Green Options

Most of us have heard about the slow food movement where we savor the taste of a place, know our farmers and sip the wine slowly, not gulp down a beer.

But what about Slow Money?

In Woody Tasch’s visionary book, Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money: Investing as if Food, Farms, and Fertility Mattered (Chelsea Green, 2008), he breaks from the grow-big-and-go-global-fast mode of industrial capitalism and industrial agriculture by providing a remarkable synthesis of the writings, ideas and practices from such authorities on the subject of soil, agriculture, community and commerce as Wendell Berry, Eliot Coleman, Gene Logsdon, Gary Snyder, E.F. Schumacher, Paul Hawken and David Suzuki – calling for and sharing examples of a new economy whereby capitalism creates and sustains life, not destroys it.

Tasch’s observation: “As it circulates the globe with ever accelerating speed, money is sucking the oxygen out of the air, the fertility out of the soil and the culture out of local communities.”

“In our devotion to money, market, and machine, we are destroying not only the fertility of the soil, but the fertility of our imaginations,” continues Tasch. “What is, in the farmer’s field, a struggle between economics and ecology becomes, in the investor’s mind, a struggle between quantity and quality, portfolios and possibilities, numbers and words.” Tasch goes on to document the widespread loss of topsoil and erosion of fertile land, noting that roughly a third of all farmland in the world has been degraded since World War II. “There is another kind of erosion at work here: erosion of social capital, erosion of community, erosion of an understanding of our place in the scheme of things.”

Expertly woven together like the rich tapestry of biological life abundant in a mere teaspoon of soil, Inquiries into the Nature of Slow Money tugs at our yearning to be connected to the land, to the soil and to the great food it can provide. It also explores our relationship to money and all the things it can, and cannot, buy.

Like millions of Americans, we’re celebrating July 4th, Independence Day.

However, we’re celebrating this national holiday by focusing on the many aspects of our life that, in various ways, have led us to quite a different vision for a sustainable tomorrow – complete with local, renewable energy and lots of delicious meals harvested within ten miles of where we live – if not from our own kitchen garden.  Sometimes we even celebrate July 4th with a rainbow.

Here’s how our Independence Day is different — and yours can be too:

•  Be energy independent by generating all our power with renewable energy systems.
For a vast portion of the United States, there is enough solar and wind energy to completely meet our needs right where we live.  True, adopting renewable energy will require an investment either personally or for your business if you work from home.  But with present Federal tax credits and many state incentives, the time couldn’t be better.  We completely power our Inn Serendipity Bed & Breakfast and Farm with solar electric and wind turbine systems.  In fact, we overproduce renewable energy to the tune of about 4,000 kWhs (kilowatt hours) a year.  We share the surplus with our neighbors.

It’s an experience many of us relish– taking a weekend stroll through the colors, sounds, and smells of a local farmers market and then choosing fresh items to take back to our homes, as well crafts, or maybe a cd from a local band. We know that the food will eventually fill our stomachs contently, or that another item we found will be a perfect and unique gift for a special friend or family member.

This summer you can show your support for your favorite farmers market, by helping it win a $5000 reward. Care2.com and Localharvest.org are sponsoring this great online contest. The $5000 top prize will be awarded to the farmer’s market that is voted the most popular by internet users like you.

After more than seven hundred hours of filming and editing, largely underwritten both by himself and those organizations supporting his visionary film-making endeavor, Chris Bedford has offered an inspiring documentary, Coming Home: E.F. Schumacher and the Reinvention of the Local Economy, where people are, once again, people, not reduced to “consumers” or “tax payers” (recently on the hook for billions of dollars of bailout money).

As an award-winning film maker for such films as What will we eat? and The Organic Opportunity, Bedford has honed his craft to capture both the pivotal work of the late E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful and subsequent endeavors of the E.F. Schumacher Society and the creation of a local economy in Great Barrington, Massachusetts.

While viewing the film Coming Home, officially released at the MOSES Organic Farming Conference in La Crosse, Wisconsin, I realized that this was no ordinary 37 minute documentary. It could very well be the start of a revolutionary way to view the local economy, starting with sustainable agricultural systems and the organic foods these farms provided to community residents and ending with BerkShares, a local currency. According to Coming Home, about 2 million BerkShares are now in circulation throughout Berkshire County. As of February 11, 2009, 100 BerkShares equal 95 U.S. dollars.

From provocative interviews, timely quotes and excerpts from E.F. Schumacher or from those in the community, Coming Home weaves a story of hope, empowerment and some practical ingenuity at just the right time when We the People are searching for solutions, turning not to Congress, but to our communities, and to Main Street, not Wall Street. Carefully selected footage and fine editing work makes for an engaging review, even for the most skeptical of viewers who may not see the power in communities that have their own farmers, radio station, interdependent retail district and currency.

Ecologic Designs’ story starts like this:  “There is always talk about a killer set of waves and dolphins playing in the surf, an epic afternoon rolling across warm red rocks on your bike, or a hike in fresh powder on a full moon snowshoe trek. There is also talk about a beach polluted by sludge or surfing next to trash, trails that all of a sudden become strip malls, or the snow trip sans snow because of global warming.” It’s this kind of understanding that guides Ecologic Design, through their two brands Green Guru Gear and Green Goddess, to craft products and fashions in Boulder, Colorado, that have a positive environmental and social impact, while raising ecological awareness.

Take Green Guru’s Blow Out series bi-fold wallet, for example.  The company uses reclaimed bike inner tubes to create a stylish and waterproof exterior. Every item in their Blow Out series is made from 98% reclaimed and recycled content by weight.  Each wallet features a six card and two bill compartments.  The ultimate in a locally-based enterprise, drawing from a readily available waste stream, Green Guru’s butyl rubber comes from Reclamation Stations within about eighteen miles from there they’re manufactured. Green Guru Pouches, Chalk Bags and Messenger Bags are also made from the upcycled inner tubes.

Since spring of 2007, Ecologic Designs has been an ecopreneurial trailblazer, creating viable and sustainable enterprises by harvesting the waste stream, often referred to as “upcycling”: the practice of recycling or repurposing items destined for the landfill and transforming them into something of further use and value. Upcycling was coined by William McDonough and Michael Braungart, authors of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.  The butyl rubber, also called vulcanized rubber, is not cost-effective and very difficult to recycle; therefore these inner tubes usually end up in local landfills where they won’t degrade for many years.  Unfortunately, tires and inner tubes account for over 50% of the rubber produced each year.

Responding to a blog I posted earlier about governmental preparations for peak oil, one self-labeled “alarmist” commented with a plug for his own resource, a networking web site called Bright Neighbor. I thought the site was worth checking out.

According to the peak oil experts, we need better personal and collective plans for fossil fuel depletion. Randy White, an early member of Portland, Oregon’s Peak Oil Task Force, agrees. His Bright Neighbor is taking on the practical functions that he believes should be executed by the powers that be—were they up for the job.

In the international marketplace of ideas, Lyle Estill is not a widely known expert on human-scale, local economies. He may never attain that status, if only be because he’s too busy making economic theory a sustainable reality in his little corner of North Carolina.

In Small Is Possible: Life in a Local Economy, Estill chronicles the failures and victories of an ongoing movement for sustainability and local resiliency in Chatham County, [...]

A growing segment of eco-conscious citizens are recognizing how both living green and supporting the local economy are integral to a more sustainable world.

Here are five strategies adapted from a complete action item list at small-mart.org, a web site inspired by The Small Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses Are Beating the Global Competition by Michael Shuman:

1. Buy Fresh. An age-old tradition of supporting local agriculture is experiencing a resurgence. More people are shopping at farmers markets, joining co-ops, and buying shares at community-supported agriculture (CSA) programs. Many such businesses are listed in directories provided by sustainability business networks.

It doesn’t need to stop with buying local produce. Supporting other food operations like the neighborhood baker, cheese maker, or caterer also helps bolster the local economy. All of these local food practices help communities lessen their carbon footprint by forsaking a broader distribution network and the environmental costs of long-distance shipping.

Are you fed up with the Fed (Federal Reserve System) and Treasury Secretary, or growing weary working at a job for someone else’s dream and financial benefit?

I was, before I launched by own dream green business and starting making time to smell the flowers and eat the strawberry.

Here are 5 tips to start a green business based on my experiences and book, ECOpreneuring: Putting Purpose and the Planet before Profits:

(1) Follow your Earth Mission.
Wealth without purpose is poverty. Who wants to be the richest person in the cemetery? Turn your passions and sense of purpose into an enterprise. Ecopreneurs craft an “Earth Mission” to use their business as a catalyst make the world a better place, often defining success qualitatively, not quantitatively.

(2) Operate your green business with a triple bottom line: people, planet and (some) profits.
Rather than the purpose of business to simply generate profits, sustainable businesses thrive in a restoration ECOnomy based on restoring or enhancing the planet, providing fair and equitable relationships amongst all stakeholders, and generate profits to sustain the business and its mission (in various ways, to make the world a better place).

Are you surviving the financial crisis?

While the mainstream media seem more interested in spinning stories of foreclosures, bankruptcies and the like, millions of Americans who have gone green in either their homes, lifestyles or businesses have discovered a degree of sustained prosperity, security and stability, despite the tough times both nationally and globally. That’s not to say they’re living high on the land. But that’s the whole point for many who have chosen to live lean, green, and with the health of their community in mind, focusing on what they value, not on what they can consume next.

There’s Tazza D’oro, the fair trade and community-focused coffee house I just visited in Pittsburgh, where sales are up by double digits; this, despite the restaurant industry as a whole seeing sales plummet by about 43 percent last I checked with the National Restaurant Association. New Society Publishers, the publisher of my latest books ECOpreneuring and Rural Renaissance, both printed on 100 percent post consumer waste recycled paper, continues to prosper, perhaps even more so with books that provide positive solutions for people hungry to make a difference. For people who took their early summer 2008 Economic Stimulus Package check and invested it in energy efficiency and conservation, paid off a credit card balance, or like my wife and I, added a photovoltaic system to power our all-electric CitiCar, we realized both a return on our investment and return on environment while needing less money to pay the bankers or utility companies.

Here’s what I’ve learned from both personal experience over the past twelve years and in talking with many others about how to survive a financial crisis:

(1) Invest in the future and in your community

In a time when 401ks are quickly turning into 101ks, many Americans are exiting the debt-based economy, paying off credit cards, canceling car loans, paying down mortgages. Suddenly, when we don’t need to earn money to pay the banks, we rediscover what freedom means. We don’t save for the future, we invest in the one we want to live in, filled with green building materials, fairly traded products, and crafted as a part of the restoration and reuse, place-based economy, sometimes costing us only pennies on the dollar. From an old building turned we into a strawbale greenhouse heated by solar thermal system and biodiesel (we make with a neighbor) to various renewable energy systems, we are pleased — happy — that what we invest in does, in fact, make the world just a little better.

There’s nothing sustainable about the $700 billion Federal bailout plan for the decomposing financial sector of the US financial system. Americans know it, judging by the outpouring of objections sent to US legislators and reflected in national polls this past week.

According to various estimates by experts in the financial industry, the proposal to let the government buy bad assets from banks range from $500 billion to $1 trillion. Hank Paulson, Treasury Secretary, and Ben Bernanke, Fed Chairman, are asking for $700 billion – for now.

Keep in mind that this is ON TOP OF the costs already incurred for various government actions this year, including, but not limited to:

* up to $85 billion for AIG
* up to $29 billion to fund JPMorgan’s takeover of Bear Stearns
* up to $200 billion each for nationalization of Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac
* as much as $50 billion to insure money market funds
* up to $25 billion for special loans extended to GM and Ford

Let’s not forget the billions of dollars in expenses to help those in flooded or hurricane-destroyed areas – so recent that the costs aren’t even in for the damage done from Hurricane Gustav and Hurricane Ike. There’s plenty of other federal funds flowing to counties throughout the US that were declared federal disaster areas in 2008 – like in Vernon County, Wisconsin, where we own a silviculture operation.