2011 SLC Bike Collective

Every year I give 1% of my sales back to the community in some way -- I call it the 1% For The People campaign, based loosely on the 1% for the Planet championed by companies such as Patagonia.

In past years the recipients have been KRCL (2010) and Tim DeChristopher (2009), and this year I'm donating the money and time to the Salt Lake Bicycle Collective in the form of a new marquee sign.

From the SLC Bike Collective's web site:

"The mission of the Bicycle Collective is to promote cycling as an effective and sustainable form of transportation and as a cornerstone of a cleaner, healthier, and safer society. The Collective provides refurbished bicycles and educational programs to the community, focusing on children and lower income households."

Check them out at 2312 S. West Temple in SLC; they also have locations in Ogden and Provo.

Mock up of the sign-to-be

The Organic Grid

Many parts of Nevada are big and open, and there are lots of signs that say things like 'Get gas now! No services 15,200 miles'.

The need to understand the landscape here goes far beyond a passing cerebral appreciation for the flora and fauna; you could run out of gas and water and have your eye sockets pecked out and tires stolen by vultures before the next truck comes along. Take a look at the fantastic account of the Donner party's 'cut-off' route through the east end of the Great Basin in 'Trial by Hunger' for an idea of what I mean. (To summarize: ignorance of Great Basin geography means snacking on each other's femurs by winter.)

"The making of such a map is an interesting process . . . fixing on a small sheet the results of laborious travel over waste regions, and giving to them an enduring place on the world's surface."
-- John Fremont, explorer of the Great Basin, mid 1800's

In William Fox's book 'Mapping the Empty: Eight Artists and Nevada', he addresses 'one of the oldest dichotomies in history, the tension between the organic shape of the natural world and the mathematical grid'. In the American West this can be charted beginning with Fremont's original maps of the area to Google Earth's view of straight roads bisecting and bending around landforms in the basin and range. Artists like Andy Goldsworthy have taken a different approach by constructing things out of the natural world that have some innate geometry to them that wasn't there before.

I think we should be very wary trusting current culture with our experience of anything, especially when it comes to that weirdo art crowd. Unfortunately we can't all be out all the time seeing all of this amazing stuff for ourselves, and need to trust something to show it to us, or at least tell us how we can make money from it. Catherine Norman (yes, we are related) in her thesis on Goldsworthy's earthworks notes that:

" . . . we can see a prevalence of the preconceived image of nature: a postcard of the Grand Canyon, perhaps, some view of sweeping land that our society claims is beautiful . . . interstate highways alert us with signs when we need to pull over for a scenic view. Culture has become in this way the mediator of nature, controlling our views of landscape and detaching us from actual experience with nature"

Land and life are intertwined -- we've relied upon it for sustenance and safety for millions of years, and it is only recently that we have put so many intermediaries between us that, unless you are one of the lucky few, it is outside our experience. The mediators we use can intentionally or otherwise put the human geometry on landscapes: often times photography and writing are the principle culprits. Historically, this translated experience has run the gamut of intended effect from its authors: over the last three hundred years alone the American West has been symbolized as the playground of the devil (early Puritan settlers), the divine (Muir, Thoreau), an adversary to be overcome (Remington, Hemmingway), a co-author in the human experience (Goldsworthy, Wright), and an entity possessing of it own value and rights (Adams, O'Keefe).

In rural Nevada it is impossible not to have some aspect of nature impact daily life. The consequences of ignorance usually aren't cannibalistic in the Donner-Party-Lets-Have-Hank-As-The-Appetizer sort of way, but dire nonetheless. Many of the professions out here depend on nature: ranching, farming, tourism and mining to name a few. The problem is that nature doesn't use the precise boundaries and words that we like to use, so we have to figure out how to translate between the wilderness and our needs. The town of Baker, NV, just outside Great Basin National Park is a case study in the 'tension between the organic shape of the natural world and the mathematical grid'.

To wit: the US Postal service is facing the need to cut costs, and proposes to do so by eliminating select rural post offices like the one in Baker, as well as the one in Garrison, UT, 10 miles away. That would mean that residents, some who rely on mail for medications and critical ranch supplies would have to drive 60 miles over two mountain passes to Ely, NV. Why not just consolidate the two post offices instead of eliminating both? Well, there happens to be a state line between them. Each post office is in a different administrative district, apparently neither of which is aware the other exists and coordination between the two is difficult at best. The imaginary, arbitrary, and very straight line down the middle of the Snake Valley separating Utah from Nevada seems not only not useful but it actively undermines the welfare of residents on both sides of it. (Yet at my house in Salt Lake the USPS dutifully delivers ads for plasma screen TV's 6 days a week to my front door, and there are 4 post offices within 10 miles).

We can't talk about abstract geometric boundaries and people without addressing water rights. Underground aquifers are like the US Olympic Hockey team: we all share them whether we like it or not, and our life depends on their health. My grandfather was a lifelong rancher in Waco, TX and I have clear memories of lively kitchen table discussions about water issues: who's got it, who wants it, who's wrecking it, and who's stealing it.

In this chunk of Nevada, the Southern Nevada Water Authority has been buying ranches in Spring Valley on the west side of the National Park and planning to tap the aquifer to supply Las Vegas with more golf courses and heart-shaped swimming pools 200 miles to the south. Yet this aquifer, like all good nature, doesn't care about property lines. It is intimately related to the ecosystem of GBNP as well as the water in the neighboring valleys which is critical to the farmers, ranchers, and anything else alive there.  (The question of Las Vegas creating more swimming pools and golf courses is another discussion altogether, one I think would be solved most expeditiously by relocating the Nevada Nuclear Test Range into the lobby of the Luxor Casino. But I digress.)

The solution lies, I think, in how Fremont originally mapped and named the Great Basin. He describes its boundaries hydrologically, not politico-geographically. ("[the area] containing many lakes . . . with their own system of rivers and creeks, and which have no connection with the ocean or the great rivers which flow into it.") In addition, William Fox noted that:

"Just as each audience in the East [in the late 1800's] had its own distinct uses for the art of the great western expeditions -- from scientists requiring accuracy to developers seeking the reassuringly picturesque -- so the artists produced works in response to those needs."

Not that all of our state and county boundaries should be altered to reflect aquifers or even communities of people, but perhaps those nutty artists in our midst can use the 'organic shape of the natural world' to provide a better future for the American West.

Year of Used

Tired of rampant consumerism? The Year of Used project is set to start Jan 1, 2011.

http://www.yearofused.posterus.com

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Year-Of-Used/172474152775721

Collaborative Consumption

What would life be like if you didn’t have to actually own the stuff you use everyday?

Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers’ book What’s Mine is Yours: the Rise of Collabortive Consumption explores companies who are trying to provide just that.  Imagine the Netflix business model applied to everything from apartments to cars to lawnmowers, and that’s what they’re talking about. It sounds like a great way to save money, time, and the resources that go into making stuff that sits unused for most of its life in our garages and closets.  But, it requires a fundamental shift in thinking from valuing the ownership of the things in our lives to valuing the utility they give us.  Do we want the powerdrill or do we want the holes that the drill makes?

Some examples:

Airbnb is a site that coordinates travellers with people wanting to rent out anything from couch for the night to a villa for a month.  There are rating systems so that you can rest easy knowing that your host probably isn’t an axe murderer.

Zipcar is a service that allows you to reserve a car any time of the day or night for as little as an hour.

Freecycle coordinates people who have things to get rid of with people who want them.  Their tagline:  “There’s no such thing as waste, just useful stuff in the wrong place”.

TechShop is a series of  workshops on steriods -- they have the space, advice, and tools that any tinkerer would want but few could afford.  Monthly fees give you access to half a million dollars worth of equipment.

Swap.com matches you up with people who have books, CDs, and DVDs you want while coordinating others who want the ones you have.


Now lest anyone gather their pitchforks, burning torches, and mobs and start screaming ‘Socialism!’, let me assure you the collaborative consumption model doesn’t involve government ownership or intervention.  It is a way of organizing group behavior that preserves the individual’s autonomy and freedom, perhaps even more so than our current economic model (credit card debt from the garage full of stuff, anyone?).

There is a high degree of trust required with consuming collaboratively, and hence mechanisms like eBay’s user ratings system have emerged.  In fact, trust between strangers is one of the four principles of successfully collaboratively consuming.  The three others include critical mass (enough people participating to make it work), belief in the commons (the more people that participate, the better it is for everyone), and idling capacity (the stuff being shared needs to be sitting ‘idle’ enough with a single user).

I foresee two major resistances to the collaborative model.

First, companies that make products (cars, toasters, iPods, etc) have built many of their core competencies around the production, marketing, and distribution of that stuff rather than the re-distribution and maintenance of it.  I expect a large resistance from manufacturers as they are asked to profit not from producing and selling but from organizing and redistributing products.  We are, after all, known as ‘consumers’ rather than ‘users’ (or even ‘people’).  Consumers consume things, after all; in the Collaborative Consumption model, we might better be described as ‘sharers’.  It will require a fundamental shift in the corporate DNA of many companies to address this change, from selling the product to selling the function it provides.

Second, many of the profitable business models now using collaborative consumption rely heavily on the internet and its related infrastructures.  Should access to that infrastructure be disrupted or inhibited (by cost, natural disaster, or Godzilla) the geographically dispersed collaborative communities cease to function.

Botsman and Rodgers contend that ‘ . . . the more space and time we spend dedicated to accumulating stuff in our lives, the less room we have for other people.’  With the rise of collaborative consumption, I hope the corrollary is also true.

Burning Man

I spent last week at Burning Man, a festival of 40,000+ people in the Nevada desert north of Reno.  I gave a presentation on our travels in sustainable communities (www.intentionallivingproject.blogspot.com) and had the good fortune to be on a panel with several other folks who were working with communities around the world. 

Black Rock City becomes the third largest city in Nevada during Burning Man.  Its airport, mail service, and radio station only exist for the seven days of the festival.  During the rest of the year Black Rock City has nothing but desert dirt and wind.

We’ve traveled through a lot of intentional communities, and the generosity I experienced at BM was up with the best of them.  Within walking a couple hundred feet of where we were camping I was given fuzzy dog slippers, beer and song at an impromptu Irish bar, and a chunk of tasty chocolate.  BM operates on a gift economy, meaning that people brings their gifts (food, music, art, etc) and share them without money or even the expectation that they will receive a gift in kind.  The only things you can buy are ice and coffee.

There were literally miles of ‘streets’ (the entire festival packs up completely each year, leaving nothing behind – the concept of ‘street’ is a temporary one), so you can imagine the conversations and gifting that would happen if you had time to walk them all, which you would not.

In six days, I saw three pieces of trash.  There are no trash cans or trash pick-up services; everyone took care of their own.

It was fascinating to be part of a community that had the expectation of personal expression.  I felt most out-of-place when I was not dressed up in costume or outwardly exhibiting some form of creative expression (driving a flame-throwing four-wheeled pedal-powered bicycle, for example).  The norms of the Burning Man community were clearly that you should do something creative to share with those around you – the quickest way to get derided was to walk around in khakis and a baseball cap.

Pirate ships don't build themselves, indeed.

http://www.burningman.com/