Archive for July, 2012

High Design, Light Footprint: Bamboo as Green Replacement for Plastic and Steel

by Editors @ Thursday, July 26th, 2012. Filed under Environment, Green Industry, High Design

Zuri Handcrafted Bamboo Bicycles Out of Africa

By Chris Weiss
Gizmag.org

July 25, 2012 - No matter how many bamboo bicycles we see - and we have seen a few - they continue to astound with their otherworldly looks. Zuri is a German operation that hand builds bicycles in Africa out of locally sourced bamboo. It's multi-hued bamboo-framed bikes are designed for both city commuting and mountain biking.

Bamboo has taken off as a building material in recent years thanks to its sustainable growth, light weight and durability. Its distinctive looks don't hurt, either, especially on a bike, where they serve as a contrast to the traditional metal frame.

Zuri is the venture of two Germans, David Hoffmann and Philipp Sayler. The company is based in Munich, but it builds its bikes out of a small village in Zambia, where the bamboo is harvested. Though bamboo is a simple material, Zuri crafts it into ornate bicycles - the rich grain and multiple shades of bamboo combine to create bicycles that are almost guaranteed to earn looks and questions.

Zuri harvests bamboo when it's approximately three years old. After several days of impregnation, it dries the bamboo in an incubator for two months. Then, it selects the strongest bamboo tubes and constructs them into frames. The most stressed parts of the frames, including the head tube and bottom bracket, are made from CNC machined aluminum. The process to create the finished product takes about 50 hours of work, according to the company.

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Green Energy Partners: Farmers Coop & Hospital Wind Turbines Power Community

by Editors @ Thursday, July 19th, 2012. Filed under Economic Democracy, Green Energy, Solidarity Economy

Wisconsin's First Community Wind Farm Up and Running

By Jessica Larsen

SolidarityEconomy.net via LaCrosse Tribune

CASHTON, WIS. — Wisconsin’s first community wind project is now up and running in Cashton.

A joint project of Organic Valley and Gundersen Lutheran’s Envision program, the Cashton Greens Wind Farm features two wind turbines expected to generate nearly 5 megawatts of energy for Cashton’s power grid — enough to power 1,000 homes each year.

The energy produced with the $10.5 million project will more than offset electricity used at Organic Valley’s Cashton Distribution Center and its La Farge headquarters facilities, and it represents about five percent of Gundersen’s energy independence goal.

As developers and owners of the wind farm, Organic Valley and Gundersen will receive income per kilowatt hour generated. Organic Valley will buy back its portion of energy to offset its footprint through a renewable energy contract with the villages of Cashton and La Farge.

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Cuba’s Coming Co-operative Economy?

by Editors @ Wednesday, July 18th, 2012. Filed under Cuba, Economic Democracy, Socialism, Solidarity Economy


Reflections From

Two Recent Field Trips

Marcelo Vieta
SolidarityEconomy.net

Socialist Project

The Bullet

E-Bulletin No. 667
July 18, 2012

In 2011, I made two trips to Cuba to study the new co-operatives.

In June I was kindly invited by Camila Piñeiro Harnecker, a professor at the University of Havana and one of the country's leading experts on its co-operative movement, to participate in two conferences.

In December, Wendy Holm (Canadian agronomist and co-operative facilitator working in Cuba for the last dozen years) extended an invitation to participate in the “Walking the Walk: Cuba's path to a more co-operative and sustainable economy” workshops, again in Havana.

Both trips had international guests share experiences and knowledge of the co-operative organizational model with our Cuban hosts. The backdrop was, on both occasions, the recently proposed economic reforms coming out of los nuevos lineamientos (the new guidelines) of the Sixth Congress of the Communist Party of Cuba, completed and released on April 18, 2011.

Both of these experiences were eye opening and inspirational, and full of promise for a possible broadening of the co-operative movement in Cuba, while building lasting transnational networks of co-op practitioners and researchers from Cuba and afar. In a nutshell, these trips suggest that Cuba stands on the brink of making a major effort to build a co-operative-based sector. This recalls some of the classic thinking of Robert Owen, William King, George Holyoake, and even Karl Marx, on a co-operative based society. But, undoubtedly, major challenges along this path remain for Cuba, as they have for other state-centred command economies as they entered a period of structural transformation. The following is a report from these field trips and the discussions at the conferences.

Almost instantly upon arriving in Cuba in late June of 2011 I noticed the wherewithal of its people, especially their tenacity to get by on little. In many ways, I discovered, Cubans have already been forging an alternative socio-economic reality for decades now. For instance, we can think of how they revolutionized their agricultural sector during and after the Special Period, making Cuba the first nation to adopt a predominantly organic farming sector rooted in agricultural co-ops and the notion of subsidiarity (i.e., economic activity with a strong focus on the local and managed by local people).

The Potential for a Boom in Co-operatives

Havana billboard: “We are working – and you?”

The two conferences I presented at in June 2011 were exceptional, if ultimately a bit surprising for me in ways.

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Everything Is Connected to Everything Else –and Something Emerges from Emptiness

by Editors @ Monday, July 16th, 2012. Filed under Energy, High Design, Science

‘Dark Matter’ Filaments Detected for the First Time

By Brian Dodson

SolidarityEconomy.net via Gizmag July 14, 2012

A view of the distribution of dark matter in our universe, based on the Millennium Simulat...

A view of the distribution of dark matter in our universe, based on the Millennium Simulation. The simulation is based on our current ideas about the universe's origin and evolution. It included ten billion particles, and consumed 343,000 cpu-hours (Image: Virgo Consortium)

For the first time, a team of astronomers has "observed" a filament of dark matter connecting two neighboring galaxy clusters. Dark matter is a type of matter that interacts only very weakly with light and itself. Its very nature is mysterious. Mapping the dark matter filament's gravity was the key to the breakthrough. The result is considered a crucial first step by scientists. It provides the first direct evidence that the universe is filled by a lacework of dark matter filaments, upon which the visible matter in the universe is distributed like small beads.

Jörg Dietrich of the physics department at the University of Michigan, together with his co-workers, examined gravitational lensing in the Abell 222 and 223 galaxy clusters. These clusters each have about 150 galaxies, are about 2.4 Gly (1 Gly being a gigalight-year, or 1 billion light-years) distant from Earth, and are separated by about 0.4 Gly. Earlier work by Dietrich's team using the 8.2 meter Subaru telescope on Mauna Kea, and the XMM-Newton x-ray space telescope discovered that these two clusters appear to be connected by a bridge of hot gas, as shown below.

Composite astrograph of the Abell 222 and 223 galaxy clusters as seen in visible light and by x-rays - the filament of dark matter between the two is suggested by the hot x-ray emitting gas (shown in dark red) gathered along the filament (Image: ESA/ XMM-Newton/ EPIC/ ESO (J. Dietrich)/ SRON (N. Werner)/ MPE (A. Finoguenov)

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Privatization in Reverse: Texas Town’s Solidarity Economy

by Editors @ Saturday, July 14th, 2012. Filed under Economic Democracy, High Road Economics, Solidarity Economy

Abandoned Walmart Recycled As Public Library

By Beth Buczynski
SolidarityEconomy.net via Common Dreams   

The news that a city will be getting a new Walmart often evokes a mixture of dread, anger, and apathy from its residents.

The global giant has captured a huge portion of the discount retail market share, claiming it helps people "live better" thanks to absurdly low prices. Of course, Walmart's low prices are only possible because of low standards of living, low wages paid to those in its supply chain, and low levels of concern for it own employees, but I digress.

 

In recent years, there's been something of a grassroots backlash against Wal-Mart Inc., as people have started to realize the damage a single Walmart can do to the small businesses that make up a local economy. In a few cases, there's even been news of Walmart stores closing, effectively run out of town by citizens strongly opposed to its economic, environmental, and social practices.

While this represents a win for the citizens who organized the ouster, it creates an equally big challenge. Namely, what does one do with the cavernous commercial space left behind by an abandoned Walmart?

The citizens of McAllen, Texas, a city of about 130,000 located in the southernmost tip of the state, experienced just such a vaccum after Walmart closed and then abandoned a 124,500 sq. foot space. Instead of searching for another big box retailer to take it's place, the City decided to reclaim the space as a public library.

Meyer, Scherer & Rockcastle, Ltd. of Minneapolis were selected to design the interior of the building which is about the size of 2 1/2 football fields. After stripping out all the old walls, shelves, and ceiling tiles, the space was given a fresh coat of paint and major upgrade.

The cavernous space now houses an auditorium, computers lab, classrooms and meeting rooms, and adult and teen reading lounges — not to mention hundreds of thousands of books -- earning it the title of the largest single-story library location in the U.S.

The best part of this entire transformation story is that following the re-launch of the library, new user registration increased by 23 percent. That means a lot of people were talking, learning, sharing, and supporting their community instead of simply buying a giant box of laundry soap or cheap patio furniture made in China. And that's what I call upcycling for the win. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

Beth Buczynski is a freelance writer and editor living in the Rocky Mountain West. Stay in touch with Beth on Twitter as @ecosphericblog and @GoneCoworking



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‘Down Under’ Waves Cranking Out Endless Green Energy

by Editors @ Friday, July 13th, 2012. Filed under Energy, Green Energy, High Design, Technology

Lockheed Martin and OPT team up on Australian 19 MW wave Energy Project

By Darren Quick
SolidarityEconomy.net via Gizmag.org

July 12, 2012 - Lockheed Martin has teamed up with Ocean Power Technologies (OPT) to develop one of the world’s largest wave energy generation projects.

The 19-megawatt project to be located off the southern coast of Australia in Portland, Victoria, will be built around OPT’s PowerBuoy technology that has previously been trialed by the U.S. Navy off the coast of New Jersey for powering remote sea-based radar and communications systems.

Here’s how it works:

watch?v=EsRzTl6Q24E&feature=player_embedded

The PowerBuoy is a completely autonomous device that generates electricity via a sub-surface piston-like structure that is moored to the ocean floor and an electrical generator is driven by the mechanical rise and fall of the surface buoy as it bobs up and down on the ocean waves. The electricity generated is transmitted back to shore via an underwater cable.

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Argentina’s 200+ ‘Recovered’ Factories – A New Global Trend?

by Editors @ Sunday, July 8th, 2012. Filed under Argentina, Economic Democracy, Labor Movement, Latin America, Mondragon, Solidarity Economy, Unemployment, Youth

 

Can co-operatives crowd out capitalism?

Co-ops – democratic, community-focused – offer an egalitarian way out of our current mess.

By Wayne Ellwood
SolidarityEconomy.net via The New Internationalist

In the eyes of the mainstream media and the high priests of the free market, Argentina just doesn’t get it.

This past May, the country was savaged by the international business press for nationalizing the Spanish-owned oil company, YPF. Scarcely mentioned was the fact that Argentina’s oil and gas industry was only ‘privatized’ in the late-1990s under pressure from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other hardline enforcers of then fashionable neoliberal economic policies. Like many countries around the world, Argentina’s oil industry used to be state-owned.

Back in 2001, the knives were out again. After years of enforced austerity and ‘structural adjustment’ the resource-rich South American country was awash in debt, crippling inflation, staggering unemployment and negative economic growth. (Notice any parallels with present day Greece and Spain?)

The IMF’s prescription for setting the economy right – ‘flexible’ labour conditions, deregulation, loosening of capital controls, privatization of state-owned assets, devaluation of the national currency – only made things worse.

With inflation raging and tens of thousands of workers on the streets, the government finally called it quits, defaulting on its debt and devaluing its currency. Predictably, the kingpins of global finance went ballistic, warning that Argentina would sink into penury and chaos.

It didn’t happen. Over the next decade the country’s GDP grew by nearly 90 per cent, the fastest in Latin America. Poverty fell and employment rose steadily while government spending on social services slowly increased.

Many factors contributed to this astounding turnaround, including the determination of Argentineans to strike an independent economic course not reliant on the whims of foreign capital.

But a significant part of its success is rooted in Argentina’s rich history of co-operatives. Waves of Jewish and Italian immigrants brought the co-operative vision with them during the early 20th century. Co-ops were well established, especially in agriculture, prior to the financial and political meltdown in 2001. According to the International Co-operative Association (ICA), nearly a quarter of the South American country’s 40 million people are linked directly or indirectly to co-operatives and mutual societies.

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The ‘Jackson Plan’: Solidarity Economy and Popular Power In the South

by Editors @ Friday, July 6th, 2012. Filed under African-American, Economic Democracy, Elections, Organizing, Solidarity Economy, Youth

A Struggle for Self-Determination,

Participatory Democracy, and Economic Justice

Written by Kali Akuno

For the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

A major progressive initiative is underway in Jackson, Mississippi. This initiative demonstrates tremendous promise and potential in making a major contribution towards improving the overall quality of life of the people of Jackson, Mississippi, particularly people of African descent. This initiative is the Jackson Plan and it is being spearheaded by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM) and the Jackson People’s Assembly.

The Jackson Plan is an initiative to apply many of the best practices in the promotion of participatory democracy, solidarity economy, and sustainable development and combine them with progressive community organizing and electoral politics. The objectives of the Jackson Plan are to deepen democracy in Mississippi and to build a vibrant, people centered solidarity economy in Jackson and throughout the state of Mississippi that empowers Black and other oppressed peoples in the state.

The Jackson Plan has many local, national and international antecedents, but it is fundamentally the brain child of the Jackson People’s Assembly. The Jackson People’s Assembly is the product of the Mississippi Disaster Relief Coalition (MSDRC) that was spearheaded by MXGM in 2005 in the wake of Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of Gulf Coast communities in Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and Texas. Between 2006 and 2008, this coalition expanded and transformed itself into the Jackson People’s Assembly. In 2009, MXGM and the People’s Assembly were able to elect human rights lawyer and MXGM co-founder Chokwe Lumumba to the Jackson City Council representing Ward 2.

What follows is a brief presentation of the Jackson Plan as an initiative to build a base of autonomous power in Jackson that can serve as a catalyst for the attainment of Black self-determination and the democratic transformation of the economy.

Program or Pillars

The J – K Plan has three fundamental programmatic components that are designed to build a mass base with the political clarity, organizational capacity, and material self-sufficiency to advance core objectives of the plan. The three fundamental programmatic components are:

Building People’s Assemblies Building a Network of Progressive Political Candidates Building a broad based Solidarity Economy

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