Green DIY: Finding My Inner MacGyver

I grew up in a back-to-the-land household awash with Foxfire books and Whole Earth Catalogs. In the larder, huge jars of limas and black-eyed peas, some dried fruit, maybe some carob cookies. (Blech.) We even had, as the centerpiece of our living-room decor, a trunk-thick segment of a branch that a storm had ripped from the huge cherry tree in the back yard; my stepfather lopped it to just fit vertically in the living room, bolted it to ceiling and floor, and anchored one end of a Mexican hammock on it. The two or three smaller branches that extended from this central pillar actually leafed out each spring for two or three years.

You get the picture. And for many years, I wished my parents could have been more ... American, more like everyone else, blithely invested in a homogenous, mass-produced life-style. (Couldn't they at least stock the shelves with Pop-Tarts and Little Debbies and Count Chocula, like my friends always seemed to have?)

In my twenties and thirties I spent a lot of time running down what I saw as the self-important, frothy, and ultimately unrealistic ideals of that time. I loved the green world, spent all my vacations backpacking, camping, and otherwise venturing away from civilization, but practiced a pragmatic, regular-joe, and frankly lazy sort of environmentalism. I steered as clear as possible away from any actions I thought might be perceived as holier-than-thou, ate the occasional Big Mac, loved owning and driving a car. (And really, really wanted a Brooklyn neighbor's JFK-era Galaxie 500, carbon pollution and gas mileage be damned.)

Last night, however, while watching "How to Make Your Bathroom Eco Friendly" (found via Jetson Green), it occurred to me that perhaps the apple hadn't fallen so far from the tree.

One of my absolute favorite things about the emergent social web -- and geek culture in general, which I only started to tune into about four years ago -- is the way it has connected a whole class of people who just can't help but tinker with and try to improve on the objects and processes they get their hands on. In other words, the DIY movement. It is as Marshall McLuhan foresaw in 1972: "With electric technology, the consumer would become a producer." A prosumer -- that's the unlovely-but-useful term often applied to people who proudly show off creations in places like Flickr (photography), Etsy (crafts), and Threadless (a T-shirt lover's paradise), or who cheerily share how-to on sites like instructables and Howcast. There are many others, serving (almost) every conceivable niche; there are wonderful magazines like MAKE and JPEG; there are real-world gatherings of the various tribes of the DIY movement, such as BarCamp and the sublimely weird dorkbot. For me, these are inspirational settings -- they allow consumers to do an end-run around corporate mass-produced goods, they democratize skill, they empower people to do for themselves. (Generally, I'd much rather spend my online time in these communities learning and sharing than get caught up in the bloviations and spin wars that dominate so many news and politics blogs.)

The DIY spirit is present everywhere in today's green movement. There are dozens of blogs that focus on things an individual can do to live more sustainably; paging through them is like watching an endless parade of examples of human ingenuity. (Here's an OPML file of some of my fave green-living blogs; save it to your desktop and you can then upload it to whatever RSS feedreader you're using.) The green channel on instructables is just a gas to read, a succession of Rube Goldberg contraptions and mental kung fu that Macgyver would be proud of. (Aside: this list of "Macgyverisms" is totally hilarious.)

It all reminds me -- perhaps with a tad less self-righteousness -- of Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog. I've come full circle.

Here's that video from Howcast that got this rumination rolling: