I own a big-ass hammer drill, with a full set of wood, metal and concrete bits, hole saws, screwdriver bits – you name it. I use it once a year – max. So why do I own? Why do thousands of people in my city all own a drill they use no more than a few times a year? Because there’s no where you can go to borrow or rent one.

In contrast, although I own a bicycle, and tune it up every couple of months, I own very few bike tools. This is because I can go to The Bike Kitchen a non-profit bike shop where I can bring my bike, and pay only $7.50 an hour for access to a fully equipped bike shop and all the chain-oil, lubricants and duct tape I can use. And if I get in over my head, the staff will not only fix the bike for me (for a reasonable price) but teach me to do more complicated repairs myself.

I only need bike tools once every few months, so it would be a waste of money to buy them when I can just drop by a fully furnished bike shop. Similarly, I only need access to a car once or twice a month, so instead of buying one, I just borrow one from the Cooperative Auto Network, which has 10 cars within a two-block radius of my home. CAN is less expensive than other car sharing services (like Zipcar) because CAN is a non-profit.

This idea of collective use and a preference for renting/borrowing over owning is crucial to decreasing our consumption. Unfortunately, North American society suffers from a strong ownership-bias, which is continually fueled by corporatist interests. To overcome this destructively wasteful trend, two things must happen:

1. We must recognize candidates for collective use.

If you don’t use it at least once a week, you don’t need to own your own. Most people don’t need a fully equipped wood-working area. Or lawn mower. Or, second dining table. If you live in an apartment building, you may not need your own vacuum cleaner or washer/dryer. The casual ballplayer shouldn’t have to buy hundreds of dollars worth of sports equipment for a few games per year. Its simply more efficient to share rarely used items.

Another example that will become salient in the next few years is the EV (Electric Vehicle) range extender. When people hear that an all electric vehicle can only drive 100 km (or 50, or 200, or whatever) on a single charge, they freak out. Instead of thinking of the 99% of their trips within this limit, they think of the 1% that are longer. The way to combat this is through the collective use of range extenders (generally portable gas or diesel generators) that can be added to an EV for those rare longer trips. If you’re going to exceed your EV’s range once a week, it makes sense to own your own range extender, or have it permanently installed (as in a serial hybrid). If you’re going to exceed your EV’s range more rarely, you don’t want to be dragging around the extra weight of the range extender all the time, and why pay for it upfront anyway? It makes far more sense to pick one up from a nearby gas station (or some other sort of depot) before a big road trip.

2. We must develop collective-use infrastructure

It’s all well and good for me to sit here criticizing you for buying things instead of renting; meanwhile, nobody actually rents the things that you need! I’m not aware of any nearby organization that will rent me a tennis racquet or a set of drywalling gear. Three approaches to this problem are obvious.

First, before buying something you’ll use rarely, at least check to see if someone will lend or rent it to you. The least you can do is Google it.

Second, you can build your own rental cooperative around the things you already own but don’t use often. Talk to your neighbors. Stick up a website. Put an ad on your car. Just make sure you take a deposit or a piece of I.D. to make sure your belongings find their way home. Remember, the purpose of this is not to make you wad of cash, it’s to decrease consumption, so price reasonably.

Third, communities can take collective action to build sharing infrastructure. The city of Vancouver has been very supportive of the car co-op there. Citizens can pressure their city governments to support other kinds of sharing, such as community workshops where you build your own desk, depots where you can rent trailers or camping equipment and kid-meets where children can trade toys they’re tired of for “new” ones. The same can apply to communities of different sizes, including condo associations, streets, neighborhoods, schools, and so on.

It’s just like they teach in kindergarten: Share everything.

Related Posts:
The 10 Commandments of Everyday Minimalism
War on B.S. Humbug Edition – 25 Reasons I Hate Christmas
Kavan’s Top 5 Ways to Save Energy – The Big Picture

8. Rapid Extinction of Critical Species

Our food supply is composed of various interconnected plant and animal species. We sometimes forget just how interconnected they are. For instance, the entire oceanic ecosystem depends on phytoplankton (little floating plants). If phytoplankton were to rapidly die off, due to changing water temperature, acidity or perhaps a virulent disease, the entire oceanic ecosystem would collapse. Bye bye fish, sharks, whales, krill, crabs, lobster… everything. Our agriculture is also fundamentally dependent on a small number of key species: worms (which aerate the soil) and bees (which pollinate practically everything). If worms or bees were to suddenly die off, horrendous famine and mass extinction would follow.

7. Environmental Collapse

The theory of environmental collapse is based on the idea that most organisms are tightly interconnected. Thus ecosystems are web-like structures where each species depends, directly or indirectly, on many other species. Many scientists believe that there is a kind of diversity threshold such that, if we lose enough species, entire ecosystems will collapse. Given the alarming rate at which species are becoming extinct (somewhere in the order of 100 to 1000 times faster than normal), if such a threshold exists, we may be getting close.

This, of course, would not only cause horrifying environmental destruction for which our grandchildren would never forgive us, and eradicate all sorts of potential medicines, but also produce global famine.

6. Human Disease

The Black Plague killed half the population of Europe in the 14th century, when slow methods of travel (horses and tall ships) impeded its spread. A similar disease today could rapidly spread across six continents. It is possible that the right (wrong?) disease could kill practically everyone on the planet. This could be a natural occurrence or a biological weapon.

As a society, however, we like to flip out about every new strain of the flu and take dramatic, but entirely ineffective, steps to assuage public fear. We close schools and hassle airline passengers. What we don’t do is create a culture where it is unacceptable to go to work, go shopping, take public transit, or generally wander around coughing on people when you have a contagious infection. Meanwhile, we let sick people sit around cross-infecting each other in waiting rooms for hours because we don’t have enough doctors on staff. And more fundamentally, we don’t address the continual degradation of human immune systems due to nutritionally devoid diets and epidemics of obesity, diabetes and respiratory disease.

5. Climate Change

If you still think climate change is a hoax, get help. No scientific conjecture has received more thorough testing and analysis in history than man-made climate change. If the temperature continues to rise, three important things will happen:

sea level will rise

deserts will grow

storms will become more extreme

All of these have severe effects on the food supply. As sea levels rise, farmland close to sea level will be flooded. As deserts grow, they consume previously arable land. As storms grow more extreme, more food and farmland will be destroyed each year. You might think that as the temperature warms, we’ll be able to farm further north, and that will make up for the farmland lost to sea level rise and desertification. You would be wrong. The arctic is already a cold desert. Climate change will likely just make it a less-cold desert.

4. Nuclear War

Any open conflict between two nuclear powers, be they the US and Russia, India and Pakistan or China and North Korea, has the potential to end life as we know it. Even if initial blast only kill millions, the radioactive fallout from a large-scale nuclear conflict could poison not only billions of people but also our food and water supplies.

3. Supervulcanism

Sorry Trekkies, Supervulcanism is not about controlling emotions and mind melds. It refers to a sudden rise in global volcanic activity. Volcanos are like the Earth’s smokestacks. If they all start spewing out ash at once, the atmosphere would become opaque, blocking out the suns rays. Imagine a thousands years of twilight. Now imagine 99% of the worlds plants dying, shortly followed by 100% of the world’s animals, including us.

Supervulcanism contributed to at least three Mass Extinctions.

2. Supernova or Gamma Ray Burst

When two stars collide or a large star goes supernova (collapses into a black hole), it can create an extremely energetic explosion. This energy travels outward in the form of Gamma Rays, which are sort of like X-rays on steroids. If such an energetic explosion occurred somewhere ‘nearby’ earth, say anywhere in our galaxy, the resulting gamma ray burst could destroy the ozone layer and irradiate the earth’s surface. It would be sort of like Marvin the Martian finally getting his giant ray gun to work and frying Earth with it.

Everything dies but the cockroaches.

1. Astronomical Impact

There are a lot of big rocks floating around in space. Every once in a while, two of them come together. Whether it’s an asteroid or a commet or even something from outside our solar system, if any big chunk of space debris come crashing into Earth, we’re dead.

Strong evidence supports an impact causing the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event (the one that killed the dinosaurs). How did it happen? Well, when a 10km-wide rock slam into the ground, several things happen. First, there’s the initial explosion – several orders of magnitude more powerful than the nukes dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Depending where the impact occurs, that could kill millions, or just a whole lot of fish. Then there’s the earthquake. We’re talking a 16 on the Richter Scale – 100 000 time more powerful than any earthquake in human history. The ground would move in waves, tossing people and building about like boats on a seething ocean. It would decimate buildings and infrastructure all over the world. Imagine the aftermath of the worst earthquake ever, and all the hospitals have been destroyed.

Assuming you survive all of that, you’ll have the pleasure to freeze and/or starve to death when all the dust thrown into the atmosphere blocks out the sun, just as in supervulcanism.

Only the cockroaches survive.

This is bullshit.

The fact is, those corporations often didn’t get to their billions through wisdom or creativity, or even good luck. They got there through criminal activity, inherited wealth, and ruthless disregard for the value of anything but the stockholders and the corporation’s profit.

Case #1: duPont Chemicals

The duPont corporation is the perfect example of why these global companies think something like a whipping boy is a damn good idea. It’s because these are the same assholes who had whipping boys in feudal Europe. We have this silly idea in America that we are no longer controlled by the monarchs and scoundrels of medieval Europe, but is that really true?

It’s hard to believe that is true when I look at a family like duPont, who were Burgundian nobility who emigrated to the United States to escape the guillotine for their injustices to the lower class during the French Revolution.

If that’s not enough, they were one of the biggest companies accused by Smedley Butler of trying to overthrow the U.S. government to install a fascist dictator, as fascists tend to be more friendly to big, ruthless business. Now, you might not believe in Major General Smedley Butler’s accusations, but that doesn’t clear duPont of dirt. They’ve also been accused of having hemp made illegal to destroy the competition against their new product – Nylon – and they are also responsible for the lovely carcinogen probably in your kitchen right now: Teflon. They’re not even close to the worst.

Case #2: Chiquita

Chiquita weren’t always the non-controversial banana company with the wacky mascot that we all know now. At one time, they had a different name – the United Fruit Company – and a very different business ethos.

You see, rather than grow by producing affordable, delicious fruit… they bribed government officials in third-world countries, amassing enormous power over the politics of these developing nations and using it to exploit the workers in those places, to grow the cheapest fruit known to man (second to slave labor, I guess). Hence the banana republic.

Oh yeah, the guy the U.S. government supposedly sent in to make these banana republics more docile for the companies? None other than Major General Smedley Butler.

Case #3: Ford, GM, IBM and the Nazis

I don’t know, but it doesn’t seem like helping the Nazis massacre millions doesn’t seem like a very American way to make billions, but that’s just what these companies have been accused of.  Yet Ford and GM have been accused of not bothering to close shop when fascists took power in Europe; hell, they took the opportunity to borrow some slave labor from the concentration camps.

IBM took it a step further, and actually provided the punch card system the Nazis used to keep track of all those slaves.

Conclusion

That’s not counting the German corporations you buy products from every day who provided such valuable technology as Zyklon B, the gas used to exterminate the Jews. And the horrible and well-documented business practices of Wal-Mart and the Disney Corporation. Or the ruthless monopoly of Standard Oil, and the shady dealings of Microsoft… the list goes on.

These executives are not the benevolent and wise leaders portrayed by people like Rush Limbaugh or Ayn Rand. They are liars, cheats, and ruthless narcissists. Would you give your money to the Nazis? Then why give it to the people who enabled them?

Dear Environmentally-Conscious but mathematically challenged bureaucrats,

Please stop with the eco-theatre. If you want to make a real impact, try starting with the things that create the most pollution. Start with the enormous amounts of methane produced by the livestock that satiate our meat addiction (not that meat is bad – we just eat too much of it.) Start by reducing sprawl so people don’t travel as far. Start by improving building codes so we stop building inefficient structures. Start by improving the emissions standards for all the buses and heavy construction equipment spewing diesel fumes night and day. Start with the coal- and oil-fired power plants.

And for fucksake do the math before you open your mouth.