Earth Day Tips (but only for April Fools Day)

[Meatlad]

Earth Day was last week. Did you do anything for it? SFPK did. Efficiency is the new ideal in not only parkour, but in the auto industry and manufacturing in general. We're releasing a tip sheet at every jam from now on of ways that we can all help the environment. Feel free to print these out by the dozen and paste them on every surface you can reach.

Earth Day Tips:

14. Conserve energy: Turn off your headlights when driving at night if the road looks empty.

13. Conserve resources: Remember, toilet paper has 2 sides.

12. Recycle CDs by putting tape on them and using them as post-it notes.

11. Reduce our dependence on foreign oil by burying plastic bags in your backyard. In a few million years they will be oil again. Less time if you apply geologic pressure by placing an old refrigerator on the spot.

10. Nuclear energy is clean and safe as long as there's a place to store the waste: write your congressman and ask for it to be buried in your district.

9. Did You Know? Sugarcane-based biofuels work in your Prius - put sugar in your gas tank at a ratio of 1:4.

8. Compost your waste! Bury your batteries.

7. Don't recycle - re-use! Plastic forks, mugs & papers written for college can be put on the internet. Coworkers' accomplishments can be put on your resume! Even friends' girlfriends can be re-used on an occasional basis.

6. Carbon-sequestration strategies save resources: bury last season's clothes and draw a map to the spot. They will be in fashion again in about 20 years.

5. Most items we throw away have a 2nd life we never thought of: used tires can be made into swings or floating sea islands for turtles. 6-pack plastic rings are turtle and dolphin necklaces. Don't buy fur though: the SPCA produces perfectly good pelts all the time. Styrofoam is a great medium for making found art - leave it in the desert for a Burning Man-type to find.

4. Take advantage of unused energy sources: hook up exercycles at gyms to generators; hook your toilet up to the grid to make the most out of natural methane; burn as much wood as you can (it can grow back unlike oil).

3. Encourage investment in renewable energy technologies: Write your congressman and demand wind mills be hooked up to diesel generators to make them spin faster. Lobby for the forest industry - clearcut areas create room for solar panels. Put a wind turbine next to fans in your house to take advantage of the wind.

2. Encourage "green roofs" - start a petition in your office to replace your building's roof with a viking-style thatched roof made out of reeds, mud and ox dung.

1. Printers cause deforestation: load post-consumer grade paper such as used toilet paper in printers. Replace paper coffee cups with old toner cartriges.

Bonus idea:
-Cut yourself doing parkour? Bring a plastic bag to collect the blood and drop it off at a hospital on the way home.

[Kirill]

The following are premises of Derrick Jensen's book Endgame.

Premises of Endgame

Premise One: Civilization is not and can never be sustainable. This is especially true for industrial civilization.

Premise Two: Traditional communities do not often voluntarily give up or sell the resources on which their communities are based until their communities have been destroyed. They also do not willingly allow their landbases to be damaged so that other resources—gold, oil, and so on—can be extracted. It follows that those who want the resources will do what they can to destroy traditional communities.

Premise Three: Our way of living—industrial civilization—is based on, requires, and would collapse very quickly without persistent and widespread violence.

Premise Four: Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.

Premise Five: The property of those higher on the hierarchy is more valuable than the lives of those below. It is acceptable for those above to increase the amount of property they control—in everyday language, to make money—by destroying or taking the lives of those below. This is called production. If those below damage the property of those above, those above may kill or otherwise destroy the lives of those below. This is called justice.

Premise Six: Civilization is not redeemable. This culture will not undergo any sort of voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living. If we do not put a halt to it, civilization will continue to immiserate the vast majority of humans and to degrade the planet until it (civilization, and probably the planet) collapses. The effects of this degradation will continue to harm humans and nonhumans for a very long time.

Premise Seven: The longer we wait for civilization to crash—or the longer we wait before we ourselves bring it down—the messier will be the crash, and the worse things will be for those humans and nonhumans who live during it, and for those who come after.

Premise Eight: The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system.

Another way to put premise Eight: Any economic or social system that does not benefit the natural communities on which it is based is unsustainable, immoral, and stupid. Sustainability, morality, and intelligence (as well as justice) requires the dismantling of any such economic or social system, or at the very least disallowing it from damaging your landbase.

Premise Nine: Although there will clearly some day be far fewer humans than there are at present, there are many ways this reduction in population could occur (or be achieved, depending on the passivity or activity with which we choose to approach this transformation). Some of these ways would be characterized by extreme violence and privation: nuclear armageddon, for example, would reduce both population and consumption, yet do so horrifically; the same would be true for a continuation of overshoot, followed by crash. Other ways could be characterized by less violence. Given the current levels of violence by this culture against both humans and the natural world, however, it’s not possible to speak of reductions in population and consumption that do not involve violence and privation, not because the reductions themselves would necessarily involve violence, but because violence and privation have become the default. Yet some ways of reducing population and consumption, while still violent, would consist of decreasing the current levels of violence required, and caused by, the (often forced) movement of resources from the poor to the rich, and would of course be marked by a reduction in current violence against the natural world. Personally and collectively we may be able to both reduce the amount and soften the character of violence that occurs during this ongoing and perhaps longterm shift. Or we may not. But this much is certain: if we do not approach it actively—if we do not talk about our predicament and what we are going to do about it—the violence will almost undoubtedly be far more severe, the privation more extreme.

Premise Ten: The culture as a whole and most of its members are insane. The culture is driven by a death urge, an urge to destroy life.

Premise Eleven: From the beginning, this culture—civilization—has been a culture of occupation.

Premise Twelve: There are no rich people in the world, and there are no poor people. There are just people. The rich may have lots of pieces of green paper that many pretend are worth something—or their presumed riches may be even more abstract: numbers on hard drives at banks—and the poor may not. These “rich” claim they own land, and the “poor” are often denied the right to make that same claim. A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of pieces of green paper. Those without the green papers generally buy into these delusions almost as quickly and completely as those with. These delusions carry with them extreme consequences in the real world.

Premise Thirteen: Those in power rule by force, and the sooner we break ourselves of illusions to the contrary, the sooner we can at least begin to make reasonable decisions about whether, when, and how we are going to resist.

Premise Fourteen: From birth on—and probably from conception, but I’m not sure how I’d make the case—we are individually and collectively enculturated to hate life, hate the natural world, hate the wild, hate wild animals, hate women, hate children, hate our bodies, hate and fear our emotions, hate ourselves. If we did not hate the world, we could not allow it to be destroyed before our eyes. If we did not hate ourselves, we could not allow our homes—and our bodies—to be poisoned.

Premise Fifteen: Love does not imply pacifism.

Premise Sixteen: The material world is primary. This does not mean that the spirit does not exist, nor that the material world is all there is. It means that spirit mixes with flesh. It means also that real world actions have real world consequences. It means we cannot rely on Jesus, Santa Claus, the Great Mother, or even the Easter Bunny to get us out of this mess. It means this mess really is a mess, and not just the movement of God’s eyebrows. It means we have to face this mess ourselves. It means that for the time we are here on Earth—whether or not we end up somewhere else after we die, and whether we are condemned or privileged to live here—the Earth is the point. It is primary. It is our home. It is everything. It is silly to think or act or be as though this world is not real and primary. It is silly and pathetic to not live our lives as though our lives are real.

Premise Seventeen: It is a mistake (or more likely, denial) to base our decisions on whether actions arising from these will or won’t frighten fence-sitters, or the mass of Americans.

Premise Eighteen: Our current sense of self is no more sustainable than our current use of energy or technology.

Premise Nineteen: The culture’s problem lies above all in the belief that controlling and abusing the natural world is justifiable.

Premise Twenty: Within this culture, economics—not community well-being, not morals, not ethics, not justice, not life itself—drives social decisions.

Modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are determined primarily (and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these decisions will increase the monetary fortunes of the decision-makers and those they serve.

Re-modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are determined primarily (and often exclusively) on the basis of whether these decisions will increase the power of the decision-makers and those they serve.

Re-modification of Premise Twenty: Social decisions are founded primarily (and often exclusively) on the almost entirely unexamined belief that the decision-makers and those they serve are entitled to magnify their power and/or financial fortunes at the expense of those below.

Re-modification of Premise Twenty: If you dig to the heart of it—if there were any heart left—you would find that social decisions are determined primarily on the basis of how well these decisions serve the ends of controlling or destroying wild nature.

Reading suggestions:
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
Endgame by Derrick Jensen
Siddhartha or Damien by Hesse [chose one or all]
Culture of the Spectacle by Guy Debord
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.


If you read any one of those... :rolleyes:

Video recommendations:
http://www.youtube.com/murderd2death

[Meatlad]

Um... April Fools. :ugh:

[hillexallen]

PLEASE READ KIRILL'S POST

And here's the video for it: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8649250863235826256#

A few points...

1. Rather than making new laws and new technologies, how about we change our lifestyle completely? I think that we will need a change in mentality rather than a change in lifestyle.

2. I read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn, and it talks about a way of life called Tribalism. Tribalism is the form of society that humans used for hundreds of thousands of year before civilization came. It is sustainable, it is sane, it is healthy, and it is happy. I'm not saying it's perfect, but I'm sure it would be a lot better than what we have now. By the way, Ishmael addresses the myth of the noble savage in great detail.

3. Government is controlled mostly by industry. We shouldn't expect the government to cooperate in making laws that are bad for industry. i think the people should take matters into their own hands.

4. I have faith in humans, and I believe that all humans WANT the world to be a better place. I think the best thing we can do is to start talking to other people about new ways of living that would be more sustainable and happy.

SUMMARY

1. New technology and new laws probably won't fix the problem. I think we need a complete shift in mentality and culture.

2. Instead of relying on the government and other establishments to make change, we should create it ourselves. Let's organize and get out there!

3. "Ishmael" by Daniel Quinn is a book about this topic that I really recommend to everyone. The ideas outlined in it are obvious yet mindblowing.

4. Let's all start talking about finding new, happy, sustainable ways of living! When we figure out how we want to live, then we can start living that way.

LOLOLOLOL Meatlad.

I LOVE THE EARTH! :biggthumpup:

[hillexallen]

/i/ THREAD INVASION!!!

[Meatlad]

Green roofs! Let's grow our food on our roofs. Think of all the non-street surface area of a city in the form of roofs, and how much of it is just sitting empty with chipping paint and rusting vents. The first person to invent an affordable elevator to bring ox dung to the top of a skyscraper will become rich in money and soul. It will be called the poop chute.

[BENNY]

Money comes from taking, WEALTH comes from giving.

[Kirill]

Green roofs! Let's grow our food on our roofs. Think of all the non-street surface area of a city in the form of roofs, and how much of it is just sitting empty with chipping paint and rusting vents. The first person to invent an affordable elevator to bring ox dung to the top of a skyscraper will become rich in money and soul. It will be called the poop chute.
google 'permaculture'


bump.
Reading suggestions:
Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
Endgame by Derrick Jensen
Siddhartha or Damien by Hesse [chose one or all]
Culture of the Spectacle by Guy Debord
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.


If you read any one of those...

Video recommendations:
http://www.youtube.com/murderd2death

[lethalbeef]

Dude, hillex, your summary points are as long as your original points.

[BobTheKing]

I recognize the spirit of this thread was humorous, but I do have a ton of sincere energy and cost saving tips (many of which I use). Would anyone like me to start a thread on these (or does one exist)?

[2nd Chance]

Never a problem with those, as long as it doesn't get political (which is against forum rules).

[hillexallen]

I had an epiphany today. I now realize that our culture tends to exploit fundamental human needs instead of just fulfilling them! So:

1. Instead of paying for food (allowing my need for food to be exploited for money), I would like to grow/gather/hunt my own food.

2. Instead of playing video games and going to amusement parks (allowing my need for excitement to be exploited for money), I would like to find authentic methods for inducing adrenaline. I think most of us have this covered already.

3. Instead of paying for internet access to go on facebook and other networking sites (allowing my need for social activity to be exploited for money), I would like to move towards talking to people in real life all the time instead of using email, etc...

Just a few more: picking berries instead of buying berry-shaped candy, sitting around the glow of a campfire instead of the glow of a computer, running instead of driving a car, gathering information instead of paying for TV (corporate news), developing happiness through relationships with friends, family, and nature instead of buying artificial happiness like video games, drugs, etc...

I'll continue looking for more.

I think if we start fulfilling our needs instead of allowing them to be exploited, we will be much happier, and our lifestyle will be much more authentic and sustainable (not to mention we will have to spend far less money). :naughty:

[Beretta]

Growing your own food is win. Gathering is long work, though not necessarily hard. We all gathered blackberries together at a couple of the monthlies last summer/fall and some of the sleepovers at my old house. It takes a long time to get a little bit of food. Give it a shot, though, it's fun.

[Ronin524]

Square Foot Gardening is a great way to create your own self sustaining food source.
http://www.squarefootgardening.com/

[Meatlad]

Very astute observations Hillexallen! And yeah, the shorter points are way easier to read than the really long posts.

I like the idea of gathering and growing your own food, even if you only have enough space to grow a very small fraction of needed food.

Bob - put 'em wherever. It probably would be better to start another thread however, as people will likely not look in this one expecting to find real info due to the thread title and first post (which I am not removing even though it's after April Fools).

[2nd Chance]

Hillex, I totally agree that fulfilling your own needs is better. Yay self-fulfillment!

[hillexallen]

Growing your own food is win. Gathering is long work, though not necessarily hard. We all gathered blackberries together at a couple of the monthlies last summer/fall and some of the sleepovers at my old house. It takes a long time to get a little bit of food. Give it a shot, though, it's fun.

Yeah, my family has a really good garden in our backyard (my dad teaches horticulture), but I have been thinking about trying to grow my own garden in some random park in the city in a place where nobody really goes, or maybe at my school. Not sure that's doable or safe, but if not I'll just grow veggies and fruits in my backyard.

I've been talking to my dad about what foods grow here. Apparently carrots and broccoli do pretty well and don't take too terribly long to become edible.

I've never tried gathering food for subsistence, but it's something I will definitely be doing in the near future.

EDIT: Sorry for the long posts, I'm sorta in the habit because often when I make a short post I always need to go back and clarify stuff and answer questions.

[Corndogg]

I just planted some mini-corndogs, hopefully in a few months I will get a big lush corndog plant going!