May 14, 2012

Creating a Peer-to-Peer Economy

Tompkins Weekly May 14, 2012

by Alex Colket

Cities have so much potential. Consider for a moment the tremendous diversity of experiences you could have, people you could meet, products you could buy/trade/share, services you could contract, and the skills you could learn just within downtown Ithaca. The dense format of city living offers so many possibilities, yet our access to these opportunities is quite limited. It may be relatively easy to connect to the resources offered by local businesses, but we have poor knowledge of all the amazing things that others in our community have to offer. So much potential is wasted because we are not connected enough with the people around us.

In a world of infinite abundance and total equality, perhaps this would be fine; but in a world where we are facing climate change, resource depletion, and social injustice, this is just not acceptable. We are voraciously consuming  resources from around the globe – much to the detriment of our environment – while leaving our community capital massively underutilized. If we wish to continue living in a society that affords us a degree of convenience and opportunity similar to what we currently enjoy, we need to find a way to make more efficient use of what we already have.

Of course, this is how it used to be. Towns, tribes, villages and other types of communities historically supported themselves just fine without relying on the outside world to meet their needs. However, as the density of our settlements increased and the pace of life quickened, we began to lose touch with what the people around us had to offer, and we instead turned to businesses and brands to support us. This shift has since snowballed out of control to the point where selling, bartering, and sharing amongst neighbors is nothing but a fringe movement, and the community-based economies that worked so well for so long have been almost entirely replaced by globalization.

With this new economic infrastructure so firmly entrenched, how can we ever hope to return to a model that grows our communities instead of corporations? Ironically, one of globalization’s greatest achievements – the Internet and the mobile web – offers us an incredible opportunity to do just that. In fact, it’s probably more than an opportunity at this point; with all the social, environmental and economic pressures pushing us in this direction, re-localization seems like an inevitability. The internet has already changed the way many of us live, but in the next 5-10 years it’s going to fundamentally  transform our society and serve as an operating system for new, sustainable way of living. Healthy communities and strong local economies will serve as a foundation for this new future.  This time around, we are all going to work together to do it right.

By harnessing the power of the mobile, social web and all the amazing tools it offers for sharing, organization, collaboration, and discovery, we will build a vibrant peer to peer economy where we buy, sell, share, trade, rent, and give directly with the people around us. As we go online and use these tools to communicate with each other about what we have to offer and what we need, we will be able to make better use of our resources and take full advantage of opportunities to help one another. Suddenly, all these assets that are sitting around underutilized – spaces that are not filled, possessions that are not wanted, skills that are not used, time that is wasted – will become commodities that we can leverage to support ourselves and meet our needs. This new economic model is variously being called collaborative consumption, the sharing economy, or the peer to peer economy, and as it takes hold it will disrupt globalization and help us pave a path to a more just and sustainable future.

I believe that this step of rebuilding communities and strengthening our local economies is one of the most impactful things we can do if we wish to solve the myriad environmental, social, and economic problems we currently face. I think the web offers us a chance to make this happen very soon. To this end, I’ve spent the last 15 months of my life working to build a web platform called Swidjit. to facilitate this exciting future. The current site is just a start, but with your participation and feedback, we can grow it into a powerful tool and use it to make this place even more amazing. Check it out to browse the latest listings as a guest, or login to post your own haves/wants/events/thoughts/etc. Your involvement will help support Swidjit’s efforts to build a thriving, inclusive, collaborative community and a brighter future.

Alex Colket is the founder of Swidjit and a member of the Sustainable Tompkins board of directors.

May 7, 2012

Lessons to Be Learned from the Maya

Tompkins Weekly May 7, 2012

By Richard W. Franke

On January 18, 909 C.E. (Common Era, or A.D.) a master carver put the last known date on a stone monument in Central America, then a part of the large Mayan civilization (Wright 2004:99). Thus ended the famous “Long Count” calendar of the Maya, a calendar recently revived by some mystics (and some commercial interests?) who have extrapolated its calculations to predict massive disasters on earth in December of 2012.

To see what will happen in December of this year we shall have to wait a few months, but we do know that Maya civilization collapsed in the ninth or tenth century, well ahead of both 2012 and the Spanish colonial conquest. One expert has estimated that during a 75-year period around that time the total population of the Maya dropped from 3 million to 450 thousand.

For academics the Maya collapse has stoked interest almost as keen as that for Rome – the subject of our previous Steps to Sustainability article. Maya civilization encompassed large urban areas such as Tikal that may have had 40,000 residents around 600 C.E. Maya temples have fascinated observers. They strongly influenced the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright and played lead popular culture roles in the final scenes of the first episode of Star Wars.

During the classical or high period of Maya culture – 250 C.E. to 900 C.E. – the Maya built massive pyramids and carved masterful stone sculptures. They developed a complex writing system, created and utilized an efficient mathematics based on the number twenty and including the zero concept. Maya calculations of the times of the orbits of earth, Venus, and the moon and some eclipses, are within one point of modern astronomical values. Many Mayan computations were carved in stone on “stelae,” or ceremonial posts at the entrance to temples, neighborhoods or other sites.

Maya civilization was ultimately based on access to water and on maintaining the delicate soil of the region. Most of the area has a limestone base and lacks large rivers so the Maya accessed water by organizing their communities around “cenotes,” or large open wells. They also dug impressive canals – some up to a mile long, one hundred feet wide and ten feet deep. Water tended to seep down through the limestone base and water was always liable to slip away, especially as the region was vulnerable to droughts.

The demands of the spreading urban empires during the classical period, including the need to support rulers, soldiers, artists and perhaps a large priestly caste that carried out rituals, calculated solar orbits and managed the complex calendar system put pressure on the resource base. Occasional droughts interacted with the vulnerable soil and water limiting factors.

Archaeological research confirms significant inequality in height between Maya buried in tombs – thus higher classes – and those buried simply in the ground. Commoners had lower life expectancy and higher childhood nutritional deficiencies – differences striking enough to show up in the bones from the burials. The corn, squash, avocado, root crops and cotton produced could not continue to support the large the large unequal social structure. Eventually even the aristocrats began to suffer. Forests were turned to grasslands and mountain slopes were eroded when trees were chopped down. It is possible that the deforestation intensified the tendency towards droughts. Whenever droughts did hit, various cities went to war with each other, desperate to control the little water left in a region.

The Maya built a remarkable civilization on one of earth’s most vulnerable resource bases. Despite their great artistic and mathematical achievements they never solved the problem of managing their relationship to their life support system and they never abolished their highly hierarchical class system that contributed so much to their collapse.

Richard W. Franke is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology: Montclair State University, New Jersey, a resident of Ecovillage at Ithaca and a Board Member of Sustainable Tompkins.

April 30, 2012

The Collapse of Rome

Tompkins Weekly  April 30, 2012

By Richard W. Franke

On September 4, in the Christian calendar year A. D. 476, the Roman Empire collapsed when a Germanic soldier named Odoacer deposed the last Emperor, Romulus Augustulus. Following this event, Europe fell into 1,300 years of food shortages, trade breakdown, epidemics, invasions, and general public insecurity. The collapse of one of the two or three largest empires in history has fascinated scholars and pundits for hundreds of years. Theories about the collapse of Rome abound. Was it moral degeneration, overextended supply lines, lead poisoning, malaria, peasant revolts, Germanic tribes? Does the fall of Rome teach us anything about sustainability?

The collapse in 476 A.D. was not exactly of the Roman Empire: it was the collapse of the Western Roman Empire – the one with its capital in Rome. Often forgotten is that the Eastern half of the classical Roman Empire – with its capital in Byzantium (now Instanbul) – continued as a centralized state for another 1,000 years.

Recent research suggests that Rome collapsed in part by introducing unsustainable food policies into key parts of the Empire. The Roman conquest of Gaul (France plus some other territories) in the first century BCE (Before the Common Era, or B.C.)  added thousands of square miles and enormous agricultural resources to the empire. At first, the benefits of domination far outweighed the costs of the conquest. The Roman conquest coincided with something called the Roman Warm Period. Warmer than average temperatures in Northwest Europe during this time tempted the Mediterranean-based conquerors to introduce Southern European cash crops into regions that had previously been too cold. Varied, local crops that had been adapted to the main weather patterns of the region were replaced. Cash crops were immediately of high value and local intercropping was abolished in many areas. Then, around 300 AD the warm period ended. The cash crops – and the local economy – crashed. What had been a boon to the treasury turned into high-cost military expenditures to control the heavily taxed farmers in Gaul. What little surplus there was went to pay the salaries of the soldiers. The army could not fully contain the situation, however, and large chunks of the (Western) empire in and around Gaul broke off for much of the late third century and again in the fourth.

In this brief historical vignette we may be seeing the workings of something in ecology known as Liebig’s Law, or, the Law of the Limiting Factor. We know it in modern English by the folk saying of the “Achilles Heel.” According to this law, any system at any time has at least one factor that limits its expansion or survival. Systems can have changing limiting factors and they can also have more than one. Limiting factors can be outside factors (often called drivers or forcings), or they can be internal to the structure of the system.

According to this view, for the Roman Empire, a key limiting factor was the need to fill the central treasury with funds to pay the troops. This structural feature of the Empire interacted with an outside driver: the weather. The decision to conquer Gaul and then the decision to bet on the continuation of Mediterranean weather where it had not typically occurred increased the system’s vulnerability to disturbance. The Empire depended on the remittances from conquered areas. Big conquests meant big remittances. Cash crops meant bigger remittances. Inequality between the Roman central state and its conquered people’s made the system continuously vulnerable to uprisings. The changing weather was a trigger. In a way The Roman Empire collapsed because – well, it was an empire.

Richard W. Franke is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology: Montclair State University, New Jersey, a resident of Ecovillage at Ithaca and a Board Member of Sustainable Tompkins.