The Symbiosis Project » Blog Archive » The future belongs to those who tell a better story. This is a true story. It all starts one week from today. After reading about it on the internet, a single person in a neighborhood in Portland, OR, decided to start a community beer-brewing co-op. He gathered a group of eight neighbors, and together they bought the equipment to brew 30 gallons of beer for $500. They went up and down 3 blocks, and found 45 people who also wanted to drink and brew beer with them. It turned out that everyone in the community was strapped for cash, so everyone just paid the minimum amount, $30 a month, and even still they collectively raised $1350! During the discussion, one thing that kept coming up is that everyone felt they were paying too much for internet. By the third month, they had raised $1000 from the second month, $1000 from the third, and were now collectively saving $1000 a month on internet. Sharing food and cars and beer (not all at the same time) eventually brought the community close enough to start talking about hard topics.
Weekend Series Permaculture Design Course in Columbus, Ohio | relocalize.net Post Carbon Institute promotes the strategy of - building strong local communities to increase resilience. what is relocalization? Relocalization is a strategy to build societies based on the local production of food, energy and goods, and the local development of currency, governance and culture. The main goals of relocalization are to increase community energy security, to strengthen local economies, and to improve environmental conditions and social equity. In 2009 Post Carbon Institute partnered with the international Transition movement to support and inspire community led responses around the relocalization strategy. what is transition? A Transition initiative is a community-led response to the pressures of climate change, fossil fuel depletion and increasingly, economic contraction. Transiton US is a nonprofit organization that provides inspiration, encouragement, support, networking, and training for Transition Initiatives across the United States.
Peer-to-Peer Economy Thrives as Activists Vacate the System Eric BlairActivist Post The Occupy Movement recently celebrated its second anniversary with very little fanfare leaving many to wonder where all the activists went. It seems they, and many anti-establishment activists, are vacating the system rather than occupying it. Progressives may call it the "sharing economy" while Libertarians may refer to it as Agorism - a "society in which all relations between people are voluntary exchanges by means of counter-economics, thus engaging in a manner with aspects of peaceful revolution." Whatever it's called, together, they're opting out of the current socioeconomic matrix and creating a new alternative economy where trading occurs peer-to-peer and increasingly without government-issued currency. It's a space where mutual trade occurs without burdensome taxes, regulations, or licenses. Websites like Ebay and Craigslist first made it possible for individuals to sell things or offer services online. The Economist describes this movement as follows:
Consilience: The Blog - Consilience: The Blog - Deconstruction: Vital side of sustainable development Deconstruction: Vital side of sustainabledevelopment Tuesday, October 27, 2009 at 9:35AM Introduction by Grant: This guest blog is by Toni Renee "TR" Vierra of eco-Organize in Napa, California. She is a green building advisor, educator, radio host and active green building organization leader. Most often we address the construction side of sustainable development but neglect the "deconstruction" side of infill development. Building Green from the Ground Upby eco-organize LLC As we look toward a future with mandatory Green Building Ordinances in California and elsewhere, one critical construction component is often overlooked - - site preparation. Toni Renee Vierra, LEED-AP,is Founder and President of eco-Organize LLC. eco-Organize provides green building and business advice to property owners and the building community.
Poverty Impedes Cognitive Function The poor often behave in less capable ways, which can further perpetuate poverty. We hypothesize that poverty directly impedes cognitive function and present two studies that test this hypothesis. First, we experimentally induced thoughts about finances and found that this reduces cognitive performance among poor but not in well-off participants. Second, we examined the cognitive function of farmers over the planting cycle. Lacking money or time can lead one to make poorer decisions, possibly because poverty imposes a cognitive load that saps attention and reduces effort. Green at City Scale | GOVERNING Over the past decade, green building has moved out of the fringe and into the mainstream. LEED Gold and Platinum buildings are becoming commonplace in both public and private buildings. Now Portland, Oregon, is going one step further. As part of an evolving "eco-district" policy, city leaders aim to move beyond the design of individual structures to focus on greening entire neighborhoods. The idea is to pool resources among buildings to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve energy- and water-use efficiency. "Green buildings are pretty far along, but if you really want green cities, you have to look at whole systems," says Eric Ridenour, an associate with SERA Architects. At first glance, the eco-district framework, outlined in an eight-page city document, reads like a rehash of Sustainability 101: yet another plan to create green jobs, encourage smart growth and catalyze renewable energy development. Portland isn't the only city scaling up its green-building practices.
Human friendship favours cooperation in the Iterated Prisoner's D MyBook is a cheap paperback edition of the original book and will be sold at uniform, low price. Buy this article Price: $30.00+ Tax (if applicable) [In the last decades, many studies have attempted to analyse the factors that may favour the evolution of cooperation. Marketing firm helping to green companies--and their images, too | Tech news blog - CNET News.com This post was updated at 11:55 a.m. PDT to better describe the scope of TCG's work. It was also updated at 12:52 p.m. The Communication Group, a San Francisco-based marketing firm, isn't just about touting its clients' environmental friendliness. The firm, also known as TCG, is helping corporations take their first green steps through what it calls its Green Prepare program, a 12-step process for companies to become greener. In the first stage of the Green Prepare program, a TCG consultant does a walk-through of a client's office or workplace and comes up with 12 steps for sparing the environment. When the company has completed 6 of the 12 steps, it signs TCG's "Blue Step Promise" to strive to complete the rest and is awarded a certificate and logo in return that the company can then display. The idea is that the Green Prepare program might also serve as the first step for corporations that want to become green-certified through other regional programs, Munn said. Livermore, Calif.
With Investment, Millions of Blue and White Collars Can Be Turned Green OAKLAND, Calif. — Building a green economy has the potential to affect millions of workers in occupations throughout the country, and a new report highlights some of those jobs than can be transformed, with the right investment, into green jobs. The Job Opportunities for the Green Economy report looks at six investments areas, then shows at the current states of jobs in each area. In total the report shows how 45 occupations employing more than 14 million people across the country can be boosted through investments in green measures. The report is not an exhaustive list of all green investments or green jobs, but is meant to give a snapshot of a few possible green jobs, said one of the authors, Robert Pollin, Department of Economics and Political Economy Research Institute, University of Massachusetts-Amherst. "We all know that we have to build a green economy. "The jobs are real, the jobs are there," said Marco Trbovich, assistant to the president of the United Steelworkers of America.
Why Obama's green jobs plan might work HEMLOCK, MICH. — While Detroit's automakers struggle to rebuild their sputtering operations, the key to jump-starting Michigan's economy may lie 80 miles northwest of the Motor City. This is the home of Hemlock Semiconductor Corp. It makes a material crucial for constructing photovoltaic panels. On Dec. 15, the same week that General Motors Corp. and Chrysler begged $17.4 billion from taxpayers to stave off collapse, Hemlock announced a $3-billion expansion that could create hundreds of jobs. In contrast to Detroit iron, Hemlock's quartz-based polycrystalline silicon is in such demand that workers in white smocks and protective gear toil around the clock to get it to customers around the globe. Hemlock has been deluged with applications from idle factory hands such as former autoworker Don Sloboda. "It looks like the future to me," Sloboda said. Whether clean energy can pull Michigan out of the ditch remains to be seen. Americans have heard it before.
Certified Green Neighborhoods LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) has become the standard certification system for green architecture in the United States - and the organisation that oversees LEED ratings, the US Green Building Council, is growing by leaps and bounds as architects and developers catch on to the fact that LEED-certified buildings fetch higher rents and incur lower operating costs. As LEED becomes more popular, though, it is also attracting more criticism: its objective, point-based rating systems largely ignore differences in regional environments and assign equal point values to building technologies that vary widely in their costs and beneficial impacts. Also, LEED ratings typically assign little value to a building's site context: many LEED-certified buildings (including Maine's first Platinum-level LEED home in Freeport, at right) have been built in automobile-dependent rural hinterlands, creating instances of "green" suburban sprawl.