Something I thought was cool is that the concept has met with no resistance from the taxi company with exclusive rights to service Sea-Tac, whose representatives said “If people want to be creative and save money and be more green, we’re absolutely OK with that.”

The New York City Taxi and Limousine Commission is on board with taxi-sharing, too. In July of last year the “Commissioner’s Corner” column addressed the different ways the Taxi and Limousine Commission was supporting taxi-sharing, including pilot programs to develop multi-fare meters, support group riding at reduced rates from taxi stands at points on busy corridors, and place “livery stands” at places like shopping centers.

In U.S. cities, where taxis usually supplement public transportation systems, cab-sharing is a great way for consumers to save money while, in many cases, generating additional revenue for the cab driver. In other parts of the world, taxis actually are public transportation. When I was in Amman, Jordan last year, we went everywhere by cab–there is no public transportation, and taxis are super cheap and always available. And according to Wikipedia, dozens of other countries use taxis as the main form of transportation, calling the service everything from “multi-hire taxi” to “taxibus.”

Here are some of the answers:

• Petty issues that get people angry and make them shut down to cooperation
• Zoning issues and codes that don’t support sustainability
• Hyperindividuation
• Egos
• People who are unpredictable, irrational, and uncontrollable 
• The digital divide (the fact that poor and marginalized communities do not have access to the online community-building tools that many others have)
• Large communities that are hard to organize; it’s difficult to create a unified voice or vision

As usual, the general sentiment is that sharing would be great…if it weren’t for the other people. Conflict, difficult personalities, egos – it seems like everyone has a story about how they got burnt in a sharing plan or cooperative effort that went sour.  Honestly, this does seem like the biggest barrier to the sharing revolution. But those of us who are mediators, or who have taken classes in non-violent communication or powerful non-defensive communication, know the potential for any conflict situation to transform into something positive and constructive, so we feel confident that this barrier is entirely surmountable. 

While talking to Bioneers conference attendees, we also brainstormed ideas about ways to manage our differences, including:

• Hear people out. Even if you think they are “unpredictable, irrational, and uncontrollable,” they will probably be much easier to talk to if they feel they are being listened to.
• Remember that what we interpret as “unpredictable, irrational, and uncontrollable” may actually just come from a miscommunication.
• Remember that most people are well-intentioned. Most of the time if someone is acting “unpredictable, irrational, and uncontrollable,” it’s because they feel their needs aren’t being met.
• Use meeting facilitators to talk through difficult topic.
• Postpone discussion of issues that tend to trigger people, and start by finding common ground on other issues.

Of course, whole books could be written on this topic. For now I just wanted to share some of the thoughts we collected at Bioneers.

* Tools
* Plants
* Produce
* A dog
* Music parties!
* Yerba mate
* My/our kitchen
* Homeschooling
* Myself in the service of the planet
* Garden
* Humor
* Yoga and dance studio space
* Orchard
* Water
* Food
* Child care
* Time
* Money
* Energy
* Crying
* Intuition
* Love

Living Green

But the other day, I had tea with writer Jennifer Fosket who has co-opted the C phenomenon and created “The Ten Cs of Social Sustainability.” In her book, Living Green: Communities that Sustain, she and co-author Laura Mamo, both sociologists, look in depth at ecovillages, cohousing, affordable housing communities, and even single-family housing neighborhoods around the country and explore how those communities have made sustainability a way of life.

The questions they ask go far deeper than questions about how to recycle, use green energy, etc. They ask: What
motivates people to change their lifestyles? What factors affect the choices people make in their homes? How does the built environment affect the way people live? In what ways do people connect with each other and how does this contribute to the strength of the community? What helps communities to endure through time?

In many ways, these are the most crucial, yet most challenging questions to explore in building a more sustainable world. The Ten Cs of Sustainability came out of Fosket’s and Mamo’s observations in the communities they visited, and begin to answer the question of what makes a sustainable community successful. The Ten Cs are practices and considerations that could apply in any development or community. They include:

• Culture
• Context
• Citizenship
• Commitment
• Collaboration
• Connectedness
• Care
• Contact
• Commons
• Continuity

Anyone who is currently working to build community around living sustainably could benefit from reading Fosket’s and Mamo’s book. The communities described in each chapter provide inspiring examples, and the Ten C’s are a great framework around which to structure discussions about what it means to build community, connect with one another, collaborate in designing the community, and commit to long-term sustainably.

I wrote a piece for Shareable entitled The Four Degrees of Sharing, which I see as a sharing manifesto of sorts.  I give examples of the ways people are taking sharing to new levels, creating new organizations around sharing, establishing community-wide sharing programs, and cooperating in new and amazing ways.  Emily Doskow and I will regularly contribute articles and a Q&A column. If you have any sharing questions, please send them to us!

Shareable is sponsored by non-profit Tides Center.  The publisher, Neal Gorenflo, and editor, Jeremy Adam Smith, are social entrepreneurs and visionaries. They have created an amazing space to grow the sharing revolution!

I wrote a piece for Shareable entitled The Four Degrees of Sharing, which I see as a sharing manifesto of sorts.  I give examples of the ways people are taking sharing to new levels, creating new organizations around sharing, establishing community-wide sharing programs, and cooperating in new and amazing ways.  Emily Doskow and I will regularly contribute articles and a Q&A column. If you have any sharing questions, please send them to us!

Shareable is sponsored by non-profit Tides Center.  The publisher, Neal Gorenflo, and editor, Jeremy Adam Smith, are social entrepreneurs and visionaries. They have created an amazing space to grow the sharing revolution!

Today’s Times article focused primarily on younger adults coming together to share rental housing. It might appear from the article that shared housing appeals mainly to twenty-somethings.  But during many of my recent public speaking events, I met a LOT of graying-haired people interested in shared housing, and many of them are just as idealistic as the youth described in the Times. They are looking to live more sustainably, build a supportive community around them, and find new kinds of personal rewards in their housing arrangement.  The difference might be that the 40- to 60-somethings are more often in the market to buy, rather than rent, and they are thinking about a longer term living arrangement.

I was a little baffled by the part of the article that cited Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist, who thought the “idealized, small-scale communities they described reminded her of the hunting and gathering bands of pre-history.” She profiled the home-sharers as compassionate, emotive, verbal, and/or creative types. As a result, “she worried that other personality types, the sort who know how to fix the toaster or program the VCR, weren’t being invited into these houses.”

Somehow, I don’t think this is going to be a problem.  These particular young folks are part of Generation DIY – they are the ultimate practitioners of do-it-yourself, fix your own bike, grow your own food, make things from recycled junk, build solar ovens, and rig the plumbing to recycle grey water. They do things like lead soldering workshops at the Brooklyn Skillshare.

And the fact that they are verbal and compassionate means they have the skills to express themselves, understand each other’s needs, and navigate interpersonal conflict – all of which is far more crucial to their survival than the ability to fix a toaster.  They are resourceful and they will thrive.

Besides, if they really can’t fix the toaster, I’m sure they’ll find some other good use for it:

A memorable moment was when attorney Jenny Kassan boldly suggested that we need a local stock exchange to serve as a source of finance for small local businesses and to keep our investments in the community (as opposed to putting our savings into mutual funds and financing who-knows-what kind of companies). It’s really a genius idea – it could create a simple way for each of us to share in owning and nurturing the businesses that serve us. We would choose to finance the businesses we feel could successfully enhance the character of our neighborhoods, provide a needed local service or product, create local jobs, and be accountable to the community. Most folks trading on the New York Stock Exchange don’t take any of this into consideration.

Jenny Kassan cited Michael Shuman, author of The Small-Mart Revolution. Shuman recently blogged about the concept of local stock exchanges. A major reason we don’t have local stock exchanges now, Shuman points out, is that securities laws have made it prohibitively expensive for small businesses to make a public offering. Shuman writes:

“The regulations prohibit the average American from investing in any small business, unless the firm is willing to spend $50,000 to $100,000 on lawyers to prepare private placement memorandum or public offering–thick documents with microscopic, ALL CAPS PRINT that no human being has ever been observed actually reading.”

But Shuman suggests some simple changes to the securities laws, that could make it a lot easier for small businesses to seek investors. For example, he suggests that we could exempt from securities regulation any small businesses that issues $250,000 or less in total stock, offers the stock only to people living in the state, and allow each investor to purchase no more than $100 worth of stock.

In the same way that many of us have made micro-loans through organizations such as Kiva, we could make investments of a comparable size in businesses locally. We’ll see the returns in many ways – not only in the growth of our investment money, but in the growth of flourishing businesses all around us.

That’s better.

We are on the brink of something exciting, something with the power to transform our world. I love to imagine the near future, when people everywhere share cars with their neighbors, start local tool-lending libraries and childcare cooperatives, do regular mealsharing with friends, and form casual cohousing arrangements in every neighborhood. What’s more, the value of all of these things is somehow greater than the sum of their parts, and the potential of it all makes me gasp.

First of all, I’ve seen all those tiny green sprouts popping up all over the place. They are everywhere: sprouts of hope, new technologies, new attitudes, social justice,green collar jobs, and community building. They are sprouts of community gardens,solar panels, bicycle lanes, buy-local initiatives, recycling programs, fair trade,microlending programs, restored creeks, and so many other beautiful things.

Okay, granted, there’s a huge grey cloud making it hard to see these little sprouts. It’s true that the economy, the environment, war, unemployment, evictions, foreclosures, homelessness, contamination, water shortages, businesses closing, and the disappearance of fish in the sea, to name a few, make for one very large grey cloud(VERY LARGE GREY CLOUD).

But the sprouts are most definitely there. What I’m wondering is: When are these sprouts going to grow enough to overtake the grey cloud? Seems to me that if they grow just enough, they’ll create fertile ground for more growth, and more, and more! But for now, their growth is frustratingly slow. Too slow?

I could think of ways to speed them up, but many ways require change mostly beyond my control. There are top-down changes, like getting the government to put money into green-collar job creation, instead of, say, prisons. But I’m not holding my breath — and I’m not expecting our government to catalyze the growth of the sustainability movement (though I truly appreciate that our President is on the right track).

What about all those millions of people with wonderful ideas, great intentions, and the will to change the world? The grassroots! Couldn’t they (I mean, we) get this new green revolution going? Unfortunately, with the way things are going, I’m worried that we won’t. So many of us are overworked, burnt out, struggling to make ends meet, and worried a lot about our own survival right now. It’s not easy contending with a large grey cloud.

But I only say all this to emphasize the importance of the missing ingredient: Sharing! Or, perhaps I should say: SHARING! Sharing has the most potential to add momentum to the changes already taking place, getting us to the tipping point where a sustainable and socially just world is truly possible. Sharing is not just the fertilizer that helps those green sprouts grow bigger. Sharing is more like a catalyst — one small ingredient that you can add to the mix that makes everything just explode.

The power of sharing is unique in a handful of ways:

• Sharing, unlike recycling, is naturally contagious. Sharing opens up a pattern of generosity and mutual caring that breeds on itself. A lot of other things we do to change the world aren’t quite so viral. One person reducing his or her waste, for example, may or may not inspire a neighbor to do so. But offering to let your neighbor use your basketball hoop or eat strawberries from your patch opens up the flood gates of generosity.
• Sharing is self-serving, so we’ll want to do it. Sharing helps us meet our needs more efficiently and cheaply, and sharing our snow blower with a neighbor might mean that she will let us use her hot tub. (Yessss!) Sharing builds community, which makes us happier people, and cooperation has been shown to release endorphins. So there’s no need to force anyone to share — people will naturally start doing it to enjoy the benefits.
• Sharing reverses the drain on our time, energy, and resources. For those of us who are spread way too thin, sharing saves resources, money, time, and energy, thereby freeing us up to garden, compost, recycle, hang our laundry, ride our bicycle, volunteer, advocate for social and environmental justice, and do things to help ourselves and the planet. We’ll all get a little more rest, the support of a community of sharers, and the strength we need to get all the sprouts growing. In short, sharing gives the grassroots the time, energy, and resources we need to grow a better world.
• Sharing connects all of our isolated world-changing acts and boosts their potential. As I noted, the sprouts are everywhere — people planting urban food gardens, composting their food waste, and installing solar panels. But many of these are things we do in isolation — and when we can find the time and energy. Sharing adds the element of community, which boosts the potential and the impact of everything we do — neighbors can get together to jointly purchase or bargain for solar power, or they can start a neighborhood compost project. It’s more efficient, and each additional person who joins the effort compounds the benefit to the earth and to the others in the group. Much of what we do to save the world can be done better if we organize and cooperate, and it can be much more fun that way, too!
• We don’t have to wait for someone else to hurry up and do anything. We don’t have to wait until our government starts a new program or provides needed funding. We don’t need to change the laws. We don’t have to wait until a scientist invents a solution. We don’t even need to form a nonprofit orfundraise to get started. We just start sharing. Today.
• Every single one of us can share. I’ve been known to say things like: “I can’t afford to make a donation;” “I don’t have time to volunteer more;” and “I don’t know how to install solar panels.” It’s all true. But it’s hard to say, “I can’t afford to share,” or “I don’t have time to share,” or “I don’t know how to share.” Sharing is something that everyone can do. Even a curmudgeon, even a poor person, even a busy person. I think the hardest part is getting started, then ironing out the details, understanding everyone’s expectations, and figuring out the logistics. But my friend Emily Doskow and I just wrote a book to help everyone through that part. So otherwise, there’s nothing stopping any of us from sharing.
• Sharing is a clean and easy way to get rid of the big grey cloud. Somehow or another, we need to get rid of that cloud. Otherwise our future looks like, well, a big grey cloud. There are all kinds of approaches to this — some folksreform the system, lobbying, advocating, and making changes bit-by-bit. This is an important thing to do, but it’s way too slow. Others propose bringing down the system in one fell swoop, which usually involves an uprising, or a full-blown violent revolution. I can only imagine that this would be messy. Very messy. The system has very large weapons, and even if we do succeed in taking out the system, we will then be faced with the task of rebuilding something on top of a big mess. Fortunately, we really don’t need to remove the system before we can start replacing it. Even while the grey cloud is still hanging out, we can start sharing, nourishing our local economies, going organic, and creating rewarding green-collar job opportunities. The spouts of our new system will simply overtake the cloud with time.

First, there’s the “grow or die” economy — where companies must compete in order to survive, grow in order to compete, and create increasing demand for their products in order to grow. And the best way for a company to sell a lot of a product is to create a culture of “self-reliance” and “convenience,” convincing all people that they should have one of their OWN. This culture of “self-reliance” is so ingrained in us that it would feel awkward asking the guy in the neighboring apartment unit if he would like to share a vacuum cleaner. Vacuum manufacturers would want us to believe that we should each have a vacuum, or even two.

Second, there’s the fact that, until recently, we could maintain this lifestyle without actually seeing the impact of it. Now we have seen how perpetual growth is eating away at the planet’s natural resources, melting the icecaps, and undermining a stable economy. Now the images of factory farms and third world sweatshops have made their way into our minds, and we are all searching for a more compassionate and sustainable way.

In the meantime, we have gotten out of practice with sharing. Sharing and cooperation are arguably as old as civilization itself. But today, much of the sharing and cooperation we do are managed by the government or businesses via incredibly complex systems of global cooperation. As consumers, we mostly just experience the end-products, such as electricity, water, manufactured goods, and food. So while we benefit greatly from cooperation, we have lost the ability to do it directly and face-to-face. In this sense, we are a vulnerable culture. We are blinded to the harms that our consumption inflicts on the world, and we are not prepared to meet our needs if or when the complex system crumbles.

So we might as well roll up our sleeves now, gather our friends, family, and neighbors, and get creative. Solar power cooperatives, neighborhood rainwater catchment installations, a cooperatively owned water purification system, community supported agriculture, neighborhood fruit tree harvests… The possibilities are endless and they will completely transform our world. That’s why it’s a sharing revolution. Not a trend, not a movement, but a REVOLUTION. Goodbye grey cloud. Sharing is here to save the planet.