Make Every Dollar Count

For anyone looking for a new leaf to turn over this New Year's Day, start at the most basic level. We live in a world of dollars. They often determine where we will work, for how long and ultimately how they will be spent. The local currency that we use is just a reflection of our efforts. Therefore how we spend them can reflect much about what we do and believe in. I recently went to a website that offered to calculate my lifetime carbon footprint with the ultimate goal of "offsetting" it through reforestation. This can be done at several sites, and it gives us a way to look at our energy use in a whole new light. Since I started paying for energy, budgetary concerns led me to be conservative. My first apartment became a workshop for efficiency techniques and innovative systems that mimicked nature. Because my compost was working out on a second floor balcony, I had relatively close contact with it. If insects colonized it, they provided food for my fish tanks. The rich liquid that I harvested from the under-gravel filter was used for fertilizing the trees that grew along the street. Occasionally I walk through that neighborhood and marvel at the difference between the trees that I watered with fish emulsion compared to those that did not get "the juice". Closing systems allow wealth as well as nutrients to cycle, creating generations of beneficial results for organisms enjoying the rich environment. As I found ways to live better on less, I realized many eternal truths that have shaped my understanding of sustainability, diversity, the give away and permaculture.

Some cities have developed local currencies that allow large groups to integrate and formalize barter systems. We have all felt the warm glow of outright giving, but in some transactions we need to be enriched in a more tangible or lasting way. Understanding that any form of currency is just an iconic representation of time, of human effort, of skills, or sometimes of less tangible "goods". Recently, I have had the opportunity to fall in with a group of junk-pickers who meet regularly. They often find things that are valuable, but not for them. We try to disburse them to appropriate locations where the recipients can get use out of them, without cost. a recent dumpster score was several hundred dollars worth of specialty clamps. The proprietor of a local string instrument repair workshop was flabbergasted that he was being presented with these tools of his trade. Throwing such wonderful tools away should be a crime, but in our capitalistic society, our perception of value has become quite arbitrary.

I would like to make the case for taking a critical look at how every dollar, that after all, just represents how we have spent our life force, is spent. Do we want to spill our nickels into the purses of those who receive huge government subsidies? Would we rather give our money to those who handcraft items that will be around for generations? Do we spend our time rewarding folks who walk their talk, or those who are greedily lusting after money, power and prestige? These sound like huge complicated questions, but really they are quite simple. As one begins to research and understand what the marketplace has to offer, and how dollars flow in our current system, deeper understanding and insight make their way into our consciousness. Certain choices become second nature and when less time is spent finding out about what each purchase means for our neighbors, our local environment and our community, we can truly sat that we are on our way to sustainability.

When I first started down this road, I discovered that mankind's history in the Northern Hemisphere has been fraught with examples of raping The North, carting off it's "resources", and creating boom and bust economies based on this extraction.The process continues to this day, but knowing that, I can try to work my magic to charm the lives of those northern communities by taking low impact vacations there and trying to wrest as many dollars from the south as possible to redistribute to folks who live sustainably in these northern climes. Don't misunderstand, when there are products that reflect a sustainable ethic, or truly "green" technologies, I will reward them wherever they are, but when faced with a choice of two sources, I always choose the northern producer over those closer to the equator. Similarly, if a business owner treats their employees like "human resources", to be exploited, I have no problem taking from them without giving back, or taking my business elsewhere. No product is so essential that we couldn't make due without it and people who only know how to take are jeopardizing their right to survival in my book.

It is time for us to embrace a new culture. One of cooperatively working with nature, natural systems and one another to eliminate waste, fraud and corruption. Living is giving. Understanding this important fact has the power to unleash vast reserves of human potential that lies dormant because of the commodification of nearly everything under the current capitalistic system. By reviewing our personal budget and understanding how it fits within a larger economic system, we can allocate our funds with much more precision and make decisions for where to spend our dollars that can transform our lives, our planet and the lives of those around us. In the New Year, let us all try to live a little more and spend a little less, making sure to reward those we care most about and make a friend in the local economy who will then be empowered to do the same for another, on and on to the betterment of our respective communities.