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Why Sharing is a Revolutionary Act, and Our Future
Beth Buczynski’s new book: Sharing is Good: How to Save Money, Time and Resources through Collaborative Consumption, chronicles the roadmap to our sustainable future. This accessible and well-written volume explains the many ways that sharing our resources can not only help to save money, energy and time, but can also allow us to strengthen our communities and build more meaningful personal relationships with one another.
This book provides a great overview of our rapidly expanding local and global sharing economy, highlighting many successful existing sharing networks and forums, and shows just how easy it is to share. Buczynski describes scores of different ways that resources can be pooled, from cooperatives and bike-sharing, to CSAs and local lending networks like Streetbank or Yerdle; she also suggests a few salient questions to ask before you get started, and some potential problems to avoid.
Sharing is Good challenges the reader to radically redefine what our culture has traditionally defined as “success”, acquiring lots of stuff, and hoarding masses of wealth:
“…the sharing economy seeks to reinvent our idea of what it means to be a citizen, on both a hyper-local and a global scale. No matter what you call it, collaborative consumption challenges traditional definitions of professional success, personal wealth, and what it really means to be a productive member of our communities. Sharing allows us to create a new definition of value, not based on currency but on how much a thing, action, or person enriches our lives, and it gives us the opportunity to enrich someone else’s in return.”
Growing a Currency of Trust
Buczynski offers some very cogent and well documented reasons why sharing is inevitable for our future — from rapidly dwindling resources to rapidly expanding landfills — but her most powerful argument is the genuine human connection that giving provides. Whether it is sharing excess zucchini from your garden with your neighbors, helping to repair a broken lamp, or giving a ride to a stranger, pooling our skills and resources allows us to strengthen our personal relationships, create memorable experiences and build trust in one other.
In addition to listing many valuable collaborative consumption resources, this book also provides a brief history of various modern and ancient forms of barter, trade and sharing, as well as different monetary system structures that humans have tried over time. When explaining how people living thousands of years ago in China used strings of cowrie shells as currency, Buczynski admits we must remember that money only has value because we all agree that it does, a concept that she confesses is a bit scary to her.
However this concept is not actually frightening at all, but incredibly liberating. Striving to amass huge mounds of cash does nothing to enrich our lives, lessen pollution and waste, or provide us with more worthwhile human experiences; paper money essentially lacks real value or tangible worth, and you certainly can not eat it. Although sharing our resources and what we do not need, as well as engaging with others in significant ways that strengthen our community, finding a purpose, helping others, and being part of a tribe, that is truly priceless.
The post Why Sharing is a Revolutionary Act, and Our Future appeared first on EcoLocalizer.
Source: http://ecolocalizer.com/2013/11/05/sharing-revolutionary-act-future/
