There are many ways for us to minimize resource consumption to lower our environmental impact and simultaneously ensure that all of our needs are met. Here are some resources, grouped the same way as our home page. If you’ve got more ideas, please send them to us!
WASTE RECLAMATION
Urban Foraging / Dumpster Diving – The practice of recovering useable items from dumpsters or street curbs that have been needlessly discarded. Loads of resources in this section, take the time to drill down!
Food Not Bombs – Food Not Bombs recovers food that would otherwise go to waste to serve warm meals on the street to anyone who wants it. They promote an ethic of sharing and community while working to expose the injustice of a society where fighting wars is considered a higher priority than feeding the hungry.
WASTE MINIMIZATION
Free Markets – Events where you can swap goods (You know, the stuff that is too good to throw away but you shouldn’t keep), share skills, give presents, eat food, hang out, dance, sing and have fun — all for free!
Freestores – Imagine a store where everything is free! A place where you can bring the things that you no longer need but others can use and where others can do the same. It’s happening some, could happen more.
Freecycle and other internet based swap networks (freesharing & recyclinggroupfinder ). You sign up for an email group for your community then you can announce items you are offering away for free. Other members who want items that were posted can simply arrange with the poster to pick them up. It’s all free!
Craigslist Free Section – Similar to Freecycle but you don’t need to join, just browse or post.
(go to the home page to find your city)
ECO-FRIENDLY TRANSPORTATION
Community Bike Programs and Bike Collectives – Groups that facilitate community sharing of bicycles, restore found and broken bikes, and teach people how to do their own bike repairs. In the process they build a culture of skill and resource sharing, reuse wasted bikes and bike parts, and create greater access to environentally friendly transportation.
Craigslist Ride Share and Spaceshare – Internet-based ridesharing – easier than the thumb and won’t get you harassed by cops.
(go to the home page to find your city)
RENT-FREE HOUSING
Squatting – Squatters find abandoned buildings and restore them into rent free housing and community centers with arts and educational programs for low-income communities.
Travel networks – The best known nowadays is Couchsurfing, but it includes Hospitality Club and the original, Servas. These networks allow people meet and build friendships with people from around the world by temporarily sharing a living space. Travelling without hotels demands cooperation, clear communication and generosity on both sides. It’s great practice in mutual aid for all involved. Read here and here for some ideas on how it works.
GOING GREEN
Guerilla and Community Gardens – Rebuilding community and reclaiming our capacity to grow our own food as an alternative to dependence and participation in exploitative and ecologically destructive systems of global industrialized corporate food production
Wild Foraging – Instead of buying industrially grown, pesticide sprayed, genetically engineered foods shipped half way around the world with resource intensive transportation technologies, wild foragers find and harvest food and medicinal plants growing in their own communities.
WORKING LESS
All of the practices described above will reduce the need to work at a meaningless and alienating job in the money economy, and have more time to give to what has been described as the “core economy”– home, family, neighborhood and community. Time Banking is a way to give and receive services without regard for how those services are valued by the money economy. Most time banks work on the basis of an hour of your time earns an hour of someone else’s, on a “pay it forward” basis– not a direct exchange with one other person, but a record of hours you’ve given that you can then redeem.