A Year of No Money: A Self-Provisioning Pioneer?

Recently I reviewed Plenitude, Juliet Schor's intriguing new book on ecological economics. ("Eco-economics" doesn't make sense, does it?)  She predicts, and promotes, a new meld of working fewer hours with more sophisticated sharing and self-provisioning.  This will yield a comparable or higher standard of living while consuming much less of the earth's resources.  I am on the lookout for stories of people who represent this trend, though of course once you're looking for something, you find it - a bias error.
MBA Mark Boyle has gone cashless.  Read about him. Is this a trend, or is he a stuntman?

Everything in Mark’s life takes a lot longer as part of his new moneyless routine. Washing his clothes takes a couple of hours of scrubbing with hand-made soap. Even a cup of tea takes half an hour to make! But Mark says, “It's all worth it in the end because the feeling of liberation and connection with nature it has afforded me more than compensates for the minor inconveniences."

Eco-Friendly Leftover Boxes - Hurrah!

A big pet peeve of mine is styrofoam or clamshell leftover containers.  Not only are they manufactured from non-renewable, non-recyclable materials - basically petroleum - but then they hand it to you in a plastic bag.  Tin foil cases are no better.  Adding green insult to eco-injury, how often do we forget to eat said leftovers, eventually tossing both the food and their excessive packaging?  Ugh.
I try to always carry a zip lock plastic bag in my pocketbook - they take very little space and are perfect for a dry leftover.  But they're not ideal for a saucy or runny dish....
Trolley Car Diner, our local hangout, has switched to a much greener solution.  These fold-up boxes are made of 100% recycled materials and are compostable and recyclable themselves, though of course to recycle them, they would need to be cleaned, probably not a good use of water.  This produce line has quite the pedigree!  Kudos for the innovation, and for the diner for adopting it.

Bio-Pak #1 one of our most popular, is ideal for White Table Cloth Restaurant Leftovers and Deserts to Go

These Bio-Pak Plus 100% recycled to go recycled paper food containers are a green alternative that is good for environmentally conscious takeout operations that want at least 35% post consumer content. There is a green stamp on the bottom of these carryout containers that show these Bio Plus EARTH food take out containers are endorsed by the Green Restaurant Association dinegreen.com because they are made from 100% natural kraft recycled cardboard including a minimum of 35% post consumer recycled paper content.

The Earth's Carrying Capacity vs. Peoples' Consumption - Turning Lose/Lose to Win/Win

Nothing in this sophisticated interactive online visual from Scientific American will be news to people who are informed about climate change and general overconsumption.  This is the background which is ignored in all the discussions about buying our way out of global recession, and why that prescription's short-term prosperity is the road to long term disaster.
It does seem like there are ever more people who maintain denial as a political position.  No more regulations!  Wish we didn't have to spend so much time fighting and could work harder at innovating and preserving.  Enjoy this awesome job of communicating and predicting.
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Freecycle Storefront in NYC

This from the NY Times
One quibble: the writer calls this recycling, but it's reusing - that's higher up the value chain than recycling, and environmentally superior.  Some cities have give-away areas at the city dump, but this is way smarter.

In Brooklyn Store, Everything Is Always 100% Off

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

Merchandise at the Brooklyn Free Store in Bedford-Stuyvesant might include a fur coat, cans of green beans and a book by Plato.

By COLIN MOYNIHAN

Published: August 15, 2010April Gariepy, 30, wheeled her bike beneath the white tent on Saturday afternoon looking for a wire basket she could attach to her handlebars. A moment later, Sharika Barrow, 17, approached, gazed at the shelves of books, clothing and other items displayed beneath the tent, then wondered aloud what sort of place she was visiting.

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Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

Myles Emery, one of the founders of the Free Store. Organizers say that it offers an alternative to mainstream capitalism.

“It’s a free store,” Ms. Gariepy replied, having made that determination herself just a few moments earlier.

After browsing, the two emerged from beneath the tent without selecting anything but both said they would probably return.

“I just came from the Brooklyn Flea,” Ms. Gariepy, said. “This is kind of like the same thing, but everything at the flea is higher priced.”

For six weeks, a group of people have been engaged in an unusual project in Bedford-Stuyvesant that they are calling the Brooklyn Free Store, where everything is available for the taking and nothing is for sale.

The name of the store is painted on a purple banner hanging from a chain link fence fronting a bare dirt lot on Walworth Street, near De Kalb Avenue. Behind the fence a blue plastic tarp is stretched over a white tent, covering an array of items stacked atop sheets of weathered plywood.

A handwritten sign reads “Take what you want. Share what you think others may enjoy (not limited to material items).”

There were cans of green beans and a pair of used brown wingtips beneath the tarp on Saturday, along with a used toaster oven, a flashlight and a galvanized metal bucket.

There were books by such disparate writers as Plato (“The Republic”) and Tina Brown(“The Diana Chronicles,” which details the life and times of the former Princess of Wales).

And there were dozens of items of clothing, including a brown fur coat and matching hat.

Organizers of the store said it was intended to demonstrate the feasibility of recycling and to offer an alternative to mainstream capitalism. It has no owners or customers, only participants, say the people who started it. Because everything there is free, the store has no official hours and it is never locked.

“New York is world renowned for having the best garbage," said Myles Emery, 34, an organizer of the store. “There could be free stores everywhere.”

Most of the items in the store are donated and a few of them are gleaned from a wealth of serviceable objects that are discarded on the streets each day. The number and nature of the items beneath the tarp vary, organizers said, adding that people have dropped off a digital camera, an electric stove and a TiVo with a recording capacity of 40 hours.

Some of those who started the Free Store in early July had also played a role in operatingan earlier incarnation, which was run out of a storefront in Williamsburg from 1999 until 2005. Both stores drew inspiration from the original Diggers, a group of agrarian utopians in 17th-century England, as well as from another group that adopted the same name more than 40 years ago and opened storefronts in San Francisco and in New York where items were dropped off and picked up without any money changing hands.

About two dozen people stopped by the Walworth Street store over the course of four hours on Saturday. Some merely looked. Krissa Henderson, 25, from Bushwick, took some gardening books. Gregory Coleman, 54, from Bedford-Stuyvesant, left with wool socks.

Others arrived to drop things off. Caryn Prescott, 41, donated some clothes and cosmetics, and Eddie Ballard, 34, from Crown Heights, who came across the store by chance, contributed a recyclable tote bag he happened to have with him, mainly out of a sense of admiration for the project.

“There is something about the communal aspect of this place that appeals to me,” Mr. Ballard said. “I felt like I wanted to give something just to be a part of it.”

The Self-Provisioning Resource Conserving Eco-Nut Next Door

Amidst the landslide of greening and sustainability books constantly being marketed and touted (get the irony?), two jumped out at me.  Reading them as a pair made it clear that Plenitude, by economist  Juliet B. Schor, and The Cheapskate Next Door by journalist Jeff Yeager are describing the same contemporary trends using very different language.  People can earn fewer dollars without their quality of life being diminished, IF they also experience an increase in free time.  This free time can be invested in social capital, healthy lifestyle, creative self-provisioning, and ingenious thrift, aided by everything from social networking to asking grandma to teach canning techniques.  Schor’s book is analytic; Yeager’s is  a how-to-do-it  manual.

Reading over and over again how we aren’t “over” this Great Recession because none of us are buying enough, hence the jobs producing all of it are lagging, has often made me wonder how that squares with the carrying load of the planet.  The fact that personal savings have actually increased seems like good news, not bad.  The fact that demand for fossil fuels has decreased – isn’t that the goal here?  Schor, an economist with an emphasis on ecological concerns and the author of two other terrific books, The Overworked American and The Overspent American, reviews the basic theoretical underpinnings of modern economics and concludes that they don’t square.  As developing world incomes rise, driving massive additional consumption, the world’s growth limits will be tested.  We can’t just keep on extracting finite resources on the cheap and expect it will all end well.  Likewise, she predicts there will never again be enough conventional jobs for all who seek work.  We’re becoming too efficient and productive for that, through ever improving and disseminating technology.

Schor’s solution,, that we cut back on workers’ hours, thereby employing more people over all, is not original. This has been tried in many places and times, often to avoid laying workers off.  Kelloggs of Battle Creek, Michigan, famously offered a six-hour day for decades which workers loved, along with all the others lucky enough to live there.  Schor’s original synthesis is to combine this with the new realities of environmental as well as social stress, to define a life of Plenitude less dependent on material excess.  By editing out the waste of American life, and utilizing the dividend of extra time, whole new micro-economies are evolving, allowing people to live healthier, happier lives that – paradoxically – are lower income.  She effectively decouples standard of living from quality of life, as happiness studies have been confirming is correct, once people move past subsistence.

She cites examples of lowering overhead by resource sharing, plugging Freecycle, CraigsList, carsharing, Open Source internet software – much of which I have written about over the years.  Local agriculture, from gardens to micro-farms, is a favorite example, written about glowingly throughout the book.  She describes people once again learning to cook, preserve, sew, and build their own downsized homes.  It all sounds very idyllic; I want to believe her, I really do.  Except that what she is talking about as a trend looks more like an interesting trickle of outliers (Hi, Anna!  How’s the honey going?).  OK, I grow a few tomatoes.  That doesn’t make me Ma Ingalls.  But perhaps a generation from now her manifesto will prove true.  If so, we will all be the better for it.

The Cheapskate Next Door: The Surprising Secrets of Americans Living Happily Below Their Means is a charming hybrid of two terrific classics, The Millionaire Next Door and The Tightwad Gazette.  Those books were all about resource conservation from a financial standpoint – why leave good money on the table?  TheMND describes a value-oriented affluent population who eschews conspicuous consumption.  TTG was more about people scrapping together a nest egg, even on a tiny salary.  The secret of both is living beneath one’s means.  However, they were written before the age of environmental awareness.  All their strategies translate quite well to a new eco-age.  The Cheapskate took himself on a national book tour – by bike, CouchSurfing his way across the country. 

His book is a lot of fun.  My main takeaway is that if you create good habits, these too are hard to break.  One becomes  a  reflexively resource-conscious consumer [a description I prefer to “cheapskate”].  Case in point.  Two friends and I were at the beach in search of 1% hydrocortisone cream for my friend, suffering from a bee sting. We grabbed the first brand we saw.  But I couldn’t resist going back to look at the shelf, where I found a generic tube for half the price.  Then I saw a generic tube half the SIZE.  It is generally more economical, both financially and ecologically, to buy a larger quantity.  But!  Only if you will finish it all.  Having just thrown out boxes of unused, expired OTC meds from my old house, I knew the smaller generic tube was a good choice.  Time expended: 1 minute.  Amount saved: ~ $6.00.  Since I earn less than $6.00 a minute, it was a good use of my time.  However, you can’t send a child to college or pay for health care –America’s two huge and ever escalating price tags  - on small salaries supplemented by self-provisioning and judicious cheapskating. 

If you’re following these authors’ advice, be sure to check these books out from your local library soon!