp about—but that’s not the point. The point is that this experiment transformed Colin and Michelle’s lives, and actually had a large impact on the way people think—particularly people in large cities.

And what do YOU think? Please leave your comment below.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Demographics/Psychographics, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Green Business, People Helping People Tagged with , , , , ,

A friend sent me a link to a very interesting article, “A Locavore’s Dilemma: On the Fantasy of Urban Farming” by Will Boisvert

According to Mr. Boisvert (whose name, ironically, translates as “green woods”), we would all do more for the planet to buy big-agro chemiculture food from thousands of miles away than to develop food sources in or close to urban areas.

I’ve heard this argument before. And I do think it’s important to do our research and know the numbers; it’s important to make a business case for local food sustainability, whether urban or rural.

But I’d say Mr. Boisvert totally misses the point.

He says the most sustainable thing we can do in NYC is build more housing, to avoid further stress on the exurbs and suburbs, which are very UNsustainable. But I don’t see why it has to be housing vs. food. Build that 600-person apartment building he wants, and THEN use add urban agriculture and solar arrays to harness the roof for food and energy.

And his attack on COmmunity Supported Agriculture farms (CSAs) is just bizarre. I don’t think our annual membership fee for the organic CSA we belong to here in Massachusetts would even cover the same amount of factory food at our local supermarket, and it’s far cheaper than buying the nonindustrial stuff at Whole Foods, a pricy organic grocery, or the farmers markets.

We do need to look at the economics/carbon impact of urban agriculture and the urban food movement, and often, they’re not pretty. But no uglier than mass-scale farming.

He writes:

Hauling each spud from upstate thus requires as much fuel as moving it 585 miles by corporate semi or 2,340 miles by rail. I don’t know the numbers, but I think truck is a lot more common than rail.

If that’s true, then even with the much-reduced efficiency per mile, the number of miles is so much fewer that local food, especialy urban agriculture, comes out way ahead. If the potatoes go 127 miles at 28 ton-miles/gallon vs. 2500 miles from Arizona at 120 tm/g, the Catskills come out way ahead: 4.5 gallons vs. 20.8 for the far-shipped chemiculture ones. And his analysis doesn’t recognize that the efficiencies of big trucking disappear rapidly when that huge truck is running 4 mph stop-and-go in NYC traffic, while those of urban farming increase.

As he notes, a neighborhood urban farm might use one gallon to transport to multiple sites across the city, in a small van. And if we’re really talking hyperlocal, your neighborhood rooftop or small-lot urban farm could efficiently deliver in a five-mile radius with a bicycle (more efficient in time as well as fuel, in NYC’s traffic-choked streets)—which can offset the fuel costs of hauling the soil up to the roof by crane. Equipped with a handlebar box, a rear rack, and maybe even a small trailer, bicycles can carry quite a bit. Even back in the 1960s when I was a kid in the Bronx, a lot of local merchants offered bicycle delivery (using massive one-speed bikes with huge handlebar boxes).

Even if it’s trucked in a van, the fuel cost of a three-block delivery is pretty close to zero.

And unlike Mr. Boisvert, I don’t discount the many other benefits. Better quality food, community-building, job skills training for those interns and volunteers, and an understanding of the food cycle. My own first garden was in Brooklyn, in fact, and the thrill of growing my own food in my mini-urban farm definitely helped push me to the locavore mindset. I discovered a new crop: radish seed cones; the young ones are terrific in salads. And that was also around the time that I started advocating using flat roofs as food and energy resources.

I do have some concerns, and would like to see research, on how urban agriculture can avoid pollution-borne contamination of the food. But he doesn’t talk about that.

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

This morning, I chanced across Green Inventions: 10 Hot Eco-Innovations That Could Change The Planet on Huffington Post Green. It’s a good list, including such modern wonders as LED lighting, industrial-scale composting, and LEED green building certification. However, it’s far from complete.

At the end of the article, readers were offered a chance to add to the list. Here’s what I wrote:

There are so many wonderful innovations: Zero Waste, passive solar design, urban rooftop farming (something I’ve been advocating since about 1980), small-space vertical gardens for apartment dwellers, lower-impact adaptive technology like using a tiny wheelchair hatchback instead of a big galumphing gas-guzzling wheelchair van (the hatchback door becomes a ramp–no hydraulics needed), solar chargers, the Stretch building code…the list goes on and on.

It’s an exciting time, and I am optimistic. Yes, it would have been easier to make all the sweeping changes 30 years ago–and we already knew how. I know of a house deep in the Colorado Rockies near Aspen (think snow, cold winters) that was designed so well–in 1983–that not only doesn’t it need a furnace, it has banana trees in the sunroom. But we can still get it together and reverse the damage to the planet while creating hundreds of thousands of jobs. All we need is the will.

I realize I didn’t even mention the money we save when we do these things, though I did get one of the economic arguments in (jobs).

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

Since about 1980, I’ve felt that we could solve a lot of our urban problems by seeing flat city roofs (and for that matter, roofs in suburban shopping centers, etc.) as resources: places where we can harvest energy with solar collectors—but also harvest food.

But when I started talking about my brainstorm, people told me that the roofs were not designed to bear the weight of a dense garden, and the amount of reinforcement they needed would make the whole idea unworkable. I never quite believed this. It seemed to me that if you were to put one or two 200 square-foot gardens onto a 2000 square foot roof, the weight load could be distributed across the entire rooftop without much difficulty. But I’m not an engineer.

Still, I wasn’t surprised to see the “green roof” movement emerge over the past ten years or so—but I was disappointed at how few green roofs seem to grow edible crops.

I do think community food self-sufficiency—particularly in urban areas–is a big part of the answer to “how do we reclaim our economy—and our bodies?” and a great antidote to the very dangerous practices of “chemiculture” [a word I personally coined, BTW], GMO seed strains, and the attempt by Monsanto and similar companies to exercise a terrifying degree of control over (and damage to) our food supply.  So I was delighted when I found these folks in the Bronx, using 6000 square feet of the 10,000-square-foot roof of a city-owned apartment building, to commercially grow hydroponic greens. With hydroponics, there is no soil, and therefore the issue of weight and roof support is moot. In this short video, Farm Manager Kate Ahearn gives us some background about the project. (I did make one error. I referred to a supermarket rooftop farm in Lynn, Mass. It’s actually in LynnFIELD.)

This model, with hydroponic gardens and protection from the elements, offers a 12-month growing season and numerous harvests. Yes, it’s more expensive to set up than a basic soil-based garden, but the payback is much greater. And as a green marketing guy, I see profitable, sustainable, earth-friendly businesses like this as a big step forward not only in economic development but in human rights and the rights of other living things.

Note: there will be more on this story. My old buddy Ted Cartselos did another shoot, with a better camera, on Friday. (Thanks, Ted, for working with me on this.)

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

I’m a glass-half-full kind of guy. Especially when I see evidence all around me of brilliant minds hard at work solving “intractable” problems, I freely admit that I’m an optimist. The human capacity to destroy ourselves is eclipsed by the human capacity to creatively collaborate, and to dig ourselves out of the mess.

And since writing is what  do, I’ve wanted to do a big-picture book on this, for many years. Last month, I started writing an essay on this, and I think it will evolve into the proposal for my ninth book.

To give you a bit of inspiration on this snowy afternoon (here in Massachusetts, anyway), I want to share two sentences from a section of the essay entitled “Throw Away Assumptions”:

Assumption, 18th century: humans can travel no faster than the fastest horse. Reality: humans aboard the International Space Station have traveled at 17,247 miles per hour; future technologies such as warp-space drives and tesseracts, imagined by speculative fiction writers, could potentially take us orders of magnitude faster.

Shifting our attitudes from the impossibility of going more than 15 or 20 miles an hour to hurtling through space at more than 17,000 mph took a couple of centuries. With today’s future-think mindset, solving the problems of the world ought to be a whole lot quicker. Especially considering the consequences of failure.

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

With a billion people suffering hunger, two billion not getting all the nutrients they need, and another billion suffering obesity, it’s clear that the food status quo needs a shakeup. Food sustainability blogger Danielle Nirenberg (@DaniNierenberg) offers 13 change-the-food-system resolutions to start 2013 in her latest article on Huffington Post.

To her very good list, I’d add a few more:

  • Recognizing that we can grow great food in adequate quantities without chemicals, genetic modification (GMO), irradiation, or monocropping
  • Remembering that organic food is the true heritage food—all there was, for most of human history
  • Emphasizing localism and freshness—eating most food near where it’s grown
  • Reducing meat consumption—not just because a plant-based diet is healthier, but also because you can get seven times the food value from the same amount of land, and thus its a key strategy in ending hunger

My list could be much longer—but I’d like to ask YOU to write your favorite in the comment section.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Demographics/Psychographics, Politics, poverty Tagged with , , , , ,

Our local paper, the Daily Hampshire Gazette of Northampton, Massachusetts, runs a political column by a local conservative, Dr. Jay Fleitman. I know him a little; our kids went to preschool together, back in the day.

And thus I can say that Jay is a bright guy—and in person, quite pleasant. But you wouldn’t know it from his columns, which closely parrot the right-wing talking points of Fox News bloviators and the more extreme Republican politicians, whether or not they have a basis in fact. His writing is very typical of those who claim to speak for Republican voters these days.

Sometimes, I write letters to the editor debunking his statements. But I can’t rebut yesterday’s column that way, because I recently submitted a letter on another topic; the quota is one per month. Fortunately, I have no quota on how often I blog.

His column was called “Not an Accidental Republican.”

He writes:

Unemployment is crushing in the black population after four years of this president…yet 97 percent of blacks voted for Obama.

Where did this crushing unemployment come from? From the wildly unregulated chaos of Wall Street under George W. Bush, undermining both the Main Street economy—rewarding “job creator” companies through tax loopholes for “creating” jobs overseas—and the housing market, writing mortgages that no reasonable person could justify and frequently yanking those mortgages without anything even close to due process (often in communities of color). Bush inherited the strongest economy of my lifetime, if I’m not mistaken—and, not coincidentally, a country at peace. He gave the megacorporate multinational foxes not just the keys to the henhouse, but to the entire farm. And he wrecked the economy, the peace, and our status among nations.

Has Obama fixed the economy? No. He’s made a start. But he’s too timid, too much of a closet 1970’s-style Republican to do what needs to be done. A massive federal jobs program focused on clean energy and infrastructure repair would be a long step forward, but he’s not willing to take it. (I’ve been advocating such a plan for years.)

My wife has another great solution to the unemployment problem: provide tax breaks around job creation only when a job is created in the U.S. Voila—jobs in the private sector, in this country.

Describing the reaction of a young Democrat who was interviewing him, Jay writes,

I think that he was taken aback by the perspective that there is nothing particularly enlightened or sophisticated in the notion of a big centralized government intruding widely in society, that this is an old model found throughout human history with varying degrees of despotism.

That which makes the American experiment so unique was the founding of a government with a primary directive of protecting the degrees of freedom of its citizens. And yes, it is his political party that is the party of enlarging government.

Hmmm, let’s see…what’s the biggest expansion of federal government authority and what are the most obvious instances of U.S. government despotism in recent years? Oh yes, the Department of Homeland Security including the TSA…the imprisonment without trial, waterboarding and other torture at places like Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram…the crackdown on dissent at home in violation of the First Amendment…and the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan—sovereign nations—under false pretenses. Who was president at the time? Well, what do you know; it was George W. Bush. Why didn’t Jay speak out against these appalling attacks on liberty?

Once again, Obama’s failings here are in not doing enough. He broke his promise to close Guantanamo, and he has taken his time about winding down the wars—to name two among many examples.

By the way, I asked, if we don’t have the fiscal conservatism of Republicans, then who did he think was going to be stuck with the $16 trillion debt? It’s not my generation, as we’ll be skating into Medicare, Social Security and retirement. It will be his generation, so what were they possibly thinking with over 70 percent voting for Obama?

Again, this is the Republicans’ debt. Bill Clinton left not just a balanced budget but an actual surplus, which Bush utterly squandered (wars and attacks on civil liberties are expensive, and so was the decision to slash revenue). If Republicans are serious about ending that debt (which would be a good idea), why are they so resistant to raising revenue?

During the Republican presidency of Dwight Eisenhower, when both Jay and I were born, the top-earner tax rate was 91 percent; it was 50 percent during Reagan’s first term. So why is it considered so burdensome to bring the top income tax rate back from today’s 36 percent up to the 39.6 where it had been under Clinton (a time of enormous, unparalleled prosperity)? Also, let’s not forget that the income for many high-net-worth  U.S. citizens is actually a good deal lower, because much of it is taxed at a much lower rate as capital gains—this is how Mitt Romney got away with paying about 14 percent. And don’t get me started on the way many highly profitable U.S.-based corporations pay little or even nothing in taxes.

The gap between rich and poor in the U.S. right now is beginning to look like some kind of Third-World banana republic. The income inequality, or disparity, is obscene. Social services have been slashed by successive presidents from both parties for 30+ years, since Reagan took office; the poor have been disproportionately hit by programs to shift money from the have-nots to the haves. Taxes for high-income earners are actually far lower in the U.S. than they are in much of Europe; Germany, Portugal, Austria and the United Kingdom all have high-earner tax rates of 45 to 50 percent. France’s 40 percent maximum tax rate kicks in at just €69,783 ($91,083.52) per year.

Why do we need taxes? To pay for three things:

  • Government services, such as roads, traffic lights, police and fire, teachers, food inspectors, and disaster relief—which help rich and poor alike—as well as assorted subsidies to people and economic entities at specific economic strata: food stamps, tax breaks for investment or education, subsidized insurance for nuclear power, etc. etc.
  • War.
  • The debt.

If you support the idea that governments should provide those services, you have to support paying for them—and you cant keep funding them disproportionately out of the torn and ragged pockets of those who have the least. If we stopped getting into wars and funding a military many times larger than even Russia’s, we wouldn’t have created the debt (again, this happened during the Republicans’ watch).

It’s time for people like Jay Fleitman to stop throwing red herrings around, to stop whining about the Democrats who are trying to clean up the Republican mess, and to come together as a nation to solve our problems. A fair revenue program is a logical step to move forward.

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

Can we think about landfills as a solution to resource scarcity, instead of as a trash problem?

This article on GreenBiz by Mikhail Davis of InterfaceFLOR (pioneer in sustainable flooring under the late Ray Anderson) could change a lot of people’s thinking about how to design industrial processes and industrial machinery for sustainability.

Davis argues compellingly that a lot of our difficulties with reducing waste, reducing raw materials, and reducing carbon impact stem from the way we’ve historically designed our machinery from the premise that raw materials will be not only abundant, but very pure. These 19th and 20th-century machines need a constant stream of very pure raw materials, and that is unsustainable. In fact, he cites a contract between a town and a trash-to-energy incinerator that inflicts monetary penalties on the  town if it fails to supply enough trash. Can you say “goodbye, recycling!”?

He proposes that as a society, we change our society’s thinking about this: that we design machines that don’t require more and more pure, virgin raw materials, but instead can use mixed ingredients (such as those we might find in landfills or plastics recycling stations), even if the mix changes in composition and quantity. This works on several levels:

  • To a large degree, we’ve already extracted the easy stuff. Mining and drilling will continue to produce lower-grade, lesser concentrations that need more work and energy, increase carbon footprint, and produce more waste, to get usable raw materials—getting more and more expensive in both dollar and environmental measurements. Look at the horrible process of extracting oil from tar sands, if you want an example.
  • Designing machines that can run on waste streams turns landfills into abundant sources of raw materials. When we start mining landfills, we have lots to feed the machine—as long as the machine can run on a mixed and inconsistent stream of materials. If we can mix together several kinds of plastics even as the specific mix constantly shifts, our landfills become resources, right along with our reycle bins. Our trash problem goes down; the environmental consequences of mining are also much-reduced.
  • A logical corollary: instead of designing a machine to make one output from one consistent input, we can design machines that create multiple kinds of materials depending on what sources are being harvested at the moment.

In contrast, the machines of the next industrial revolution must be, above all, flexible: flexible enough to function with multiple inputs and flexible enough to generate multiple outputs. On the extraction side, our abundant “landfill ore” (or diverted post-consumer products) provides valuable, but mixed materials and cannot be mined efficiently with the old single-input, single-output mining technologies. The most modern recycling factories, like those of MBA Polymers and the best e-waste processors, take in a wide range of mixed waste materials and then produce a diverse range of usable raw materials as output.

 InterfaceFLOR is now able to use 97 percent of the messy mix of materials in old vinyl carpet tiles to make new flooring tiles, and the remaining three percent goes into other products. I think that’s pretty cool!
And this kind of holistic thinking is how we, as a society, change our demons into delights.

 

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

$5 trillion net savings, support a 158% bigger U.S. economy by 2050, using no energy from coal, oil or nuclear.

This is the capsule version of the Rocky Mountain Institute’s energy plan. RMI is a green “think-and-do tank” founded by my favorite practical visionary, Amory Lovins. By thinking holistically, Amory and his colleagues achieve “impossible” results like a house in the California desert that doesn’t need air conditioning, and one in the Colorado snowbelt that doesn’t need a furnace.

Here are the last two claims on their blueprint:

9) U.S. industry can produce about 84% more output with 9–13% less energy—without mandates or breakthroughs in innovation.

10) We can capture and integrate the renewable energy needed to meet 80% or more of our electricity needs by 2050.

Go read the other eight.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Activism, General Commentary, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , ,

Guest Post by Julie  Gabrielli

It seems we are experts at knowing what’s wrong in the world – whether global problems like climate change and poverty, national concerns like the economy and health care, neighborhood issues like the lady down the street whose dogs never stop barking. Even within our own families, we tend to focus on what’s not working.

What happens when we turn and face in another direction? Not to actively ignore or deny those very real problems. But to focus instead on what we want. Do we ever even ask this question of ourselves or others: what sort of world do we want to live in?

Even then, the answers may come back framed in negatives, such as “I want fewer wars” or “to eliminate racism.” The brilliant Hildy Gottlieb first opened my eyes to this habit.

I tested this out one recent weekend at our neighborhood shopping area, taking video footage of everyday people addressing these big issues. People were quick to cite the problems: education, the economy, global warming, racism, negativity, stereotyping, war. When asked to say what they want, if they could wave a magic wand and fix everything, they were less confident, sometimes even embarrassed. As if talking that way is not an adult activity.

The danger of dwelling on what’s wrong is that we can become convinced that there’s no hope for us. We’re just a doomed species and blight on the planet. I know many avid and dedicated environmental activists who harbor this secret belief deep within their hearts: that the planet will be better off without us.

And why wouldn’t we reach this conclusion, when all we read about and see around us are the consequences of our bad behavior? The mortgage crisis, countries in the Euro zone so deep in debt they threaten to take the whole thing down with them, giant corporations cutting down the boreal forest in Canada to get at the dirtiest, most carbon-intense oil on the planet and then lobbying our government to build a pipeline to cart it to the Gulf of Mexico. Fifty million nonelderly Americans (18.9%) are without health insurance or access to good health care.

This stuff is senseless. Meaning, try as we might, we can’t make sense of it. I wonder if it’s because, as Einstein famously observed, we cannot solve our problems using the same thinking that created them. So why not try a different way? What happens when we focus instead on what we want, instead of what we don’t want? Try it. You may be surprised at what happens.

Why does this matter? you may be wondering. It turns out that we create the future every moment of every day. A positive vision of a future that we want is the galvanizing force that animates the world-changing work of all the people who will be in the film, “I Want America to Thrive.” Even the title speaks to a positive vision. Why not? It’s a surer way to transcending, rather than merely solving, our problems.


Eco-architect Julie Gabrielli has been at the forefront of the sustainability movement in Maryland for over 15 years. She is an artist and writer, always searching for the most effective medium to wake people up to the beauty of our world. To learn more and stay in touch, Like this film on Facebook. 

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