GetUsedParts.com

This looks like a very useful sort of service. Say your car is broken, and maybe it's not exactly a popular car, and the part that's broken is hard to find. How do you go about finding the part you need? One possibility is to call all the junk yards in the area, but that takes a lot of time.

So, consider this welcome message:

Welcome to Get Used Parts, the easy way to find used auto parts online. Designed to help people with any level of car experience find used auto parts and car parts, Get Used Parts puts you in touch with thousands of junk yards coast to coast for a free, easy online solution. Now you can find used auto parts without scraping through salvage yards. Whether you are a full-time mechanic or a person who thinks cars just get people from point A to point B, locating car parts online guarantees great automotive parts while keeping your hands clean.

That's what they do, is serve as a middleman between you and thousands of junk yards. Instead of calling the junk yards yourself, you enter your request into the web site and it sends queries to the junk yards for you.

Since my car is missing its radio (actually, I took the radio out) I just tested the site. While the site did not work with Safari, it works fine with Firefox (Mac). It's very easy to use the site to describe the part you need. The site knows all the makes and models of cars, and the kind of parts that goes into each one. This is very reassuring in that it will help you describe the part correctly even if you don't know all the technically correct words.

I discovered this site here: http://www.kk.org/cooltools/archives/000907.php

Consumerism and choice and lack of choice

Imagine you're driving with your kids. You stop at a gas station to fill the tank, and they're hungry or thirsty. You didn't carry any drinks or snacks with you, fortunately the gas station sells some. But you look at the choices, and they're all some form of overly sugarfied junk food. What do you do?

Imagine you want to buy a car. The essential desire is to travel around town, and occasional long trips, at relative high speed, relative comfort, and a great deal of freedom. You go to the automobile store and find the choices are gasoline or diesel burning (except if you hunt hard enough). What do you do?

Imagine you want to be informed about the world. You look around for news sources, and the easy ones to find are all owned by humongous multinational corporations that gear the "news" you receive to subtly serve the agenda of the large corporations. What do you do?

Welcome to the modern world. You have a dizzying array of choices before you, but they're all essentially the same choice. Some kind of junk that serves the interest of the large corporation that provided you with the junk, but is actually unhealthy.

Let's think about the first example - if all the drinks or snacks you can find are highly sugared junk, then how are your kids, or you for that matter, going to have a healthy diet? It's easy enough to alternative snacks and drinks, but that's not what's stocked in the store.

If you have freedom of choice, but the choice is limited by the store owner, then do you really have freedom of choice?

The "Dancing Rabbit" ecovillage

I've recently been doing some reading about community living, and especially the ecovillage concept.

Today I want to take a look at the Dancing Rabbit ecovillage: Ecologically Sustainable Living Dancing Rabbit is an ecovillage set amid the hills and prairies of rural northeastern Missouri. Our goal is to live ecologically sustainable and socially rewarding lives, and to share the skills and ideas behind that lifestyle.

First, what's an ecovillage? The Global Ecovillage Network tries to answer that question thusly: Ecovillages are urban or rural communities of people, who strive to integrate a supportive social environment with a low-impact way of life. To achieve this, they integrate various aspects of ecological design, permaculture, ecological building, green production, alternative energy, community building practices, and much more.

Sounds rather idealistic, doesn't it?

I can imagine that taking a group of American individualistically oriented ego's and trying to live communally, well, that's gotta be a very interesting experiment indeed. For example:

Decision Making

We make our decisions using a combination of empowered committees and full group consensus. For many years we used full group consensus for all decisions, but as we continued to grow more decisions had to be made and more time spent in meetings. Many people became uncomfortable with the amount of time spent in meetings and became willing, even eager, to give up some control of the decision making process in exchange for having to spend less time in meetings. So bit by bit the group agreed to moving pieces of the decision making process away from the full group and into committees empowered to make decisions in certain areas.

If you're going to live communally, then how do decisions get made that affect the whole? And, yes, there are going to be decisions that affect the whole. For example the Dancing Rabbit site shows shows a
common house serves the communal needs of the group. As they say:

Planning out the building, raising funds and doing the actual construction has been a learning experience for us. Coming to consensus on these and other issues about the community building was extremely challenging.

No one person owns the common house, the community does, and the community acted together to create it. However I can only imagine the kinds of arguments that went into creating consensus around the details of that building.

Here's one that bothers me, and I haven't ever even visited: Vehicles: At DR members don't own private vehicles, instead a car co-op provides for our transportation needs. Elsewhere on the site it says that DR members are not allowed to own their own vehicles. Instead they share ownership of the cars in the cooperative and are expected to cooperatively organize trips to town etc.

To me this seems heavy handed. But maybe that's a bit of American consumerism and individualism speaking through me, that isn't what I really believe? On their site they give Sustainability Guidelines and reading between the lines of that agreement you can see why individually owned cars would be banned. Namely, individually owned cars are very unsustainable -- witness the current war in Iraq for why I say that.

In general what I see on the site is very interesting and encouraging. Most of their buildings are made in the straw bale fashion, which is very sustainable and can create very sturdy buildings. They are tending to do organic gardening to grow their own food, and to live in a simple lifestyle. A lot of my thinking says that "we" don't need all the gobbledygook of gadgetry that fills our lives, and that "we" might well be healthier and happier by owning less things. Not that I've done a terrific job of doing that in my own life, still I applaud them for trying. American consumerism is deeply ingrained in those of us who grew up here, and to live differently means confronting all the egoic conditioning that "we" took in through growing up in this country.

Let me close by saying that it's difficult talking about a community in this way. I have never visited them, I only know them through what's said on their web site. A community is a vibrant expression of the people who jointly create that community. There is no way I can have done justice to these people in these few paragraphs.

Major species extinction periods

There's a few articles in the news right now talking about species extinction. There's been five previous periods where a major amount of species went extinct all at once. All of those were due to external forces (climate change, and meteor impact).

Today it seems that we are in the middle of a major extinctionary period, and the difference today is that we are the cause. We humans are causing major stress to the environment of this planet, and it is that stress which is causing species to die off.

The Sixth Extinction (By Niles Eldredge, actionbioscience.org, June 2001)

At first glance, the physically caused extinction events of the past might seem to have little or nothing to tell us about the current Sixth Extinction, which is a patently human-caused event. For there is little doubt that humans are the direct cause of ecosystem stress and species destruction in the modern world through such activities as:

• transformation of the landscape
• overexploitation of species
• pollution
• the introduction of alien species

And because Homo sapiens is clearly a species of animal (however behaviorally and ecologically peculiar an animal), the Sixth Extinction would seem to be the first recorded global extinction event that has a biotic, rather than a physical, cause.

... We can divide the Sixth Extinction into two discrete phases:

• Phase One began when the first modern humans began to disperse to different parts of the world about 100,000 years ago.
• Phase Two began about 10,000 years ago when humans turned to agriculture.

I think he's missing the third phase. Namely, 150 years ago when Oil began to be exploited, it was Oil that allowed for the great amplification of humanities effects on the planet. Perhaps you could push the date back a little, to the first coal and steam powered engines such as was used in railways.

In any case, the use of fossil fuels is what gave us humans the energy with which to reshape the planet. Prior to fossil fuels, our agriculture was largely dragging sticks along the ground, and had to be highly organic in nature. After fossil fuels we had machines available to dig up whole mountains to, for example, get the copper buried underneath.

He does go on to say this:

Homo sapiens became the first species to stop living inside local ecosystems. All other species, including our ancestral hominid ancestors, all pre-agricultural humans, and remnant hunter-gatherer societies still extant exist as semi-isolated populations playing specific roles (i.e., have "niches") in local ecosystems. This is not so with post-agricultural revolution humans, who in effect have stepped outside local ecosystems. Indeed, to develop agriculture is essentially to declare war on ecosystems - converting land to produce one or two food crops, with all other native plant species all now classified as unwanted "weeds" -- and all but a few domesticated species of animals now considered as pests.

And, obviously, there is truth to this. No matter how primitive that agriculture was, it did change the landscape and habitat. And he also mentions how in every place humans traveled to, they killed off whatever large beasts were in that area. e.g. the Sabre-Tooth Tigers of North America that disappeared shortly after humans first arrived there.

Extinction on the Horizon for One-Fifth of All Bird Species (CAMBRIDGE, UK, June 1, 2005, Environmental News Service)

Logging ban urged to protect caribou (Canadian Press, May 31, 2005)

Royal Bengal tiger faces extinction threat (Kolkata, May 25, The Hindu)

UNDP Warns On Extinction of 15,000 Animal, Plant Species (Angola Press Agency (Luanda), May 22, 2005, Posted to the web May 23, 2005 )

UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report warns worsening ecosystem changes put Millennium Development Goals at risk (60 percent of earth’s ecosystem services being degraded or used unsustainably; the poor most affected; United Nations, 4 April 2005) See: Synthesis reports

Report Shows Extinction Crisis for Animals

Ethical consumption

How do you know if a product you're buying is made by an "ethical" company? Or are they going to turn around and use the profits from your purchase to rape the planet?

How do you know if the product is any good? Or if it will fall apart immediately?

Ethical Consumer Research Association

www.ethiscore.org is a project of ECRA (the Ethical Consumer Research Association/ECRA Publishing Ltd).
ECRA was founded in 1988 as a not-for-profit workers co-operative to provide information on the companies behind the brand names and to promote the ethical use of consumer power.
It has published Ethical Consumer magazine since 1989, and now offers a range of other products designed to encourage purchasers to take environmental and social issues into account in the market place. (see www.ethicalconsumer.org).

ethiscore.org is designed to be the consumer interface to ECRA's main research database. Full details on all the specific ratings on www.ethiscore.org are therefore available for scrutiny at www.corporatecritic.org.

ethiscore.org is managed on behalf of ECRA by its subsidiary company Ethical Consumer Information Systems Ltd.