Consuming Thoughts: X

X is for “Exchange” Your Money for Action. George Bailey: …this rabble you’re talking about… they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. We do. 99.9% of businesses operating in the world are small to medium-sized businesses. In the US, small and medium-sized businesses employ over 60 million people. Currently, many of these businesses and their people are suffering. Cut off from sources of credit, capital and equity they are slowly, inexorably going broke.

Traditionally, small, community banks and lenders were there to serve small businesses and individuals. However, according to the Move Your Money post in the Huffington Post:

…America’s Main Street community banks — the vast majority of which avoided the banquet of greed and corruption that created the toxic economic swamp we are still fighting to get ourselves out of — are struggling. Many of them have closed down (or been taken over by the FDIC) over the last 12 months. The government policy of protecting the Too Big and Politically Connected to Fail is badly hurting the small banks, which are having a much harder time competing in the financial marketplace. As a result, a system which was already dangerously concentrated at the top has only become more so.

So, what can we do? Three things:

1. Continue to buy local. Small and medium-sized businesses are overwhelmingly local and regional businesses. Healthy cities and communities are sustained on a resilient web of local commerce and consumption.
2. Start saving and investing locally. Put your money in local, community-focused institutions. The folks at the Huffington Post have started the Move Your Money campaign and website where you can get information about how and where you can make a difference just by opening a bank account. Community banks, savings and loans and credit unions have a much bigger interest and stake in maintaining and growing a healthy community.
3. Check out this video. George Bailey or Mr. Potter? The choice is ours.

Tags: buy local, George Bailey, Its a Wonderful Life, Move Your Money, small and medium-sized business, The Huffington Post, too big to fail

Consuming Thoughts: I

I is for Inter-relations and What It All Means: John Lydon: Swimming in the slurry, burning in the heat, wind blown is the weather, I eat what you secrete. Nice thought that-and true. Breathe in, breathe out. You’ve just contributed to global warming. We are butterflies individually and collectively creating chaotic change with each flap of our bright, store bought wings. That means that literally everything we eat, drink, acquire and otherwise consume comes with a complex history of relationships, costs of production often hidden and externalized (The Story of Stuff is a delightfully depressing ode to this process.)

Things stay with us for a brief present (sometimes less than a minute of use)  and then can persist in some degraded form for hundreds of years. Take a look: take 10 minutes and start making a list of all the various relationships in which you became enmeshed through the last bottle of water you consumed. I doubt you’ll uncover them all, but please, don’t let me stop you. Imagine going through this process with everything single thing you buy. Not going to happen, is it?

So, as concerned but time-pressed consumers how can we take control of this complexity? Here’s a high impact start:

1. Buy local. Less complexity, more direct effect through shorter value chains.
2. Practice all 6 R’s: Reduce consumption. Reuse whatever possible. Recycle diligently. Repair what can be fixed. Refuse what you don’t need. Redesign how you live to accomplish the other five.
3. Rethink plastic: It tastes terrible, over 80% of it isn’t actually recycled, a staggering amount of it is unnecessary.
4. Create community: share stuff instead of buying what already exists in the neighborhood. Grow and share food. Share knowledge & experience. Share time.
5. Consider creating smaller families: The effects of over-population are not pleasant. Think famine, increased conflict and suffering, increased pressure on dwindling resources leading to large amounts of general unhappiness.

Yoda: Do or do not. There is no try.

Tags: buy local, chaos theory, Community, Do or do not. There is no try, John Lydon, recycle, reduce, refuse, repair, reuse, The Story of Stuff, Yoda