Off the Waffle in Eugene, Oregon is not your typical waffle house. You won’t find pads of butter, bottles of fake maple syrup, or sides of hash browns and eggs here.

The owners, brothers Omer and Dave Orian, are in their mid-twenties and usually sport matching red afros. They and their seven employees serve traditional Belgian Liège waffles made from yeast-leavened batter. They use pearled sugar imported from Belgium, which caramelizes through the waffles, making them crunchy on the outside and moist on the inside.

And if you’re low on cash, Omer and Dave are happy to make a trade, because they’re big fans of bartering.

“When we were in elementary school, Dave would carry with him a little suitcase full of toys in hopes of trading them for cool stuff that other kids had,” says Omer.

Dave says the brothers have traded all kinds of things for waffles, including “acupuncture, massage, plumbing, a trumpet, and art.” And Omer adds that they received yard rakes from one customer.

“We have bartered for things we never would have gotten were we to have to pay cash for them,” Dave says.

The Orian brothers also installed a “barter wall” next to the counter to encourage exchanges between customers. The “wall” is a large corkboard with a sign next to it explaining: “It may benefit you to trade your goods and services with your neighbors as an alternative to using money, which can potentially be a little hard to find these days.”

“I don’t know that our five foot bartering wall will be the thing that turns this local economy in the right direction, but I do think we can make a significant impact,” Omer says. He argues that Eugene possesses ample “human and natural resources” to sustain itself. “The lack of cash flow due to the economy should not stop this city from prospering.”

Photo by Abby Quillen.

Right now you can make a number of exchanges using the wall. Ellen will do some proofreading or editing for you if she can borrow your truck for an hour. Heather, a doula-in-training, will provide free labor support in exchange for experience toward her certification. Mike will fix your bicycle for some moped parts. And if you’re a business lawyer, Omer and Dave would like to trade you some waffles for your services.

If legal work for waffles doesn’t sound like a fair trade, you probably haven’t tasted these waffles. Everyone who has seems to invariably sound like a teenager with a crush. The store is wallpapered with waffle wrappers decorated by customers, many of them waxing poetic about the waffles. “Waffles make me so happy,” one gushes. “There’s a waffle at the end of the rainbow,” another proclaims. Off the Waffle’s 1,695 Facebook fans seem pretty smitten as well.

Off the Waffle’s “original” waffle is served in a to-go wrapper just like it would be if you purchased it from a street vendor in Brussels. But you can also sit down in the casual dining area, enjoy the Django Reinhart music that’s often playing on the stereo, and get a waffle served on a plate and topped with a combination of gourmet ingredients you’d expect to find in a much fancier restaurant. The Ahee-hee, for instance, features cream cheese, garlic-rubbed seared rare ahi tuna, sesame seeds, and drizzled sesame oil.

While you wait, you can pick up Off the Waffle’s small “joke basket” and exchange jokes with other customers. It’s crammed with scraps of paper, post-it notes, and pieces of napkin scribbled with jokes like, “What’s the difference between snowmen and snowwomen?” You turn it over for the punch line: “Snow balls.”

Off the Waffle just moved to a new location, and they haven’t put their sign up yet, but day and night, a line seems to snake from the counter to the door. Most people pay cash, but if you have a healthy potted plant or a restaurant-style highchair, Omer and Dave will probably trade you a mighty tasty waffle for it.

Abby Quillen is a freelance writer who lives in Eugene, Oregon with her husband, son, two cats, and four chickens. She blogs about simple, healthy, and sustainable city living at www.newurbanhabitat.com. She wrote this article for Shareable.net.

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1. Build a Home

Bats like warm, dry, tight spaces. A bat house provides them with an alternative to your attic, and reduces the chance of human/bat contact. Advice on what to look for in a ready-made bat house, along with plans for building one yourself, are available from Bat Conservation International at batcon.org. 

That’s where you’ll also find a state-by-state guide to the needs of different bat species. For example, the hollows of dead trees provide a roosting site for bats in many areas, but the Western Yellow Bat roosts in living palm trees. So bat lovers in Southern California leave palms untrimmed, particularly during nesting season, when bat babies may be clinging to the fronds.

2. Watch Your Water

Bats need drinking water and are attracted by ponds and birdbaths. They may miscalculate a swooping approach and become stranded in steep-sided swimming pools. Provide an escape route by making or buying a small floating ramp like the “Frog Log”: froglog.us

3. Plant a Night Garden

Bats are the primary predator of agricultural pests—one bat eats 2,000 to 6,000 insects each night. Plant afternoon-blooming or night-scented flowers to attract moths, and the voracious bats that follow will help control your local mosquito population. Evening primrose, phlox, night-flowering catchfly, fleabane, goldenrod, four o’clock,  salvia, nicotiana, and moonflower are all good choices. 

4. Adopt a Bat

This is the year of the bat, according to a United Nations declaration that recognizes their importance to the world’s ecosystems. You can support research, conservation, and protective legislation by adopting a bat through Bat Conservation International. Someone you know might love the (symbolic) gift of a bat. 

The torrid summer of 2010 will cap off the hottest decade ever recorded on our planet. American households have responded to the heat by doubling our consumption of electricity for air-conditioning since the mid-1990s. Our a/c use has, in turn, boosted greenhouse gas emissions from power plants—helping to speed global climate change and to ensure that future heat waves will be even more frequent and intense … and that we’ll soon be cranking up the air-conditioning yet another notch.

But around the country, people are starting to recognize this vicious cycle and trying to put a stop to it.

I’ve met many people from across the country who enjoy the non-air-conditioned life, even in the heart of the Sunbelt. Here in Salina, Kansas, a place where triple-digit highs are common, my wife Priti and I have lived without air-conditioning for ten years.

Air-conditioning plays an important role in protecting the more vulnerable segments of our population during heat waves. But that doesn’t warrant its lavish deployment throughout society for much of the year. Whether you live in a house on a shady lot or in a third-floor urban apartment, it’s possible to stay comfortable by reviving and updating simple hot-weather strategies that have been cast aside during the age of air-conditioning. And it can be done without costly equipment or home renovations.

The key is to focus on people-cooling, not building-cooling. Your body is constantly converting chemical energy from food into heat; hot and/or humid weather makes it harder to unload that heat. But filling a home with chilled, still, dry air around the clock is only one of the many ways by which we can help our bodies maintain their thermal balance.

Keep air circulating. Air movement is highly effective in helping you evaporate perspiration and shed heat. On a merely warm day, a breeze through an open window is enough to do the job, but in truly hot weather, especially if it’s humid, turn on a fan. Ceiling fans are good, but the direct breeze from a portable or window fan can be more effective. In summer, we have a window fan blowing directly across our bed at night.

Don’t let the morning weather forecast scare you into reaching for the A/C switch. If all of the home’s occupants are away at work or school during the day, midday temperatures are not very relevant. If you are going to be home all day, the predicted high temperature or heat index may sound menacing; however, a naturally ventilated indoor space often remains at least ten degrees cooler than the outdoor maximum, and air movement knocks a few more degrees off the temperature your body is actually sensing. In a closed-up, air-conditioned home, a thermostat set in the mid-to-upper eighties would create a suffocating environment—but with open windows and moving air, living in such temperatures is no sweat.

Change your location with the time of day and sun position. If you’re fortunate enough to have a basement, take advantage of the geothermal cooling it provides. A fan enhances the effect. And if things get really tough, there’s no need to be an absolutist. For a few hours’ break, you can quickly and fairly efficiently cool down a one-room refuge with a window air-conditioner.

Reserve sedentary activities for the hottest part of the day. When physical work is called for, just accept that you may need to wring out your shirt afterward. Don’t do your running or other exercise at three in the afternoon under a broiling sun, but don’t do it in an air-conditioned health club either. Research shows that regular exertion in the heat builds the body’s tolerance, helping you function better in hot weather.

Don’t make extra heat. Remember that any energy-consuming household device releases waste heat. Plan meals that involve less cooking—cut back on boiling and baking especially. Keep the dishwasher and any unneeded lights turned off. Use solar technology—a clothesline—to dry the laundry. And take cold or lukewarm showers to avoid burdening your indoor atmosphere with a big load of humidity.

Get wet. High humidity may be the enemy, but water in liquid form is an essential ally. When it’s feasible, hit the lake or local swimming pool with your friends and neighbors. When it’s not (and if water supplies are sufficient), nothing cools like the old garden hose or lawn sprinkler.

Stay near plants. Head to the woods, where it always feels cooler. Plants can cool twice, by blocking sunlight and by absorbing heat as they transpire water. If you have a yard, you can further reduce the peak indoor temperature by creating more shade [pdf]. If possible, have trees, especially to the south and west. If that’s not possible, a dense stand of other kinds of tall plants—giant reed (Arundo donax) or sunflowers, for example—can be tall enough by July to shade the sun-baked sides of the house. We have grapevines covering a couple of windows.

Bring in the night air. If, when the sun starts going down, the outdoor temperature drops below that in the house, it’s a signal to pull in some of that outdoor air. Use a whole-house or attic fan if you have one; otherwise, set up one window fan blowing in and another out.

Meet your neighbors. Especially in the evening, spend time under a shade tree, patio umbrella, or screen porch, or head for the neighborhood park. Using natural cooling can help reverse the trend toward isolation from neighbors and nature that has characterized the age of air-conditioning.

The most important adjustment to be made is not in the thermostat but in our own view of what constitutes comfort. When people say they couldn’t survive without air conditioning, they tend to be thinking about the last time they dashed from a sun-baked parking lot into a chilled home or business. But focusing on those extremes ignores a wide range of perfectly livable, pleasant environments—that come at a much lower cost to you and the planet.

Stan Cox wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Stan is the author of Losing Our Cool: Uncomfortable Truths About Our Air-Conditioned World (and Finding New Ways to Get Through the Summer). His website is LosingOurCool.com.

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Why is marriage so tough at times? Why do some lifelong relationships click, while others just tick away like a time bomb? And how can you prevent a marriage from going bad—or rescue one that already has?

After years of research, we can answer these questions. In fact, we are now able to predict whether a couple will stay happily together after listening for as little as three hours to a conflict conversation and other interactions in our Love Lab. Our accuracy rate averages 91 percent. Gay and lesbian relationships operate on essentially the same principles as heterosexual relationships, according to our research.

But the most rewarding findings are the seven principles that prevent a marriage from breaking up, even for those couples we tested in the lab who seemed headed for divorce.

Emotionally intelligent couples are intimately familiar with each other’s world. They have a richly detailed love map—they know the major events in each other’s history, and they keep updating their information as their spouse’s world changes. He could tell you how she’s feeling about her boss. She knows that he fears being too much like his father and considers himself a “free spirit.” They know each other’s goals, worries, and hopes.

Fondness and admiration are two of the most crucial elements in a long-lasting romance. Without the belief that your spouse is worthy of honor and respect, where is the basis for a rewarding relationship? By reminding yourself of your spouse’s positive qualities­—even as you grapple with each other’s flaws—and expressing out loud your fondness and admiration, you can prevent a happy marriage from deteriorating.

In marriage people periodically make “bids” for their partner’s attention, affection, humor, or support. People either turn toward one another after these bids or they turn away. Turning toward is the basis of emotional connection, romance, passion, and a good sex life.

The happiest, most stable marriages are those in which the husband treats his wife with respect and does not resist power sharing and decision making with her. When the couple disagrees, these husbands actively search for common ground rather than insisting on getting their way. It’s just as important for wives to treat their husbands with honor and respect. But our data indicate that the vast majority of wives—even in unstable marriages—already do that. Too often men do not return the favor.

Start with good manners when tackling your solvable problems:

• Step 1. Use a softened startup: Complain but don’t criticize or attack your spouse. State your feelings without blame, and express a positive need (what you want, not what you don’t want). Make statements that start with “I” instead of “you.” Describe what is happening; don’t evaluate or judge. Be clear. Be polite. Be appreciative. Don’t store things up.

• Step 2. Learn to make and receive repair attempts: De-escalate the tension and pull out of a downward cycle of negativity by asking for a break, sharing what you are feeling, apologizing, or expressing appreciation.

• Step 3. Soothe yourself and each other: Conflict discussions can lead to “flooding.” When this occurs, you feel overwhelmed both emotionally and physically, and you are too agitated to really hear what your spouse is saying. Take a break to soothe and distract yourself, and learn techniques to soothe your spouse.

• Step 4. Compromise: Here’s an exercise to try. Decide together on a solvable problem to tackle. Then separately draw two circles—a smaller one inside a larger one. In the inner circle list aspects of the problem you can’t give in on. In the outer circle, list the aspects you can compromise about. Try to make the outer circle as large as possible and your inner circle as small as possible. Then come back and look for common bases for agreement.

Many perpetual conflicts that are gridlocked have an existential base of unexpressed dreams behind each person’s stubborn position. In happy marriages, partners incorporate each other’s goals into their concept of what their marriage is about. These goals can be as concrete as wanting to live in a certain kind of house or intangible, such as wanting to view life as a grand adventure. The bottom line in getting past gridlock is not necessarily to become a part of each other’s dreams but to honor these dreams.

Marriage can have an intentional sense of shared purpose, meaning, family values, and cultural legacy that forms a shared inner life. Each couple and each family creates its own microculture with customs (like Sunday dinner out), rituals (like a champagne toast after the birth of a baby), and myths—the stories the couple tells themselves that explain their marriage. This culture incorporates both of their dreams, and it is flexible enough to change as husband and wife grow and develop. When a marriage has this shared sense of meaning, conflict is less intense and perpetual problems are unlikely to lead to gridlock.

Adapted for What Happy Families Know, the Winter 2011 issue of YES! Magazine, from Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work, by John M. Gottman, Ph.D., and Nan Silver, Three  Rivers Press, 1999.  For further information on practical, research-based relationship tools for couples and therapists, contact The  Gottman Institute.

Illustration by Ivana Forgo/istock and YES! Magazine 

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Relationships count—cultivate them.

Be inclusive of a wide range of food system interests.

When it comes to disagreement, find common ground where you can; for all else, foster a climate of robust debate and respect for everyone’s opinion.

Educate your members, the public and policymakers about terminology like “just,” “sustainable,” and “food policy.”

Look for unusual connections such as economic development and the local food economy.

Find a champion, especially a policymaker, who will work for your cause.

Learn more about your food system by conducting food assessments, research, and ongoing information gathering.

The Community Food Security Coalition provides technical assistance and information about food policy councils. See their website at www.foodsecurity.org.

:: YES! STORY:
Fresh from the City
Citizens and local policymakers join up to get fresh foods to schools and neighborhoods.

Mark Winne contributed these tips to Food for Everyone, the Spring 2009 issue of YES! Magazine. Mark is cofounder of the City of Hartford Food Policy Commission, the Connecticut Food Policy Council, End Hunger Connecticut!, and the national Community Food Security Coalition, and author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty (Beacon, 2008). Interested? Check out the YES! Tool Kit for Activists.

YES! MAGAZINE GRAPHIC, 2008. Illustration by Kayann Legg / I-S Sources: Rocky Mountain Institute,
Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Energy, University of Chicago.

Introduction
The Joneses are your average U.S. energy consumers. They haven’t yet upgraded to energy-efficient appliances, their house needs better insulation, and they keep the place as cool in the summer and warm in the winter as most Americans do. The two adults commute 30 miles each per day, in separate cars with average fuel efficiency, and every year they each drive an additional 4,500 miles running errands and taking their child to soccer games and violin practice. The family takes one vacation trip per year, flying to visit grandparents 1,350 miles away. How much CO2 do their house and cars produce? We figure it at 60,000 pounds, or 10 tons for each family member.

Lately, though, the Joneses have been reading about climate change, and they’re getting worried. Ecological crisis has never felt so urgent before. Even little Joey Jones is talking greenhouse gases—he learned at school that scientists are predicting a worldwide climate catastrophe that will change the rest of his life, unless we stop the worst effects by making big changes in the next ten years. The Joneses decide: change is necessary, and they’re ready to do their part. But how much can they really do? A lot, it turns out.

In 10 years, without sacrificing their way of life, the Jones family eliminates the CO2 emissions that their home and transportation used to create—the bulk of their carbon footprint.

Count Your Carbon Want to keep up with the Joneses? Here are the numbers we used. Use them to find—then shrink—your own carbon footprint. Gallon of gas Gallon of fuel oil or diesel Kilowatt hour of electricity (national average) Therm of natural gas Gallon of propane Per passenger: Airplane mile Train mile Long-distance bus mile Local mass transit mile Electric bike mile 19.36 22.38 1.43 11.71 12.67 1.28 0.42 0.18 0.50 0.02

The Rest of the Story The Joneses only changed their housing and transport habits. How can you go further?   Eat meatless. For every day of the week you skip meat, you’ll save 215 lbs. per year. Buy local. Most food eaten in the U.S. has traveled 1,500 miles to your plate. Be a low-impact consumer. Choose local products, reduce the stuff you buy, and save embedded energy by buying used. Reduce waste. Stop junk mail, reduce packaging, and reduce the 2,020 lbs. each American’s waste produces annually. Avoid the McMansion. A smaller house saves a lot of carbon: on average, 11.4 lbs. of CO2 per square foot per year.

The family starts off with easy changes: They wash clothes in cold water and air dry them in the summer, replace incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents (CFLs), turn off their computer when not in use. That’s an instant, virtually free savings of 6,200 pounds of CO2. They make one simple transportation change: One of the adults commutes by bus three days a week—enough to see whether it can be done, but keeping the second car just in case. That’s worth another 2,200 pounds. They’re down to 51,600 pounds and it hasn’t cost them anything but the price of the CFLs and a clothesline. They’re actually saving money.

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They stop donating so much heat to the outdoors: attic and basement insulation, sealing and insulating heat ducts, and patching the large air leaks typical of standard construction saves them a whopping 7,100 pounds. These savings aren’t free up front, but the savings in heating and cooling bills will repay the cost over time. Besides, Mrs. Jones is handy with home repair, and does a lot of this work herself. Down to 44,500 per year.

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The bus commute’s gone well, so Mr. Jones now buses to work all the time. They’ve worked on consolidating trips outside work, and find they can do without the second car altogether. That’s 5,900 pounds gone. They finish weatherproofing their house: beefing up wall insulation, weatherizing doors and windows, and upgrading to high performance windows. Another 1,800 pounds disappear. They’re at 36,800.

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Instead of flying for their annual vacation, the Joneses take the train: a leisurely way to save 7,200 pounds every year. (If they took the bus, they’d save even more.) They’re at 29,600 pounds per year—halfway there a year early.

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Time to replace the car. Thanks to consumer demand, electric cars have become widely available, and they buy one. Even charging on dirty power, they save 9,000 pounds. Household total is now 20,600.

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They improve their water system, including insulating their hot water heater and their pipes, and also lower the temperature of their water heater: 1,000 pounds down. When the old refrigerator kicks the bucket, the Joneses buy a new energy-efficient one and finally unplug a second fridge in the garage, knocking off another 1,300. Total remaining: 18,300.

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Grandma and Grandpa retire and move nearby. The Joneses now vacation within the range of their electric car, saving 3,300 pounds of CO2 each year. The city converts its bus fleet to clean electricity, which saves another 1,200 pounds. They’re down to 13,800.

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An efficient clothes washer saves carbon on its own, and saves dryer time. With all the money they’re saving, they decide it’s time to invest in a solar hot water system. Total: 2,000. Leaving 11,800.

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While the Joneses have been on this journey, their town has responded to citizen pressure and gone bike friendly. The new bike paths make it easy for both to ride to work. To ease the hills, they buy electric bikes. There are four months of the year when they can’t bike, so they continue their usual commute patterns then. Savings: 3,500.

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The Joneses’ furnace has been groaning and working overtime. They replace it with an electric heat pump, which also cools the house in summer. They also buy certified green, renewable power from their electric company, and the switch from coal plants eliminates the remaining 8,300 pounds of CO2 produced by the electricity for their house and car.

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Brooke Jarvis & Doug Pibel wrote this article as part of Stop Global Warming Cold, the Spring 2008 issue of YES! Magazine. Brooke is editorial assistant and Doug is managing editor of YES! Magazine.

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I left Yale during the fall semester of my junior year fully intending to come back. Seven years later, even though I was technically still “on leave,” I arrived at my 5-year college reunion as a party crasher. But I didn’t feel sheepish coming back. I was just excited to have a good time with some old friends. I was pained to discover just how miserable many of them were. Many of my classmates had defaulted to law school, some were living at home. A few people had cleared the high bar to get low-level jobs in the Obama administration, and they were deeply frustrated at how powerless they felt in such powerful positions.

I’d heard of the “quarterlife crisis,” but what was going on with these people seemed like a more permanent problem. My friends had had all this crazy ambition and talent in college, this freewheeling ability to invent and imagine. But it seemed like they hadn’t found anywhere to use it, and so for most of them, it was as if they had spent their life building and learning to fly a plane and, now that they were in the air, they didn’t quite now where to land.

According to the International Labor Organization, as of 2010, 211 million people around the world were officially out of work. When we factor in the underemployed and those who have given up looking for a job, the number climbs much higher. In the U.S., only 54 percent of 18-24 year-olds have a job. And if there isn’t a radical shift in the direction of our economy, there will be no relief: According to some estimates, in the next 10 years, only 300 million new jobs will appear to greet the billion young people entering the workforce all around the world.

In this desperate landscape, millions of us are resigning ourselves to work that hurts us, hurts others, and damages the planet. We’re wasting our greatest assets. We have a deep, dim sense there’s something else we’re meant for, but we don’t know exactly where the opportunities are or how to access them.

Figuring out what to do with your life isn’t just about self-examination—it’s about examination of the world you live in. Theologian Frederick Buechner puts it this way: “Your vocation is where your greatest passion meets the world’s greatest need.” It takes a conscious act of imagining beyond what you see, connecting what you read and what you understand about the world to the actual life you lead.

We need to genuinely believe that things can change, that what once seemed impossible is now within reach. Arriving at that perspective is largely a matter of seeking and claiming our options, from the tiniest task-related choice, to the sweeping global choices we make as a culture. Do we really have to trade our time for money for something we don’t believe? Do we have to settle for being unhappy at work just because we have the pressure of bills to pay?

There’s another path—one that doesn’t always impart a specific job title, where meaning can become a method to achieve financial stability, where our instinctive emotional response to the injustices in our world lay the foundation for a long-term career. In analyzing the stories of people who have successfully re-directed their lives (we call them Rebuilders), Dev Aujla and I identified four stages their paths share in common:

Stage 1: The Wilderness

The first stage of every path to Making Good is recognizing and acknowledging a problem. In our hundreds of interviews with people sorting through the complex emotions this stage brings up, self-doubt was one of the most significant barriers to moving forward. They had identified a problem (or 20), but they just weren’t sure what they could do about it, where they could start. It was a combination stemming from a lack of direction and that feeling of being stuck.

It’s tempting to cling to our barriers and obstacles when we feel like giving up. There’s a distinct comfort in victimhood—you don’t have to risk anything, people extend you sympathy, and you get to feel the private satisfaction of being right when someone does you wrong. It’s like shutting off the alarm on a cold morning and drifting back to sleep. Except all our options shut down. We surrender our power. Some of our excitement, our spark, our capacity to do something meaningful in our short time on earth slips away.

We don’t control the broader economy, and we often don’t control the facts of our lives, but we can always control our response to them. That response is where our power lies, and to leverage it, we need to be conscious of our perspective. Our perspective on the world has immense power over our state of mind, just as the media’s perspective has a profound impact on society. Both are creations of our mind, and the gap between how we see ourselves today and how we want to see ourselves is the path we need to travel to build a meaningful career.

The path that Rebuilders are on is a nonlinear track that introduces career freedom, variety, and opportunity custom-cut to your abilities. On the mapless road, each episode offers new skills, challenges, and contacts that will contain a clue to the next episode.

We can rarely feel the connection of one moment to another while we’re living it, but with a little perspective, we come to see the inspiration and causation that propel us forward. The truth is you don’t begin your career at one particular time. Everything that you have done to get to this point—what you have learned, the people you have met, your time off, your work experience—has brought you here. Even people in the most traditional fields will credit their success to unplanned turns, to ideas that surprised them. You have to trust that doing good work and doing it earnestly will carry you from one sustaining project to the next, that just because there’s no corporate ladder to ascend doesn’t mean there’s no future work for you. The skills and experiences you pick up along the way only make you more prepared for the next challenge you’ll face, and the path that evolves to carry you through will indeed be a path—a nonlinear career path. It’s about the constantly evolving now.

Stage 2: Finding Your Special Powers

Magazine profiles of the most creative, the most powerful, the most up-and-coming movers and shakers can give us the impression that life just feels different for really successful people. Sometimes what we read about them seems to suggest that they’ve always had a clear path, one step after another, all stemming from some grand epiphany where they felt chosen for their work. It was as if they were clueless and then one morning they had this experience and, boom, there it was, their life’s purpose clear as daylight, driving them straight toward the magazine on the kitchen table.

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Thinking this way can make us feel like if we haven’t been discovered, then we probably aren’t worthy of great things. But when you talk to people who have achieved a level of success, you find out they, too, are caught up in that long, unfolding process of figuring out who they are, what they know and don’t know, and how to get paid. The truth is that neat epiphanies rarely occur.

The path to success isn’t as clear-cut as it may sound in the magazines. When a story is written about what you’re working on one day, it will be abbreviated, summarized, and centered around a point from where it all began—even though your work will be a much more gradual process.

The second stage is about finding your edge, the special power that we all possess. We start the search by looking back at the experiences that have gotten us here today. By looking back, you can begin to uncover a story, your story, and find out that you actually do have a unique edge, in spite of a nagging insecurity about not being good enough, not being ready enough. But what we need to understand is that in spite of that feeling, we are already in the middle of the work that we need to do. We are already living our “real” lives.

We have been making choices for our whole lives— whether we are aware of it or not. In fact, all of the choices that you have made up until this point have brought you to this point. You aren’t at the beginning—you are already in the middle. You are the perfect person to make the next move. If you are waiting for a moment to start, if you are waiting for some sort of signal to tell you that you can begin, you are missing out on what is happening right now.

Stage 3: The Kin

Study after study shows that we’re happier when we’re together, but sometimes it can be hard to find your people, your tribe, your community. Maybe your family and the community you grew up in don’t seem to support the values or passion you hold dear. Schools and work environments are too often designed for competition, not connection and collaboration, breeding a cliquish and alienating environment.

Most of us start off into the Wilderness with just one or a few friends who understand what we’re going through. We have late-night conversations and long walks to make sense of all the confusing things. We become stronger as we accumulate more friends. So the question is: How do we find our people?

There are hundreds of ways to find larger groups of people with shared values and purpose. Here’s a starter list of two quick ways to get you into your community:

1. Take the online offline. There are online networks and organizations for almost every interest. It’s great to be involved in these sites and networks, but look for opportunities to take the online networking offline as fast as you can. Go to bar nights, potlucks, film screenings, conferences, community association meetings, or open houses of these networks with the goal of finding just one other simpatico person to come to future events with you.
2. Bring it to your town. Look for events that are going on in other towns or cities that attract the people that you want to be hanging out with. Contact the organizer or host organization and sign up to be a local organizer or part of the team that is bringing it to your community. You now have permission to get in touch with as many people as you can and have an organization offering you some support to get started. Whether it is a TEDx event, ChangeCamp, or a Meetup event, there are great opportunities to get to know people.

When you do find true community, it can feel like a homecoming, like the discovery of a new family you didn’t know but was there all along. In these communities, you will find friendship, comradeship, and a kind of unity of purpose. These are the people who will drop everything to help when you’re in need, with whom you can share some laughs and commiseration when choices seem unknown. Your community is made up of those who will help you land a job when you’re broke, partner with you when you want to launch a new company, or at least have a drink with you on a patio.

Before long, if you’re not there already, you’ll end up being a part of multiple communities based around workplaces, conferences, Listservs, and who knows what else. For now, consider that you are already part of a broad movement of Rebuilders, and you aren’t doing it alone. Your community is actually everywhere. There’s a growing acceptance of this trackless track and more and more people that can help you bridge between the different steps on our nonlinear paths.

Stage 4: The Tests

As we find our edge, discover our communities, and accept the path we have begun to walk down, we need to stop and look around. You are figuring out how to live your purpose and living it at the same time. Stage 4 is about finding yourself in those moments when things feel like they are in chaos and learning to take a deep breath and find that personal power inside to get up, get out, and carry on.

Making Good: Finding Meaning, Money, and Community in a Changing World

By Billy Parish and Dev Aujla
Rodale Books 2012, 304 pages, $15.99

Support Yes! when you buy here from an independent bookstore.

These are our moments of truth—a time to conquer our fears and find the power within us to overcome the obstacles we face, regardless of how overwhelming they may feel. At certain moments in all of our lives, we are called to lead.

When the dreams we have for ourselves match the reality of our experience, we’re living our purpose. These moments of leadership aren’t always about being in the spotlight. They aren’t always about presenting to thousands or asking for millions of dollars. They are often quiet moments as we are getting dressed to leave or are making notes in preparation for a call. We know that what we are doing is right, but it feels so uncomfortable that all we want is for someone to come down from above to answer our hesitant wondering about whether we’re doing the right thing with a confident Yes.

Change starts with the simple belief in progress. And to participate in progress, we have to take hold of the millions of choices that come together to create the arrow of change. The world needs your best self. You need your best self right now.

Billy Parish adapted this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions, from his book Making Good: Finding Meaning, Money, and Community in a Changing World, co-written with Dev Aujla. Billy is the co-founder of the Energy Action Coalition and the co-founder and president of Solar Mosaic.

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Video from Earthjustice on YouTube.

When Jen Slotterback found a well pad stake in a local park, she realized the forest would soon be taken over by a natural gas drilling—and the controversial process hydraulic fracturing, or fracking—unless she did something to stop it. Jen and her husband Jim had never organized a campaign before, and they only had 11 days before the vote on whether to allow fracking in the park. In that short amount of time and with the help of the Responsible Drilling Alliance (RDA), the Slotterbacks mobilized their community to save Rider Park. The board unanimously voted against the drilling.

Now the Slotterbacks and RDA are campaigning to save more than 700,000 acres of forest throughout Pennsylvania from fracking.

To learn more and sign the petition, click here.

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Biology is destiny, declared Sigmund Freud. 

But if Freud were around today, he might say “design is destiny”—especially after taking a stroll through most American cities.

The way we design our communities plays a huge role in how we experience our lives. Neighborhoods built without sidewalks, for instance, mean that people walk less and therefore experience fewer spontaneous encounters, which is what instills a spirit of community to a place. That’s a chief cause of the social isolation, so rampant in the modern world, that contributes to depression, distrust, and other maladies.

You don’t have to be a therapist to realize all this creates lasting psychological effects. It thwarts the connections between people that encourage us to congregate, cooperate, and work for the common good. We retreat into ever more privatized existences.

Of course, this is no startling revelation. Over the past 40 years, the shrinking sense of community across America has been widely discussed, and many proposals outlined about how to bring us back together.

One of the notable solutions being put into practice to combat this problem is New Urbanism, an architectural movement to build new communities (and revitalize existing ones) by maximizing opportunities for social exchange: public plazas, front porches, corner stores, coffee shops, neighborhood schools, narrow streets and, yes, sidewalks. 

This line of thinking has transformed many communities, including my own World War I-era neighborhood in Minneapolis, which thankfully has sidewalks but was once bereft of the inviting public places that animate a community. Now I marvel at all the options I have for mingling with the neighbors over a cappuccino, Pabst Blue Ribbon, juevos rancheros, artwork at a gallery opening, or head of lettuce at the farmer’s market.

"That's public space.
Nobody can use it."
How neighborhoods across Portland are reclaiming—and redefining— their neighborhoods.

But while New Urbanism is making strides at the level of the neighborhood, we still spend most of our time at home, which today means seeing no one other than our nuclear family. How could we widen that circle just a bit, to include the good neighbors with whom we share more than a property line?

That’s an idea Seattle-area architect Ross Chapin has explored for many years, and now showcases in an inspiring and beautiful new book: Pocket Neighborhoods: Creating a Small-Scale Community in a Large-Scale World.

He believes that groupings of four to twelve households make an ideal community “where meaningful ‘neighborly’ relationships are fostered.” But even here, design shapes our destiny. Chapin explains that strong connections between neighbors develop most fully and organically when everyone shares some "common ground."

That can be a semi-private square, as in the pocket neighborhoods Chapin designed in the Seattle area. In the book’s bright photographs, they look like grassy patches of paradise, where kids scamper, flowers bloom, and neighbors stop to chat.

Pocket Neighborhoods: Creating a Small-Scale Community in a Large-Scale World

By Ross Chapin
Taunton Press, 2011, 224 pages, $30

Support YES! when you buy here from an independent bookstore.

But Chapin points out these commons can take many different forms—an apartment building in Cambridge with a shared backyard, a group of neighbors in Oakland who tore down their backyard fences to create a commons, a block in Baltimore that turned their alley into a pubic commons, or the residential pedestrian streets found in Manhattan Beach, California, and all around Europe.

The benefits of a living in a pocket neighborhood go further than you might imagine. I lived in one while in graduate school, a rundown 1886 rowhouse with its own courtyard near the University of Minnesota campus. At no other time in my life have I become such close friends with my neighbors. We shared impromptu afternoon conversations at the picnic table and parties that went into the early hours of the morning under Italian lights we strung from the trees. 

When the property was sold to an ambitious young man who jacked up the rents (to raise capital for the eventual demolition of the building to make way for an ugly new one), we organized a rent strike. And we won, which would never have happened if we had not already forged strong bonds with each other. Because the judged ruled that the landlord could not raise our rents until he fixed up the building, he abandoned plans to knock it down. It still stands today, and I remain friends with some of the old gang that partied in the courtyard.

Jay Walljasper is a contributing editor to YES! Magazine, author of All That We Share, a contributing editor to National Geographic Traveler, editor of OnTheCommons.org, a senior fellow of the Project for Public Spaces, and a contributor to Shareable.net, where this article originally appeared.

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Three years ago, I decided to downsize. I sold my big house (which I loved!), got rid of all my stuff, and built an itty-bitty eco-friendly cottage. When I finished building, I slid my little house into a friend’s backyard. This isn’t as odd as it sounds. My house actually “fits” in the backyard. It looks like a tiny cabin, or a tree house. It’s also super-small and built on wheels.

My house offers 84 square-feet of living space and cost about $10,000 to build. It was built for the highway, but—honestly—it isn’t anything like a travel trailer. It doesn’t contain any space-age plastics or fake wood. Instead, it’s the real deal: knotty pine, cedar, and fir.

I made the house to be as simple and natural as possible. I minimized my construction footprint by using a bunch of “green” building techniques, including:

• Recycled and Salvaged Wood—The house took shape based on the materials that were offered to me or “found.” For example, I decided to install skylights after I found two huge windows at the salvage yard. I installed knotty pine siding on the interior walls and ceiling, and used cedar planks for the loft floor after the wood became available at the local reuse store. I installed exterior cedar siding after my neighbor offered me a bundle. He had originally purchased the wood in the 1940s, and had been storing it in his garage since that time. It was beautiful old-growth cedar—the kind you can’t find anymore.
  
  
• Insulated Windows—The house has nice, wood-clad windows that are low-emission (which reflects sunlight to keep the house cooler in the summer) and argon-insulated. They cost a mint, but have proven to work great! They cut noise and heat loss, and look fabulous.
  
  
• Solar Electricity—A 240-watt photovoltaic (solar) system powers my lights and other electric gadgets. It was sized to meet my needs, based on Olympia’s cloudy weather.
  
  
• Non-toxic Stains and Sealants—I used a water-based stain on the outside of the house, and a water-based sealant on the kitchen counter. I didn’t coat the floors, walls, or ceiling. As a result, the house carries a subtle, natural cedar and pine smell. I love the woodsy, peaceful smell of my house.
  
  
• Primitive Water/Sewer—I don’t have running water in my house. I pull water from a nearby garden spigot, and jug it into the house. I use a composting toilet, and I shower elsewhere. This “primitive” set-up has presented some of the greatest challenges for me. But I’ve gotten used to things, and I recognize that (on a world scale) any sort of toilet or shower is a blessing. Millions of people live without running water or a sanitary sewer. My situation is gifted by comparison.
  
  
• Other Good Ideas—I used shredded cotton insulation in the walls and ceiling, and Marmoleum (a natural linseed product) on the floor. I placed the house in the backyard with consideration for wind, sun and shade. Most importantly, I simply minimized the size of the house while creating a sense of space, utility and natural beauty (smaller really is better for the environment).
  

I’ve been in the backyard for over two years. I didn’t intend to find myself stumbling down a “greener” path, but the house has worked on me. I buy less stuff (there’s no place to store it). I re-think leaving lights on, and mull over better ways to manage my compost. I take fewer and shorter showers because I’m imposing on someone else. My ecological footprint has definitely gotten smaller by living in my little house.

I’ve saved a lot of money (my utility bills don’t really exist, and I don’t have a mortgage). I also spend less time fixing things and cleaning. Now, I have more of the “stuff” that I always wanted: time and resources.

I’ve tried to explain my house to other people. It’s a bit awkward. For example, a few weeks ago, a group of 5th-graders visited my house. I was trying to explain how my house works, and what makes it “green.” And ultimately, we spent less time talking about the house (itself), and more time talking about how the house has connected me to the community.

I’m less autonomous. I rely on the sun to power my lights. I trust the rain on the roof to keep me company. I love that the wind cools my house in summer (it works!). I depend on the library and food co-op, and the generosity of friends and neighbors. I have to ask for water every day, and that has changed me!

I find myself wanting (more than ever) to give something back. And that is at the root of all sorts of new ways to live more simply and in-step with my world. Downsizing just keeps getting better!

Dee Williams' tiny house was featured in Sustainable Happiness, the Winter 2009 issue of YES! Magazine. Dee is an inspector with the Washington State Department of Ecology. Reprinted with kind permission from South Sound Green Pages. Interested? Dream House: Tour Dee Williams’ house See the houseplan at www.tumbleweedhouses.com

The United States is entering the fourth year of its deepest downturn since the Great Depression. The official unemployment rate is rising again, and labor force participation among many groups has plummeted to historic lows. A stillborn economic “recovery” has distributed 88 percent of its benefits to corporate profits and one percent to wages and salaries. The financial press is full of warnings that we have forgotten the causes of the collapse and are doomed to repeat it. Ordinary Americans, pollsters tell us, have little faith that the economy will improve, and attribute hard times to the misdeeds of capitalists.

If ever there was a time to challenge economic orthodoxy, this would be it. Yet there has been no effective movement in the United States to ease the suffering of millions, shift patterns of growth and investment, and make job creation a priority. Handed opportunity on a silver platter, progressives have failed to seize it. Understanding that failure is the key to reversing it.

Why no jobs movement?

The most immediate explanation is that there has been no mass protest by the jobless. Since the beginning of the recession, none of the pillars of the progressive community—organized labor, community organizations, civil rights groups, youth and student groups—have invested deeply in organizing the unemployed. Some online jobless networks have emerged, particularly around the extension of unemployment benefits, but they’ve acquired little focus, mass, or momentum.

To be fair, the challenges of organizing the jobless are formidable. In contrast to past recessions, today’s unemployed are widely dispersed rather than concentrated in particular industries, constituencies, or communities. They often hold themselves responsible for their condition and feel a strong sense of shame and powerlessness. Three decades of conservative politics have legitimated a radically individualistic ethos and eroded the once widespread belief that unemployment is a collective problem that society is responsible for fixing.

Moreover, the solutions to large-scale unemployment aren’t obvious. There is no shortage of thoughtful and creative ideas for job creation: infrastructure banks, work-sharing, community jobs, “on-bill” financing of energy projects, worker-owned businesses, lowering (not raising) the normal retirement age. But none of these has captured the imagination of progressives, much less the public at large. Without a compelling solution to point to, it is difficult to sustain protest.

Behind this policy conundrum is a more fundamental political obstacle. Progressives generally assume that public concern about unemployment translates into support for aggressive government intervention. But the majority of Americans believe that only business –not the public sector – can create “real” jobs. A fundamental skepticism about government has led many to conclude that cutting public spending is the best way to create jobs, or to accept high unemployment as “the new normal.” Winning policy change in this climate requires more than good ideas; it requires mass political education.

All of these problems are mutually reinforcing.  In the absence of a mass movement, ideas for change have little weight. In the absence of strong, compelling ideas, people lack the confidence to challenge ideological orthodoxy. Without the reality of people in motion, it is hard to generate a sense of hope and potential for collective action.

In sum, progressive efforts to promote job creation face a classic threshold problem. Incremental strategies—whether in the form of policy analysis, public education, community organizing, or local economic development projects—have a hard time getting lift off. The issue is simply too big, too baked into our economic and political structure. Only something on the order of a social movement can achieve the scale and intensity required to shake up the status quo and create space for a serious effort at job creation.

Pre-conditions 

Social movements, by nature, cannot be programmed, but neither are they entirely spontaneous. As the right has demonstrated in recent years, certain activities and investments can foster the conditions from which movements emerge. These activities include:  

Relentless outreach and recruitment: The current base of progressive activists is simply not large enough or broad enough to support an effective movement for jobs. We need to bring in lots of new people—hundreds of thousands if not millions—who are jobless themselves or passionately concerned about the impact of unemployment on their communities.

Creating space for authentic conversations: Movement-building requires opportunities for people to make sense of their personal experience, in reflection and conversation with others.  Some of this must be in person, in small groups that offer diverse perspectives with sufficient intimacy to build trust. Online and social media are great tools for exchange of ideas and mobilization of people, but they do not substitute for face-to-face conversation.

Identifying and nurturing grassroots leadership: Social movements rely on a deep stratum of leaders with the capacity for autonomous action and close alignment on values, principles, and goals. These leaders often seem to appear out of nowhere, but they are usually the product of an active cultivation process that includes information, training, and political education.  Like authentic conversations, leadership can be facilitated through online tools but almost always requires some “face time” and one-on-one relationships to thrive.

Developing a clear story: Ask a progressive why so many Americans are unemployed, and the answers one might get include Wall Street, free trade, corporate criminality, lack of public investment, structural inequality, bad schools, a flawed growth model, and much more. There is truth to all of these explanations, but they don’t add up to a cogent story. Creating a coherent economic narrative means choosing some elements to highlight and subordinating others. The same goes for policy solutions—if the list is too long, no one will remember it, much less fight for it.

Building strategic alliances: Movement-building is not well served by a progressive ecosystem dominated by short-term, transactional relationships. Even when progressive organizations play well together at the tactical level there is too little strategic coordination to take on really big, ambitious projects—like full employment. We need to create deep institutional partnerships that build on the complementary strengths of organizations and focus talent and resources on the hardest challenges.

Putting it into practice

These are the guiding aims of a new project on jobs and the economy by the Center for Community Change and its affiliate, Change Nation. Through conscious experimentation, we seek to build a robust network of community-led “action pods” that can simultaneously pursue local job creation strategies and unite around a common national agenda.

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Van Jones is leading a national mobilization to rebuild the middle class—through decent work, fair taxes, and opportunities for all.

At present, for example, we are using a movement-building model originally developed by the National Organizing Institute to train thousands of grassroots leaders in how to connect their own personal story to a broader economic narrative. We are collaborating with Van Jones and a host of national groups to develop a working message on the economy and a short list of demands for change. And in partnership with MoveOn.org and other groups, we conducted more than 1,000 house meetings on July 16-17 where Americans could meet with their neighbors to make sense of their experience with the economy.

It is too early to predict what will come of these experiments. What we have learned for certain is that Americans have an intense hunger for authentic conversation about what is happening to their country, and a strong desire to work with others in their community to create jobs and renew the economy.

Portia Bougler was amazed when 21 neighbors—ranging from age 16 to 85—showed up at her house meeting in Chillicothe, Ohio. “We had to keep grabbing chairs, but I was thrilled by what people said, their passion and commitment for change. Everyone signed up to volunteer.” Similar reports came from meetings in living rooms, urban cafes, suburban diners, homeless shelters, and hundreds of other venues across the country. If this energy can be captured and sustained, we can create a national jobs movement, a movement of scale with soul.    

Seth Borgos wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas and practical actions. Seth is director of research and program development at the Center for Community Change. He has also worked for the National Campaign for Jobs and Income Support, an alliance of more than 100 grassroots organizations, the Unitarian Universalist Veatch Program, and ACORN. He is the co-author of This Mighty Dream, a pictorial history of social change movements in the United States.

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In this fun, quirky video, filmmaker Andrea Dorfman and poet/singer/songwriter Tanya Davis  use poetry, art, and music to offer advice for tackling one of society’s biggest fears: alone time.

Tanya shows us how to ease into loneliness—starting in easy places like the bathroom or coffee shop, turning off our cell phone security blankets, honoring the things we like to do by ourselves—as we learn to enjoy it and feed ourselves with it.

Recent studies show that our brains need downtime, away from computers and other digital devices, to spur creativity and productivity. Check out the video...then unplug and reap the rewards of solitude!

Film produced by Bravo!FACT.

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Tired of paying car insurance, sitting in traffic jams, and guzzling too much gas? Do you never want to dig your car out of another snowstorm?

Perhaps your family already cut down from two cars to one, but taking the car-free step seems impossible. Maybe you loved your car-free life back before you had kids, and every time you wrestle the kids into their car seats or take the car to the shop you pine for the old days.

You can do it—you can completely get rid of your car, even if you have a family. Yes, it can be daunting, and you will certainly have to figure out new ways to do some things, but you'll feel a payoff quickly in your health, your place in your community, and your pocketbook. There's nothing better than the feeling of freedom that comes from knowing you'll never pay a parking ticket again.

Bikes (and gear) that grow with your family

The ability to ride a bike makes being car-free much easier for anyone, but especially those of us who have kids.

You may already have bikes in the garage that will work just fine if you pump up the tires and get a tune up at your local bike shop. If you have kids, you may well have picked up a child trailer, trailer bike, or child seat along the way (or maybe your neighbor has one sitting unused in the basement). Spend some time looking at the bike gear you already have, and think about how you can transport cargo and children.

Families often already have gear for carrying children for recreational riding, but don't have a good cargo set-up since errands like grocery shopping have been done by car. If you already have a child trailer, that can easily be used for moderate cargo, though it can be difficult to carry both cargo and children at the same time.

If you have a child bike seat, consider adding either front or rear panniers (large removable bags that attach to your bike rack) to hold gear or some groceries. Note that compatibility between panniers and seats can be a problem. Consider a rear seat with front panniers (or vice versa with a seat on front and panniers on back, though rear seats generally have higher weight limits).

If you are trying to solve compatibility issues between racks, seats, and trailers, all competing for precious space on your rig, note that many European child seats attach directly to the seat stem, in contrast to American seats that occupy your back rack. This can leave you more room for a trailer hitch or panniers. If you'll be using a trailer or a trailer bike, consider attaching hitches to all adult bikes.

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You also might consider adding some rain gear to your set-up (like a raincover for the trailer, and rain pants and jackets for adults). The number of days that you can ride comfortably, at least where we live in the New England, goes up dramatically once you are moderately protected from water.

Keep in mind that as your family grows, your biking needs will change. Kids will outgrow standard bike seats during the preschool years (most American seats have a 40-pound limit). Trailers will work for a while after that, but soon that won't work either.

The most common next step from the trailer is a trailer bike (a one-wheel bike extension that allows your child to ride behind you)—but like the trailer, that has an extremely limited lifespan and even worse, provides no cargo capacity.

One of the best options, if you can afford it, is to get a bike which is designed for carrying cargo and children. We love our Xtracycle for its ability to carry both kid and stuff in a relatively compact and maneuverable package. There are other great cargo options out there, including the Ute, a Bakfiet (Dutch "box bike"), and the Madsen (a great option for more than two kids). Prices on these options vary quite widely, ranging from about $500 to extend an existing bike into an Xtracycle, to over $3,000 for a Dutch Bakfiet.

But if you have some gear, you don't have to worry about this now. You can wait, see how your car-free lives unfold, and assess what purchase will give your family the most use when your kids are outgrowing your current gear.

What about those of you that don't bike? If you live in an urban area, you can absolutely live well without a car and without biking by using public transit. But if you are physically able, consider getting a bike and learning to ride well in traffic. There are bike instructors and schools that train adults both basic riding and riding in traffic. You can also find additional resources online.

Backup Options & Public Transportation

In general, it is best to have at least two possible ways to get anywhere you need to go on a regular basis.

If you've had a car, even if it's just one car that you rarely use, you've always had a fail-safe backup plan for any required trip. Even if you took almost every trip by bike, foot or public transit, if the weather turned sour or you felt kind of sick that day, you had another option.

Biking is a fabulous primary method of transport for the car-free who are physically able, but most parents, at least those who live in northern climates, find that it's not possible to bike every day. For those of you that live in urban areas, you will likely find a wealth of backup plans, mostly based on public transit. Taking a train or bus may take longer than biking, but is generally reliable and affordable, especially if you are able to get discounts through your employer.

Even if you live in a place with good a good train or subway network, it is also useful to get to know your local bus system. Buses generally cover far more area than subways and can provide a useful backup in case of train delays.

Before you automatically dismiss this option, thinking that maybe your area is too suburban or your town is too small for decent buses, check out what your region actually has to offer. Dorea lived for four years in Lincoln, Nebraska, a moderately sized college town, and there were ample bus options for commuting. Suburban areas of larger cities often have buses or trains designed precisely for commuters that can provide a great backup option for a biker, even if they might take too long for comfortable use every day.

Think through all of your transportation options, including walking and "making do." We almost always shop for groceries by bike at a store about two miles away. When the weather is prohibitive, as it sometimes is in the winter, we will sometimes borrow a car, but more often we will simply make do by shopping at a closer store with higher prices and less variety.

Car-sharing

Another great backup option is a car-sharing program (Zipcar in our area—you can find a list of car sharing services on Wikipedia).

This can be particularly good for someone making the transition away from car ownership. With car-sharing, if you are used to driving for occasional trips, you'll still have that option easily available. Car-sharing can really help you to take the plunge; at first, you can use a car whenever you don't see another easy way to make a trip. It won't feel like much of a lifestyle shift, and you won't feel deprived and resentful.

How to Make Biking Mainstream: Lessons from the Dutch

But one of the beautiful things about a car-share is that it attaches the economic cost of the car to the activity itself because you pay by the hour. So even if at first you use it a lot, you'll soon find yourself motivated to find ways around using the car. After all, is it really worth it to spend $30 to get to Target when you could pay just a tiny bit more for a similar product from the hardware store on the corner?

When we first got rid of our car we were fairly heavy Zipcar users (2-3 times a month). But that was ages ago, and while we still maintain a membership so we can have the option, we now use it only very rarely (the last time was more than six months ago).

Borrowing a car is a great way to build community and to avoid having to have your own car. It is cheaper (and friendlier) than a formal car-sharing service. If you are going to borrow your friends' cars, it is a good idea to set some parameters ahead of time (How often can you borrow the car? For how long? How much do you contribute for gas/repairs?) and then to check in periodically to make sure your friends are still comfortable with the relationship.

Alternatively, if you know another family trying to shift away from driving, consider making your own car-share, where two families share a single car and split expenses.

Finally, you can use a taxi as a fairly expensive backup option, but one that is nearly always just a phone call away.

Keep it Simple: Live Locally

The real gift of being car-free is discovering that much of what you need is available within a mile or two of your home.

There are wonderful people living in your neighborhood who would love to come over for dinner. There's a doctor and a hairdresser right around the corner and both are great with your kids. Your neighborhood park is a social hub and you'll find you can attend a birthday party there nearly every weekend. Your children's friends all seem to live within walking distance, so playdates are a breeze. When you take the time to look around you, and stop spending so much time behind the wheel, you will find that your neighborhood is a rich area.

When we were first car-free, we remember frequently feeling like we were backed into a corner. Suddenly there was something we couldn't do without a car and we hadn't planned far enough ahead to think of another way.

But now that we've settled into our car-free lives, we find we have ready access to two or three methods of doing our most frequent tasks, and we rarely miss having a car. Even when we do, we can get one through the car-share or borrow one from a friend, who likely barely uses her car anyway. We don't have to spend much time or energy trying to figure out how to do things without a car. We just live our life, and enjoy the sense of local community and belonging that living without a car has brought to our family.

Angela and Dorea Vierling-Claassen live in Cambridge, Massachusetts with their two children, where both are mathematicians. Together, they write the blog Car Free with Kids. They originally wrote this article for Shareable.net.

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Who benefits when a pastor in a small town in Florida threatens to burn the Quran? Or when a proposal to build a Muslim cultural center in Manhattan erupts into a national controversy?

And what can those of us who believe extremism is harmful do to stop it?

Terry Jones, the Gainsville pastor who was catapulted onto the global stage by his plan to burn the Quran, said his action was about standing up to Islamic extremists. But General David Petraeus and others tell us that this action would play into the hands of extremists. Extremists need anger and hate to recruit and motivate followers; without images of outrage like this, people might revert to peace, respect, and tolerance, which, after all, come pretty naturally to a social species like ours.

There’s another group of extremists who likewise rely on hatemongering. The extreme right wing in this country needs fear and anger to keep people distracted from the real sources of insecurity—a stalled economy that has been managed for the benefit of Wall Street and big corporations, two protracted and disastrous wars, and a system increasingly unable to support a middle-class way of life.

The extremists on both sides have an oddly symbiotic relationship—each thrives on the anger and vitriol of the other.

But Reverend Jones and others of his ilk can succeed only when moderate voices are silent. Quiet disapproval isn’t enough. We must take a stand often, courageously, and respectfully for tolerance and peace. Here are a few ways we can do this during an especially fraught anniversary of the 9/11 attacks:

• Speak out in support of religious freedom, as the 9/11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrow did recently in support of the proposed New York City Muslim cultural center.

• Speak up when you hear Muslims or other groups disparaged, whether in public or private, as ColorLines publisher Rinku Sen suggests in her recent column.
  
• Read out loud from the Quran or other Muslim texts on September 11, as the Network of Spiritual Progressives is doing (Brother Jamal Rahman, the Muslim Sufi member of our Interfaith Amigos, offers some verses from the Quran and from Rumi here). Or hold an interfaith candlelight vigil for peace, like the one planned by the Gainesville Muslim Initiative.
• Offer generous humanitarian aid to Pakistani flood victims because they need help and because it’s important for humanitarian aid to flow across religious divides.
• Examine your own prejudices—most of us have them. And consider what you have to gain and lose when others are treated as equals.
• Familiarize yourself both with the violent interpretations of the religions you encounter and with the interpretations of the same religious texts that emphasize love, compassion, and tolerance for all.
• Speak out for tolerance on blogs, Facebook page, in public forums, in your faith group, and in letters to the editor. Call out candidates for public office of any political party who use intolerance or people’s race, religion, or immigration status to whip up electoral passions. Just a few voices for tolerance in any community can change the tone of a dialogue.
• Monitor news and public-affairs media, and insist that they include voices for peace and tolerance in their programming, and not give undue importance to advocates of exclusion and intolerance. (A starting place is to sign Color of Change’s petition calling on businesses to “Turn Off Fox.”
  

In coming months and years, we can expect even greater social stresses from a flagging economy, the continuing wars, and the "natural" disasters that will occur with increasing frequency on an overheated planet. Those stresses will be multiplied if we allow demagogues to transform them into hate and anger. Silence won't be enough—we'll have to speak out if we are to stop the madness.

Question: What are you doing to counter intolerance? What have you found works best? Please leave your comments below.

Sarah van Gelder wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Sarah is the executive editor of YES! Magazine.

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For holidays tainted by commercialism, Valentine's Day gives Christmas a run for the money—big money. The National Retail Federation estimates Americans will spend $17.6 billion on Valentine's gifts this year, including $4.1 billion on jewelry, $1.8 billion on flowers and $1.5 billion on candy. But for consumers with a conscience, the very things Madison Avenue markets as expressions of love are some of the worst stuff you can buy.

Chocolate

A heart-shaped box of truffles may be a sweet dream for chocolate lovers, but it's a nightmare for many workers. Most of the world's cocoa beans come from plantations in Ghana and Ivory Coast, where a 2010 BBC investigation exposed the widespread use of child labor, human trafficking and even slavery to harvest cocoa.

Flowers

Most roses and other flowers sold in the United States are imported from Colombia, where the cut flower industry is also known to use child workers and forced labor. Because the flowers have to look perfect, they're treated with immense amounts of toxic pesticides, which contributes to high rates of lung and nerve disease in a workforce dominated by women and children.

Jewelry

Child labor, forced labor and dangerous conditions are well-documented in the mining industry. Gold mining uses mercury and cyanide to separate the metal from ore, and leaves behind mountains of toxic waste—more than 20 tons of waste to make one gold ring. The film Blood Diamond dramatized the role that diamond mining plays in fueling and funding brutal wars in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Angola and other African nations that have killed and displaced millions of people.

So should you boycott Valentine's Day? I'm not. I'm all for showing my loved ones how much I care, on Valentine's Day, tomorrow, and every day. A hand-crafted card, a heartfelt note, a home-cooked meal or (ahem) a special favor are all ways to express your love.

And for a gift that keeps on giving you can get involved in efforts to change the way these destructive industries do business. Joining a campaign not only amplifies your voice but brings you together with others who share your concerns.

Last February, Change.org mounted a petition drive that persuaded 1-800-Flowers to add Fair Trade-certified bouquets to its collection and create a code of conduct that prohibits its suppliers from using forced and child labor. Now the Fairness in Flowers campaign is asking consumers to write other major florists urging them to ensure their flowers are not grown and processed with the use of exploited labor or child labor.

More than 100,000 consumers have joined the No Dirty Gold campaign, which works to get jewelers to promise to use only gold mined responsibly. To date, 80 leading jewelry retailers worldwide have signed the pledge. Global Witness, a human rights group that helped bring attention to the bloody truth about the diamond trade, recently pulled out of a flawed United Nations-backed program to certify conflict-free diamonds, but remains active in the campaign to reform the industry.

OK, here's the toughest one to pass by (at least for me)—chocolate. Global Exchange is among the groups working with schools, churches and community groups to get leading chocolate companies to promise that their sweet treats don't exploit or endanger workers on African cocoa plantations.

Real love doesn't trash the planet or force children to work in dangerous mines or pesticide-drenched fields. There's no reason that jewelry, chocolates and flowers have to take such a heavy toll. This Valentine's Day, let's show our love not only to our sweethearts, friends and family, but to the Earth and people around the world.

Annie Leonard is a contributing editor to YES! Magazine. She is the creator of The Story of Stuff, The Story of Cap & Trade, The Story of Cosmetics, The Story of Bottled Water, and The Story of Electronics. This piece first appeared in The Huffington Post.

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