In the City: Walk, bicycle, take public transportation.
Join a CSA, community supported agriculture, farm. You might not have dirt on your balcony, but your farmer is dedicated to building up the soil and growing great food. It’s food grown ethically by someone you know. The money goes right into seeds and clothes for their kids and tools. The meals in a box are more expensive, with food grown much farther away and are less likely to reflect the ethics of CSA farmers. Of course, you need to find recipes for what’s in your box and actually invest in a peeler and chef’s knife and maybe big frying pan. Learning to cook from scratch is just one short step away from planters on your balcony.
Bank at a Credit Union, or a small bank, not a major bank. Your money will circulate through your community creating wealth for your neighbors rather than building pipelines or digging coal.
Buy used as much as possible. Used computers and phones on ebay. Used clothes at the thrift store or consignment shop. Except for shoes and underwear, most of us can outfit ourselves stunningly from used clothes.
Two wonderful books on conscious living in the city are:
No Impact Man by Colin Beavan
The New Slow City by William Powers
Both show what an adventure going green can be in the city.
Green investing:
Permaculture is an approach to landscape design that conserves water and maximizes food production through perennial plants intermingled so that every horizontal and vertical space is well utilized. Twelve principles guide the permaculturist’s choices. To answer the investing question in language a rural arts guy would understand, I’ll refer to principle three: obtain a yield. Every resource on your property should in some way feed you – through producing edibles, through attracting birds as pollinators, through growing seed for sale or storage, though coppicing trees and shrubs (cutting back to encourage new growth) to fuel your wood stove.
How can your money produce a yield without destroying the earth.
- Invest in land to farm. Use the first principle – observe and interact – to pick well. Does it have water? A septic? What’s the soil like? Are there structures? What is the climate now? In the future? Owning productive land can yield food, shelter and income if you work it well.
- Buy a duplex or fourplex, fix it up, live in one and rent the others as a fair rate. People need somewhere to live and with affordable rental market drying up (in part from landlords turning long term rentals into vacation rentals). You will have free rent plus income.
- Invest in local businesses that your community needs. Look carefully at the business plans – no matter how enticing the idea it, your money has to come back to you with interest. The Local Investing Opportunities Network has a model for forming local groups of investors who want to bring at least some of their wealth home to their communities.
- Invest in yourself. Your skills and talents – honed – are a wonderful way to reduce the cost of hiring experts.
- Invest with your values. Ask yourself: what do you want more of in this world and what do you want less of? If you want more alternative energy and less fossil fuel, you can buy funds with screens for these issues – or buy individual stocks in companies you believe will be successful.
- Invest in greening your home.
The principle with all of this is what I call “possibility thinking.” Impossibility thinking is what keeps us in ruts and playing small. For every objection, every assumption, you can ask, “what if this weren’t true?”
You can’t go green in the city? What if that weren’t true? What if, as I’ve indicated briefly, there were dozens of ways city dwellers can conserve resources and enjoy good food and nice clothes. Since the earth is one, food grown by hand can be by someone else’s hand. The labors to construct a garment can be honored by keeping it in service as long as possible. Same goes for cars! And on and on.
You can’t invest money without destroying the earth? What if that weren’t true? What if there were many products and processes and enterprises that make life truly better for everyone – including the critters and the climate? What would those be? What businesses does your community need to provide family wage jobs and needed products for living well? You raise this question and let the answers come. You’ll like your answers far better than mine
I think we need to invest some time and creativity in asking “Why not?” and “What if?” so we can do well by doing good.