GreenSmith Consulting

Time to Stop Talking About Going Local, and Doing It (pt 3 of 3) Eating and Getting Around

You hear so much about the value of "going local," but perhaps not so much on how to go about doing it effectively. Thanks much to Wayne Maceyka for sharing copious resources to do so, first covering the value of and need for localizing economies, then who's doing it, and now for two of the essentials in our modern life: local food and transportation.

One of the basics of life is nourishment and along with that, moving the foods that provide said nourishment around.  Additionally, we move ourselves and other goods around all over the world as part of the economy.  We currently rely upon inexpensive fossil fuels to keep a national and international supply chain running to do all these things.

Industrial food production is garnering a fair amount of attention for the GHG emissions associated with its production (including transportation) as well as the growing awareness of the health consequences of ingesting it.  We derive industrial fertilizers from petroleum, and the machines that sow seeds, harvest plants, and spread the fertilizer depend upon fossil fuels to operate. 

From a popular culture perspective, Michael Pollan's book Omnivore's Dilemma (here's his recent TED talk),  Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation, and Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution which premiered March 26 (to name a few) have helped raise the public's awareness about where our food comes from and what that means to our collective health.

An inherent danger in relying upon a far-flung and energy dependent food infrastructure is the price of oil.  It skyrocketed to somewhere north of $140.00/gallon in mid-2008, and what did that do to global food prices and basic access?  For those of limited means; they struggle mightily.  A recent post on a food security e-mail list had an interesting comment about the ongoing need for local & regional food infrastructure.  I highlighted the potential for regional & local food,

"[Senate Bill] S 510 (and even more so, HR 2749) will make it almost impossible to get local, healthy food to local people by dramatically increasing the cost of preparing local, healthy food for sale and distribution.  We need new cooperative packing houses, new processors, new distributors and new retailers or our food will only be available to the affluent at a premium price.  Not only the poor (both working and unemployed) but also the lower middle class will be almost entirely dependent upon industrial agriculture"

Personal Scale Manufacturing is Here: Why it Matters and What it Means to You

I've been watching the evolving trend of personal scale manufacturing with interest for some time, and we're about to see that mythical "tipping point." I want you to know about it, and how it may effect your business and our environment.

 It's happening. Much like the computer went from a monolithic room filling device used only by the military and government, to one that can fit in the palm of your hand, allowing you to do something about your surroundings via a geolocation enabled app, manufacturing is fast becoming something you and I can do, literally. And it has the potential to likewise shift the balance of power and control of what and where things get made, and what products do and do not see the light of day.

How?

It used to be that if you wanted to manufacture something, whether it's an entire product or its components, you had to do so at a large scale. After all, for a third party manufacturer or yourself, it was quite expensive to set up the production line to make each part. Changing aspects frequently required time and retooling. Not something for a small scale production, unless you're talking a prohibitively expensive one of a kind.

Then along came 3D printers.

These devices use a laser to shape a piece of raw material, frequently plastic, into an object, layer by layer. At first largely the province of adventurous tech geeks, last year saw the emergence of Ponoko, a company that has succeeded in creating an ecosystem of people with ideas, tools, and desire to buy what's being created.

Basically, with Ponoko if you have an idea for a product, you can find someone to make it for you. One. Or many. You pay a per minute rate for use of the printer that makes it. If you have a printer, you get business funneled to you via Ponoko. If you are a designer, you have the ability to have your product made, at a reasonable cost, no matter the quantity purchased.

This was a definite step forward, and yet you still had the barrier of cost, someone else being in control of the manufacturing.

Enter Makerbot Industries.

It has recently introduced what is the beginning of truly democratized manfuacturing: The Makerbot. It is a $750 open source 3D printer that can create small objects via ABS plastic. And it can make its own replacement parts! While we're not talking automotive manufacturing here, it is a solid beginning to what I predict will swiftly become an increasingly wide spread, widely useful practice.

What does this mean, in terms of sustainability?

Unless you live next door to the factory of what you purchase, and all components are made in one location, your purchase of a product likely logged a lot of miles getting to you. With something made via a Makerbot, you could either create your own design, or download a design from someone else, and make it right where you are. Then, rather than having to buy a new one if a part wears or breaks, you create the replacements yourself. 

You've now skipped the shipping and reduced disposal waste. While this is happening on a small scale now, imagine the impact if repeated millions, billions of times.

The one sticking point at this stage is that objects made in Makerbots are made with plastic, which being  petroleum based material, has the accompanying ecological footprint and in time, may prove expensive as petroleum becomes a scarcer resource. Can bioplastics be used? Can those be supplied at a reasonable cost? What about aluminum, or a temporary liquid, even some other as yet to be created upcyclable substance be used? Let's hope so. Ponoko currently works with everything from felt to bamboo.

But for now, the Makerbot marks a point in time, where the shift began.

Readers: What's your take on the sustainability of micro scale manufacturing? How else can we cut out links of the supply chain? Right now the offerings are primarily machine parts and decorative objects. What would you design and offer?

The 3 Best Ways to Drastically Reduce your iPhone (Or Any Phone) Bill

Late last year I got my first iPhone (I know I know! Three words : 2 year contract.) With the increase in monthly bill, I was inspired to seek ways to reduce it. And I found them. Many. I thought you'd like to know too.

These days, it seems there's nearly as many ways to save money using your phone as there are types of phones. But they all seem to have a weak spot: Requiring you to do numerical gymnastics, or making your caller i.d. on the other end look like something to avoid.

While those may have monetary benefits, they can reduce your productivity, and make you look less professional. So I was pleased to have made series of discoveries in the past week that put it all together, with minimum effort, maximum results.

Follow these steps and you'll be well on to your way to smarter, cheaper, more connected communications.

6 Tools You Can Use to make 2010 a More Productive, Enjoyable Year

2010 seems to have come out of nowhere, here and waiting for you to make the most of it. You're ready, right? If you're not quite there, or would like some resources to make it even better, I have several to recommend today. I wasn't specifically looking for tools to start out the year, but a cluster of them showed up on my radar, and I wanted you to know about them.

For a long while I’ve been of the mind to seek out all in one solutions to organizing my life, work, plans. I’ve come to realize that’s an unfair burden to try and place on one piece of software. Nothing out there does all things well for all people using it. I thought Daylite was that for me. It’s not. And that’s okay. These days I'm finding that a variety of tools, each with their own strong suits, suits me better. Have a look, give them a try, let me know your experiences, ok?


Writing

I don’t know about you, but I write a lot in my work. And I generally don’t need elaborate formatting options to do it. When blogging, I tend to avoid Word, as it adds a lot of restrictive excessive formatting that mucks with altering it once in the blog interface. I’ve used Text Edit often, it's clean interface without button confetti is great, but then I can get distracted with all the other windows behind it on my desktop. There have been numerous options created that attempt to go minimal, and be the only thing you see. Writeroom, and other clutter minimizing apps. But they, to me, are too minimal, and ultimately, become boring.

Ommwriter is completely different than any writing tool I’ve seen. Created by digital creative agency Herraiz Soto & Co. , it hits a sweet spot for me: I like things simple. But not boring. Ommwriter achieves this, creating a beautiful, immersive experience, where you have a number of soothing, minimal backgrounds to choose from, ambient sounds/music to accompany it, even a choice of keyboard click sounds, including one that is slightly musical, and needs to be heard to be fully understood.

Ommwriter from Herraiz Soto on Vimeo.

It’s clear that some skilled interface designers had a hand in this, and this free app is a pleasure to create in. You choose how much or how little of the sound options you use. All controls stay invisible until you move the mouse, and even then, they're simple, intuitive, and don't distract from the flow. Need to duck out and get a link to paste in? Easy, the minimize button appears, you get what you need , then dive back in. Beautiful. And productive.

Time to Stop Talking About Going Local, and Doing It. Here's Who Is. (pt 2 of 3)

We’re living in interesting times, and it’s anybody’s guess what the economy, the environment, our society will look, even in the next year. The COP15 UN climate change gathering currently happening in Copenhagen isn’t panning out as many would have wanted, and solutions to unifying the world’s goals look further off.

Wayne Maceyka has a single, clear, suggestion: Go local, in all aspects, (re)building robust, agile, stable societies and economies in the process. In part 2 of his 3 part series, he focuses on the organizations currently happening to help support that.

I mentioned Michael Shuman's book Going Local in the first post of this series, and for those interested in exploring ways to localize their economies, it’s a good resource.  Civic Economics, with staff in both Austin, TX and Chicago, IL is another organization providing innovative consulting services for local economic development efforts.

 

On Michael Shuman’s Small-mart website, there are additional resources available to local economy advocates and defenders.  In the Small-mart blog, he announced the combination of Small-mart and The Business Alliance for local Living Economies "BALLE”.  BALLE formed out of a fortuitous meeting between Laury Hammel and Judy Wicks, both board members of the Social Venture Network and has been focusing on helping build resilient local economies since 2001.

 

The organization has grown to include 75 community networks with over 20,000 entrepreneurs & members across the US & Canada.  Look for “Sustainable Business Networks” in your area to connect with interesting and creative people working in the local economic development space.

Developing local currencies are a way to keep capital in communities and build stronger connections between people and businesses. Famous examples are Ithaca HOURs, from Ithaca, NY and BerkShares from Berkshire County in Western Massachusetts (forgive my Northeast focus; I am sure there are more successful examples out there, and I’d love to hear about them, below in the comments).  The IthacaHOURs site offers resources for communities interested in developing local currencies of their own.  It’s worth checking out.

Of recent interest in the conversation about alternative economic models is the rise of the "slowmoney" investment philosophy through the Slow Money Alliance; “patient capital" seeking to provide investors financial payback as well as social and environmental capital appreciation through agricultural investment.  They seek to bring money back down to earth. The effort is something of an off-shoot (or maybe a continuation) of the thinking around Slowfood, seeking to reconnect eaters with their food sources. The key questions asked by the Slow Money Alliance, and ones that I feel generate some interesting ideas are:

• What would the world be like if we invested 50% of our assets within 50 miles of where we live?
• What if there was a new generation of companies that gave away 50% of their profits?
• What if there were 50% more organic matter in our soil 50 years from now?

 

The first Slow Money Conference occurred in Sante Fe, NM and received quite a bit of press, with articles in the LA Times, Wall Street Journal, TIME, and Business Week. Is there a market for "patient capital"?

Time to Stop Talking About Going Local, and Doing It. Here's How. (pt 1 of 3)

With gold reaching all time highs in value, and other indicators that our global economy is in serious trouble (or seen more positively, ripe for a reset) money as we know it, and commerce as we know it may well vanish, or drastically change in the not too distant future. So perhaps, now more then ever, it’s time to look at how to build and maintain robust local economies.  

This week’s guest writer Wayne Maceyka takes an interesting, inspiring look at how that can happen. Part 1 of a 2 part series, we encourage your thoughts, ideas, and questions in the comments below.

  Considering the seismic activity that's been rumbling through the global economy over the past few years (it's not over, unemployment here in the United States is over 10%, the highest since 1983 and there are fears that commercial property loans, additional residential mortgages, and energy prices will squash a full-fledged recovery - in the traditional sense of the word), perhaps looking at our economy through a different lens would be interesting.

 For me, that lens has been building local and regional economies as a way to buffer regions from the winds of globalization and perhaps address some of our environmental challenges as well.

Why import items that meet basic human needs (food for instance) when much of it can be supplied from nearby? Of course, “nearby”, “local”, and “regional” are relative terms, the definitions of which are up for debate, but lets leave that discussion for another day Why is “going local” a good idea? It reduces our dependence on long distribution chains that are vulnerable to energy price fluctuations, reduces environmental impact, and perhaps most importantly helps keep financial capital circulating within the region.

 This recirculation of financial capital supports regional businesses and the jobs and value they create, further increasing the region’s resilience in the face of large-scale economic challenges.  Will every city, county or state be self-sufficient in the next 20 years? Probably not, though depending upon your beliefs around peak oil (see Jeff Rubin below) perhaps they’ll have to be.  The point is not to seek protectionist self-sufficiency, but cooperative interdependence on a scale consistent with human needs and natural resources.

Do You Know Your Community? Does the Community Know You?

I believe that we learn best by hearing from many different voices. And in this case, I'm learning along with you in our latest guest post. Like many of you, I use my deep, broad online resources almost exclusively for getting new business, and with the exception of one client, all are from other parts of the country, or even out of the country. Here we have Victoria Klein reminding us to pay attention to and make best use of what's going on right in our local communities, in terms of business, and gives several excellent resources to best explore it. Please share any we've missed, of which I'm sure you know some gems.

The wide wide World Wide Web has become an indispensable business tool in a very short amount of time. Websites, blogs, social media accounts – the way we do business has forever changed … or has it?

No matter how many virtual meetings we share, nothing can replace the importance of talking and collaborating face-to-face. The same concept goes for promoting and growing your business. You can have clients in all parts of the world, but does the mom-and-pop store down the street known what you do? With their own unique needs and perspectives, local residents and businesses are indispensable source for a business of any size. They are the original world of social networking.

But where do you start? How can you bring your knowledge, experience, and services to those who may need you the most – the folks right in your city? The answer is much simpler than the question: walk and talk. Now is the time to put in the time and effort to call or visit local ventures to, at the very least, introduce yourself and pass on a business card.

I’m not encouraging you to walk into this blind. Nor do I want you to desperately try to sell yourself like a telemarketer. Like any important project, step one is research. Delve into your local business community to find those that would benefit the most from you services. Start with:

BALLE (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies
Yahoo! Local
GenGreen Life Directory

Seek out local business organizations for advertising opportunities and networking events, which are more common than ever. Use your talents to volunteer with  a local non-profit – another networking goldmine. Don’t overlook any opportunity to talk with a real human about your work: hobby meetups, library events, weekly farmers’ markets, high school reunions … the possibilities are endless.

You don’t need to join yet another website to get the word out about your business – just knock on your neighbor’s door. Watch the 6 degrees of separation in action by joining in and sharing with your local community.

Readers: So, what do you think? What other resources do you use to connect with and learn about your local community and its resources, businesses? Let's talk about it below.

Victoria Klein is a writer, eco-consultant, and photographer who uses her creative interests to explore the delight and difficulty of the human experience, and our effect on the planet. You can read her blog here.

image credit: itzafineday on Flickr

Note To Twitter Users: Please Stop Doing #FollowFriday Tweets

Nothing anybody tells you to do on Twitter is an absolute. Nothing. How you use it is truly up to you. That is, of course, unless you're an avid spammer, in which case you'll be dropped off Twitter. Other then that, it's your party.

But if there's one thing I'm feeling more & more strong about, it's advocating that you stop doing  #FollowFriday tweets. And #EcoMonday while you're at it too. Well, not stop, but stop using it mindlessly.

Let me back up.

For those of you unfamiliar, #FollowFriday and #EcoMonday are two examples of hashtags, words marked with a # sign to help easily gather and make searchable tweets on a certain subject. In this case, it's people that you recommend others follow, the former being anybody you know, the latter being green/enviro/sustainability oriented people.

Why would I recommend against such a friendly, helpful sounding practice?

Because in most cases, it's lost any significance and lasting value. Most people simply list a huge number of people, with a #followfriday or #ff at the end. Or even worse, they retweet what someone else has tweeted. Why bother? It shows little thought and that you're doing this as a chore, not for any real benefit for those you mention.

For some this may be just being efficient, but to me it's a sign they've not taken any time to really consider who you're recommending, or how to effectively do it.

While it can have some value in the short term - those you mention following back, returning the recommendation, other people possibly choosing to follow your reccomendations - the mass of #followfriday and #ecomonday tweets don't result in an appreciable increase in followers.

I'm not saying don't do this, but do it smarter, resulting in more benefit for those you recommend, and for yourself, showing you care more then to just drop a big scoop of names in people's timelines.

How can you do it smarter?