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I’ve been working lately on getting a store going on Etsy.com, a unique community of crafters, DIYers and their appreciators where handmade and vintage items along with supplies can be bought and sold in a centralized, well-designed online venue. While almost all handmade and vintage items are thoughtful about their place in the world by design, I wanted to create a shop where I could post upcycled goods, dumpster-dive treasures, supplies and kits for more environmentally-conscious living, and other such items that challenge the typical consumer patterns of cradle to trash.
Well I’m happy to report that as of this afternoon I finally have my first items posted to WALRUS & magpie! They are a series of upcycled beer-cap buttons made from 100% recycled materials (used beer caps, pop tabs and safety-pins once used at the dry-cleaners). They’re a little rough, so I’m selling them for 50% off what I will charge for subsequent items, but I’m still thrilled to be a part of the growing Etsy community and what looks to be a great proponent to DIY and alternative consumer culture (with a healthy emphasis on creativity as opposed to an overbearing attention on consumption).
Check out my store at http://walrusandmagpie.etsy.com and be sure to let me know what you think!
From the March 2009 issue of The Sun magazine, I came across an interview with Nicholas Carr, author of the Atlantic article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” I found the entire interview to be enlightening as Carr discussed the internet’s “re-wiring” of our brains and of an internet-user’s relationship to information. One particular question I found to be very relevant with the overall theme of this blog:
“Cooper [interviewer]: Do you think computers have harmed our relationship with nature?
Carr: I certainly think they’ve gotten in the way of our relationship to nature. As we increasingly connect with the world through computer screens, we’re removing ourselves from direct sensory contact with nature. In other words, we’re learning to substitute symbols of reality for reality itself. I think that’s particularly true for children who’ve grown up surrounded by screens from a young age. You could argue that this isn’t necessarily something new, that it’s just a continuation of what we saw with other electronic media like radio or TV. But I do think it’s an amplification of those trends.”
Computers and the internet can be useful tools in the democratization of voices, in increasing productivity and the speed of gathering information, but what sacrifices might be made to a person’s relationship to place, to the natural world and to local community when any particular media’s “symbols of reality” are either confused with or championed over the tangible realities that surround each individual and locale?
This post comes from Green America’s latest newspaper editorial, a shortened version of an earlier article in which they outline 7 fixes for the economy.
Solutions from the Green Economy
January 15, 2008
Everyone now understands that the economy is broken.
While many name the mortgage and credit-default-swap crises as culprits, they are only the most recent indicators of an economy with fatal design flaws. Our economy has long been based on what economist Herman Daly calls “uneconomic growth” where increases in the GDP come at an expense in resources and well-being that is worth more than the goods and services provided. When GNP growth exacerbates social and environmental problems—from sweatshop labor to manufacturing toxic chemicals—every dollar of GNP growth reduces well-being for people and the planet, and we’re all worse off.
Our fatally flawed economy creates economic injustice, poverty, and environmental crises. It doesn’t have to be that way. We can create a green economy: one that serves people and the planet and offers antidotes to the current breakdown.
Here are six green-economy solutions to today’s economic mess.
1. Green Energy—Green Jobs
A crucial starting place to rejuvenate our economy is to focus on energy. It’s time to call in the superheroes of the green energy revolution—energy efficiency, solar and wind power, and plug-in hybrids—and put their synergies to work with rapid, large-scale deployment. This is a powerful way to jumpstart the economy, spur job creation (with jobs that can’t be outsourced), declare energy independence, and claim victory over the climate crisis.
2. Clean Energy Victory Bonds
How are we going to pay for this green energy revolution? We at Green America propose Clean Energy Victory Bonds. Modeled after victory bonds in World War II, Americans would buy these bonds from the federal government to invest in large-scale deployment of green energy projects, with particular emphasis in low-income communities hardest hit by the broken economy. These would be long-term bonds, paying an annual interest rate, based in part on the energy and energy savings that the bonds generate. During WWII, 85 million Americans bought over $185 billion in bonds—that would be almost $2 trillion in today’s dollars.
3. Reduce, Reuse, Rethink
Living lightly on the Earth, saving resources and money, and sharing (jobs, property, ideas, and opportunities) are crucial principles for restructuring our economy. This economic breakdown is, in part, due to living beyond our means—as a nation and as individuals. With the enormous national and consumer debt weighing us down, we won’t be able to spend our way out of this economic problem. Ultimately, we need an economy that’s not dependent on unsustainable growth and consumerism. So it’s time to rethink our over-consumptive lifestyles, and turn to the principles of elegant simplicity, such as planting gardens, conserving energy, and working cooperatively with our neighbors to share resources and build resilient communities.
4. Go Green and Local
When we do buy, it is essential that those purchases benefit the green and local economy—so that every dollar helps solve social and environmental problems, not create them. Our spending choices matter. We can support our local communities by moving dollars away from conventional agribusiness and big-box stores and toward supporting local workers, businesses, and organic farmers.
5. Community Investing
All over the country, community investing banks, credit unions, and loan funds that serve hard-hit communities are strong, while the biggest banks required bailouts. The basic principles of community investing keep such institutions strong: Lenders and borrowers know each other. Lenders invest in the success of their borrowers—with training and technical assistance along with loans. And the people who provide the capital to the lenders expect reasonable, not speculative, returns. If all banks followed these principles, the economy wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in today.
6. Shareowner Activism
When you own stock, you have the right and responsibility to advise management to clean up its act. Had GM listened to shareholders warning that relying on SUVs would be its downfall, it would have invested in greener technologies, and would not have needed a bailout. Had CitiGroup listened to its shareowners, it would have avoided the faulty mortgage practices that brought it to its knees. Engaged shareholders are key to reforming conventional companies for the transition to this new economy – the green economy that we are building together.
It’s time to move from greed to green.
–Alisa Gravitz
Via Treehugger.com, I read an interesting article today from the upcoming edition of The New Republic called “Trading Places: The demographic inversion of the American city.” The article outlines the growing trend among US cities toward a more affluent population within city centers with affordable housing options inverting toward the city’s outskirts. Treehugger points out the reasons for this “demographic inversion” – a term that author Alan Ehrenhalt uses to distinguish the trend from gentrification – as the deindustrialization of city centers, a disillusionment with cars and traffic, and a younger generation “expressing different values, habits, and living preferences than their parents.”
What interested me about this article is the identification of a seeming shift toward a higher-valued sustainability within city design in the US. Ehrenhalt points out that many European cities have long followed a structure of city centers being a central hotspot for arts and entertainment; with US cities moving toward a similar model and with residents living closer to the recreation they value, both inefficient transportation methods and the land-waste of urban sprawl are reduced. Walking, biking and public transportation become more viable options for those who bypass suburban life for the concentrated efficiency of a well-designed city, reducing traffic congestion from polluting cars and increasing the healthfulness of more active residents.
With increasing value in downtown living, however, those who cannot afford the increasing housing prices are pushed to the outskirts of cities where car-free transportation does not seem as practical an option, and where – if one follows the model of many European cities – the poor risk being “walled-off” from the inner-city and largely ignored. Ehrenhalt points out, however, that the affluent who are choosing downtown living do so in part in dissent of the separatist mentality of previous generations of affluent suburbanites, and that in some cases the inversion to affordable housing existing in the outskirts of a city would mean closer proximity to the service and industrial jobs that are also moving into the suburbs. Whether this will be the case remains to be seen, but let us hope that the American city’s demographic inversion will mark a time of increased community and sustainability rather than simply a new landscape of an unbalanced and unsustainable class-division.
