E-Waste? No Problem.

This is "Timmy."

Timmy is full of e-waste.

Where should Timmy go to put all this e-waste? Is there a place nearby which will take this e-waste from Timmy? Yes, there is! I found ecollective.com through Google, and then Mobius Computers through ecollective. Chris answered my voicemail in under 5 minutes, and within an hour I was dropping off 300 pounds of wires, cables, computers, monitors, and a printer. "If you'd have told me all this was going to fit in that little car I'd have never believed you," said Aaron, the supervisor. He was super friendly and knowledgeable and made the process painless and easy. "The state pays the charges for CRT recycling, since we're a certified recycler."

While The crew at Mobius unloaded Timmy, the other company I'd contacted to get my goodies called me back. Too late! Mobius Computers Corporate E-Waste Recyclers wins this round!

Prop 23 and co-opting the Tea Party

San Jose Mercury News:

Shirlee Pierce, a tea party activist in Solano County, says she contacted the Yes on 23 campaign on her own after doing research about the ballot initiative on the Internet. She's now organizing people to hand out Yes on 23 fliers at a Fairfield Safeway. "To begin with, nobody knows if there really is global warming or if it is just a big scam to enrich the solar companies,"said Pierce, who is retired.

Apparently, enriching out-of-state oil companies (who are meddling in our state's politics) is preferable to enriching local solar companies who are actually providing new, green jobs.

Growing produce and protein in an urban setting

Many people are aware these days of how far their food travels, becoming less fresh and using up petroleum to get to their table. The Suncurve is a demonstration project growing produce and protein in a very small footprint. It could be integrated into the side of a multi-tenant residence in an urban center, providing fresh greens and berries and even legumes year-round in many parts of the United States.

Renewable solar and wind energy powers a pump to circulate water through the 1" thick biomat, bringing fishwastes to the roots of the plants. Some organic matter falls from the vertical bed into the fish pond, feeding the fish. A more robust system could even be imagined, processing human wastes back into food.

The engineer in me thrills at this system of massive intervention and resource allocation. The permaculturist in me recoils at the embodied energy this system represents. The urban permaculturist in me rejoices at how many "green" jobs this sort of infrastructure could create while leveraging our current relative abundance of resources into a system that ensures a steady supply of extremely local food for years and years.

Space-Based Solar Power

PG&E has agreed to buy electricity from start-up Solaren. PG&E buys electricity from many sources. What's new here, is that Solaren plans to build their facility in orbit.

When Elon Musk got into solar cells, and electric cars, and low-cost orbital access, I told everyone I knew to watch for the the first commercial space-based solar power project to be announced. It's fun to be right.

Why do we need space-based solar power? You're going to hear many environmentalists and even my friends in the green/relocalization/power down movement get all up in your face and on the airwaves about what a bad project this is. What I hope we all come to realize is that the problem isn't that humans have an insatiable appetite for energy. It's that we use it so poorly, poisoning ourselves and dirtying our nest.

Environmentalists who have traditionally been anti-nuclear power have finally seen that it's a great alternative to fossil fuels. What they will hopefully see is that space-based solar power is an even better option, cleaner, greener, and more full of job opportunities and economic growth with far less risk than nuclear. Space-based solar power is less risky than even coal-fired plants.


This chart shows that, over time, we find more energy-dense sources and drive our standard of living higher. The saddle shape of each energy source (wood, coal, oil) reflects that it starts out expensive, leads to a nice decrease in cost, which then as the resource is used up (or replaced by a superior energy technology) increases again.

The only technology we've got that continues this trend is moving power generation off-planet.

The reason it's important to continue this trend, is there isn't a viable method to "conserve" our way out of the mess we're in. We've exported consumption idealism to the world. We didn't invent consumption; it's a ramped up version of celebrating abundance, which Life itself invented.

We can scale back, but the imperative of Life to grow and change become more complex and grander is unstoppable. As conscious beings, we get to choose how we focus on this imperative. We've done a poor(ish) job so far. We're realizing our choices have far-reaching consequences. So we need to find solutions that reduce the impact on the planet, on people, on the ability of future generations to care for themselves. The best solutions will be enabling technologies, creating the foundation for future abundance.

To reach these goals, our best choice is space-based solar power.

California Urban Lumber

A huge volume of our nation's green waste is from trees, taken from populated areas, felled and shredded. Some quick searching led me to believe it could be as much as one-third. And yet, we log along stream-beds and in environmentally sensitive areas, shipping logs and lumber great distances, burning up more fuel.

Companies such as California Urban Lumber remove logs from municipalities and incorporated areas (Never a log from the Rainforest! is one of their mottoes) and mill them into lumber. The wood is used locally for furniture manufacture and for construction. The lumber is air-dried rather than kiln-dried (because it is more sustainable). To become even more "green," they might be getting solar-electric panels soon, further helping to make urban forestry a 21st century solution.

As we move into a future where energy costs more, I really admire people who are learning how to make cities more self-sustaining. Cities are already pretty efficient at distributing resources, but there is room for improvement. I hope urban planners are becoming more savvy to ways we can close resource cycles. They could look to urban forestry for an example.

Marketing the future

Marketing is so much fun. How we talk and think about what we talk and think about actually eliminates some of our choices. Which is somewhat of a good thing, since there are really too many choices each day. We need a shorthand. We need to shortcut sometimes.

Marketing preys on this need.

We've finally entered the peak-oil part of the supply curve, and as feeding our oil habit gets more expensive, we can all agree we want relief. The folks who got us into this problem, who reacted to the first oil shock in the 70s by very effectively killing research and implementation of alternative energies, are still around.

Their solution? Drill more.

Look how effective the first ad is. "Find It. Drill It." You can almost hear your stern Father commanding your obedience ("Tell Congress"), and the implicit promise that if you live according to his rules, everything will be okay. Isn't that what we want from Dad? A firm hand and the surety that he's paying the bills? I want me some of that stability!

Look how effective the other ad is. "Free Us." Gentle colors, nurturing spokesperson, you can almost feel yourself sitting comfortably in the kitchen, your gentle parents encouraging you to make your own choice... while letting you know the best choice not only solves the immediate problem of energy scarcity but also creates new opportunities, many of them for someone other than you, in terms of green jobs.

I wonder what would happen if the two sides switched the focus of their marketing? People who voted for Bush, who think Cheney is a statesman, looking at a touchy-feely ad to increase drilling? Or on the other hand, crunchy hippies looking at an ad full of command and control telling them what to do?

Oh, by the way, the first ad is from a front organization for Petroleum Partners. So you know they are after just more of the same: drill, pollute, and concentrate the money in the hands of a few people. The second is an organization working within the policy framework of Al "We can shop our way out of this problem" Gore. As the ideas of green jobs and sustainability work their way into that population, we might come up to some real solutions.

That's my hope, in any case. We really need to level out the income structure in this country. Creating jobs is something I am sure everyone can agree on. Perhaps that's the ad that I really want to see: something in the "strict father" vein that clearly communicates the employment opportunities within the sustainability movement.

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Green Collar Jobs

The opportunity before us is to create a new economy filled with Green Collar jobs. My friends at DIG Coop are early adopters; they can design and install a gray water system, for example, and they offer job training too.

Say what you will about the space programs of the US and Russia, but they have been responsible for the livelihood of legions of engineers, technicians and scientists. We are inspired by images the Hubble Space Telescope brings to us. The origin of these benefits, concrete and intangible, can be traced back to a group of German students studying to be civil engineers nearly 100 years ago. When they needed work, there was none in what they had trained to do, but Werner von Braun put their skills to use. He built rockets. The V-2 was a terrible weapon of war, true. Can we do better?

We have a similar labor pool now, here in the US; our vast number of underemployed, near-poverty workers. Our country has a shameful number of poor people for being a "developed" nation. Green Collar jobs cover a wide spectrum of skill, training and investment, from soil testing and ditch digging, to edible landscapes, to the design of energy systems for homes, businesses or municipalities. With cradle to cradle design, materials sciences, there are opportunities for highly skilled workers. In the service sector, Green Coaching has begun to help people re-invent their lives to be more sustainable as they live within a responsible ecologic footprint.

Let's be conscious of the deep yearning people have to do meaningful work, and together continue to find ways to develop Green Collar jobs.