Sarah Henry

How to glean for good

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Gleaning for good by harvesting unwanted produce from local farms, community gardens, or neighbors’ backyards and distributing this excess bounty to the food insecure is an increasingly popular — and necessary — humanitarian effort for the hungry during tough financial times, as Shareable recently reported.

Across the country, volunteer pickers join forces to collect literally tons of fruits and vegetables that then find their way to homeless shelters, soup kitchens, and food pantries, as well as senior centers, low-income homes, and school lunch programs.

At U.N. happiness summit, a coal pile in the ballroom

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The fact that economists were at the podium questioning the equivalence of happiness and GDP is a hopeful sign, a sign of a deep crack in the foundation of the economics discipline. But it is one thing to say there is more to happiness than economic growth; it is quite another to propose that economic growth is inimical to generalized happiness. None of the speakers advocated an end to growth – that would be called, in the present vocabulary, economic stagnation or recession. Instead, they invoked, again and again, “sustainable development,” a phrase I must have heard 30 times.

Co-Op Nation: Interview with Gar Alperovitz

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The truth is we really don’t know how to truly manage a cooperative economy successfully on a national or regional scale yet. If anything, we should be learning from the experiences in the global south to help clarify what might work here, but we should also be sensitive to our own unique cultural situation. What worked in Kerala, or Porto Alegre, or Mondragón may not work automatically in the U.S. We also need to be willing to critically evaluate those experiences. The design of “the next system” is, in my opinion, still to be worked out.

Greek town taps bartering for a more shareable city

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As Greece continues to search for solutions to its national economic crisis, the port town of Volos has adopted an old-school barter system to help its citizens muddle through. Five years into their recession with 21 percent unemployment, some Volos residents who were short on Euros but long on other resources created a local currency (called TEMs in Greek) that is traded based on non-monetary contributions into the online system…TEMs can be used for everything from bakers to babysitters, teachers to technicians. In theory, the value of one TEM is equal to the value of one Euro.

TaskRabbit: Running errands for fun and profit

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Leah Busque, the founder and chief product officer at TaskRabbit, is a former IBM software engineer who started her company to solve a problem she had one very cold evening in Boston. She ran out of dog food at home and wished there was someone she could pay to run the errand. She thought: “it’s a simple problem, there should be a simple solution.” That was February 2008. She went online that evening, registered runmyerrand.com, quit her job at IBM four months later, and spent the next year building the initial service.

No number crunching in Alan Kohler opinion piece on premature peak oil death

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An awe-inspiring takedown of a sloppy story on the death of peak oil.

Alan Kohler, who is known for his excellent financial graphs on the ABC TV (Australia) 7 pm News came out with an opinion piece on peak oil which does not display the level of research expected from him. Almost no statement in his article can be supported by statistical evidence. No numbers are shown to prove that shale oil can compensate for oil decline in maturing oil fields around the world.

What’s worse, the fight over oil in and between Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries due to peaking in key countries is completely forgotten. The EIA estimates that despite increasing unconventional oil production the dependency on OPEC oil will not be reduced. Reserves and resources are mixed up and those vast gas reserves are neither used to replace coal nor oil (as transport fuel). The CO2 from an assumed unconventional oil and gas boom will cook us alive.

The problem with such articles is that they contribute to further delay the real transformation away from oil (and fossil fuels in general) which can only be done by massive rail projects and preserving oil where it will be needed most: in agricultural production and transport of food to the cities.

There is an alternative

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For as long as there has been such a thing as money, morality and debt have been intimately intertwined. We see this today in discussions about the debt crisis. Do mortgage debtors, credit card debtors, and student loan borrowers have a moral obligation to pay back their debts? Is it unethical for debtor nations to default on their loans?

Pocket Neighborhoods: Small-scale living in a large-scale world

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From Whidbey Island, Washington, to Winnsboro, Texas, pocket neighborhoods are taking root in communities in search of a simpler, more shareable way of life. In a pocket neighborhood, houses with a smaller-than-normal footprint surround a shared green space. The more public areas of the homes — living room, dining room, and kitchen — face the commons, with the bedrooms situated away from public views. The design is both community-oriented and environmentally friendly.

How is the Sharing economy different from the Anarchy economy?

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The Sharing economy is quickly becoming a diluted term, just like ‘sustainable” and ‘all natural”. If “sharing” means “make some side cash”, let’s call it what it really is. It is a way to raise cash using owned assets (a room, a car, a wheelbarrow, etc.) that boomerang back to the rightful owner at some point.