Yes, I made up a new acronym.
Save the
Planet by
Injecting
Friendly
Fixes
Yourself.
I choose to say that this is an all lower case acronym.
The idea here is to
*DO* social justice in a different way. Rather than being angry at bad guys, we will build a better world. I think the reason we are on the terrible path we are on right now has to do with a lack of knowledge. Not from a political standpoint, but a what-can-you-do-at-home standpoint. What
Derrick Jensen calls "Personal Solutions".
In fact, this idea is born from Derrick writing about
greenhouse gasses, saying that if everybody did all the things that were suggested on the big-list-of-things-to-save-the-environment, "That would only be about a 21 percent reduction in
carbon emissions. And since total carbon emissions go up about two percent per year, that whole reduction would disappear in about ..." we would only postpone the inevitable end to humanity due to environmental destruction. And, I agree with Derrick's analysis, but my approach is different: we make a better list.
Of
course, Derrick said "if everybody ..." and that is actually harder than making the better list. In fact, I think we have a list that doesn't just do 21%, but it does better than 200%.
I think that there are millions of people that want to be part of that "everybody" right now. But they don't know what to do. Or the "what" seems expensive, or hard. And yet, they will happily spend hours each day on
facebook.
It is plausible that a single person, with zero fame, in one hour, can persuade 100 people to try a new thing by doing nothing more than making links to good articles on good topics. In one hour, they can pick out their link for the day, post it to a dozen spots they frequent, and maybe add a new online spot or two each day.
In one hour, they could offset their own
greenhouse gas emissions for a year. In a year, they can mitigate hundreds of people. This is probably a thousand times more positive impact than being angry at bad guys for 20 years. Or protesting.
- - - - -
So I want to make a
thread for each global problem. Each thread will start with "spiffy:" And that thread will have a list of techniques. Then there is a thread for each technique which will then have a list of articles. One post per link. People can use the thumbs up feature to show which article they like best.
So, there will be a thread called "spiffy: techniques to reduce global greenhouse gasses" and there will be 30 posts in that thread. One of the posts will suggest using clotheslines and clothes drying racks and there will be a link to a thread called "spiffy: using clotheslines and clothes drying racks" and there will be, say 30 posts in that thread. One of the posts will be a link to an article about the value of using clotheslines.
A person can take that link and spend an hour sharing it in a bunch of places. Just like they might share anything they find useful.
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I hereby give the permies.com staff permission to edit this first post. The rest of this thread is for discussion of the spiffy idea.
- - - -
Here is a forum dedicated to all the Spiffy Threads!
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