By webmaster Friday May 15th 2009 18:38 Central European Time

The vision of Green Life Innovators

Green Life Innovators is founded in the vision that the knowledge on how to utilize clean, green technology should be freely available to the whole of humanity. This goes for a wide range of technologies, from the humble low tech panel solar cooker to the high tech hybrid powered stirling engine. We will work towards this goal through maintaining an online community for the development and exchange of ideas in green tech.

The open source model is “the third way”

In the not too distant past, if you wanted to solve a tasks above a certain size, you needed the backing of a large organization, either in the form of a government or a corporation, not so, any more. Online communities offer a third alternative for people to come together and take collective action. The worlds largest encyclopedia, Wikipedia, is made that way, so is a large number of open source software projects, for instance Tikiwiki, the engine on which we run our site. It is the first time in history that we have access to anything like this. It constitutes a giant leap towards

true power to the people, “a giant leap for man kind,” as Neil Armstrong said when he set foot on the Moon. For the first time it is not the sole privilege of politicians and the guys that have their hands on the wallets of the world to decide what can be done and what gets to be done in the world. And after spending a large portion of their time in front of the tv-set for decades, passivly consuming contents, more and more people are starting to appreciate taking part in some kind of interactive experience and thinking something in the lines of that a screen that ships without a mouse, ships broken.This also means that we, the ones who started this community, do not get to set the entire agenda for the community. A community like this works in a self organizing way and the results will depend on the activities of its parttaking members. It works more like inviting to a big party without a fixed program and let the party goers themselves form the events of the evening. So, the party is open, please come to our party.

Why do we need an open source initiative?

A question I have been asked a couple of times is why we would need an open source initiative for green tech, when this issue seems to be on the agenda of many governments and corporations. I usually answer this question with another question: “Why do we need open source software, couldn’t we all buy our software from Microsoft? Couldn’t we? Couldn’t we?” You get the point. Besides, only an open source initiative would be a guaranteed way of making this knowledge accesible in the public domain.

Fighting powery means using more energy in poor places

The Chinese philosopher Lao Tse is believed to once have said: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a life time” (A 21^st century corollary to this quote should probably be: “make sure that you teach him to fish in a sustainable way, so that he and future generations do not run out of fish”)

Anyway, the point is that fighting poverty is not done by throwing money at poor people. If it was that simple, we could just fill airplanes with banknotes and drop those notes over areas where poor people live. After all, paper money is not very expensive to print. Hardly anyone in his right mind would even consider if such a scheme would work, if it is stated in terms that blunt. It is a paradox, however, that a lot of western people nevertheless argue in such a way in which it follows logically from their arguments that such a scheme should work. Doubtlessly without seing that this conclusion follows.

That aside, the way to fight poverty is to empower poor people through knowledge. Empowering people also means giving them access to power in the physical sense of the word. Now, multiply power with time and you have another physical entity called energy. When the fishing instructor of Lao Tse has done his job, the newly trained fisherman still needs some kind of energy to move the boat. If your previous use of energy was close to none, which is the case for many people, even a little increase can make a huge impact on your life. But having said that, even a small increase in the energy consumption per capita will add up to a lot, when you are dealing with a large population. So, we’ll better make the energy clean and green. Because there is no way around it. Providing food and shelter for yourself and your family requires energy in one form or another.

Now, what about the rich part of the world?

There is something local communities in developing countries have that we hardly ever see in many part of the rich world today anymore, and that is what is called local resilience. Local resilience is best described as a local community’s ability to get life back on track after suffering some kind of shock due to and outside circumstance. People in rich countries, more often than not, do not possess a wide variety of skills, but are rather working on highly specialized tasks. According to economic theory this is called the principle of comparative advantage. The basic idea is that you produce more goods for all, if people practice getting good doing limited tasks and then trade goods and services with other people that have also practiced being good at other limited tasks, rather than each individual solving a range of different tasks by themselves. This idea usually works fine, as long as the entire system does not break down, that is.

When faced with a shock, which is happening in this very moment due to the ongoing financial crisis, people in such a setting often find themselves totally lost. They are so woven into the fabric of the system, that when it breaks, they hardly know what to do. Suddenly many of them find that there is noone around to offer them a job doing that very specialized thing they are trained for. If you happen to live in a residential neighbourhood, you might not even be able to grow vegetables in your garden or raise chicken and pigs in your garage, to get you through hard times, because there is probably a law against it.

Then, of course, there is the matter of mass consumption and the fact that the entire economic system mainly is powered by access to high energy density, relatively cheap fossil fuel. As most people are aware of these days, fossil fuel will not be around forever. What fewer people are aware of, is that it will stop being cheap, long before we run out of it. There is little doubt that rich countries will need to rethink their way of organizing society to a much larger extent than developing countries. This is especially true in the matter of mass consumption. The whole chain of mining, production, transportation, sale and marketing, consumption and finally disposal, introduce linear systems into a world where everything else moves in cycles. And that is just not something that can keep going on for ever.

Green-techies are often attacked by other environmentalist for “using green technology in an effort to save consumerism”. I can not speak for everyone that is a green tech enthusiast, nor can I speak for everyone who chooses to join Green Life Innovators, but personally I do not believe that consumerism in is present form can be saved, no matter what clever moves we make. To me it is more a matter of making life in a post fossile fuel economy a little more pleasant. I doubt if many people will disagree with me, when I say that having some technology does tend to make life more pleasant. Even if few of us have ever experienced a life without technology, the feeling we get when some device breaks pretty much gives us an idea how life without technology might feel like. Besides, there are aspects of modern life that I would hate to see gone, for instance modern healthcare. If future generations rather get do die from appendicitis than having an appendectomy, I would consider that a major set back to civilization. Likewise with computers and the Internet; I mentioned before how online communities now empower people. I would really hate to see that gone.

Green Life Innovators is not meant to be a political forum

In the posting guidelines of Green Life Innovators it is stated that political postings will be deleted. This will, however, not be totally and strictly enforced. Primarily because it is virtually impossible to draw a clear cut line between statements that are of a political nature and statements that are not. Indeed, the very concept of sustainability might be viewed as a political ideology in an of itself. What is meant by keeping the forums of GLI free of politics is that we would delete flame wars between people trying to push their favorite among traditional political -isms, as the only way to a sustainable future. There are many forums on the Internet where people who want to have political discussions on environmental topics can go. We therefore strongly urge anyone who feels so inclined, to take that kind of discussions there and not here.