This week @ecotrain has presented us with another wonderful opportunity to look around us, look inside us, and come up with an answer to the Question of the Week: What have you had too much abundance of, and how did you deal with it? Just as I usually do, instead of jumping right in, I spent some time mulling over this question, leading me to a number of examples I could talk about. Since I consider each of them equally good, though none of them perfect for the occasion, I decided to mention all of them a little bit.
Thousands of Bicycles All Around Us!
It was last year, exactly around this time, when I found myself in the epicenter of bike-abundance. I was volunteering at Recyclistas Bike Shop in Victoria, BC, learning about bike mechanics, and building my wonderful Red Fox which would take me down the US West coast. All in all it was a fantastic experience I described in this post. One of the main reasons was the shop's approach to materials, that is bike parts and components.
Whenever a bike was donated to the shop (which happened almost daily), it was completely stripped, all the pieces were evaluated, and sorted according to usability. They would be used either to build up new recycled bikes (sometimes on the same frame they came on), or sold to customers as second-hand pieces. If they were not in a good enough shape for that, or if there just happened to be too many of them (kickstands, for example, were notorious for overflowing their bin), they were donated to Bicycles for Humanity. Sometimes even that was not an option, if a piece was completely shoddy, hence beyond any usability. In that case there was a great opportunity to use them for aesthetic purposes, that is bike-art. If even that was not an option, the pieces in question were sorted according to their material, and recycled for steel, aluminum, etc.
One thing I realized in those weeks at Recyclistas, is the incredible abundance of bikes all around us, especially in places like Canada. Sure, some of them may be a bit old and worn, others may not even work properly. Most of them are not even assembled, making it even harder to realize their existence. But they are there... all around us! It only takes a good shop with some creative minds and skilled hands to bring them all out. And bike shops like Recyclistas do just that. I'm so happy to have had the chance to be part of them for a while.
The Obligation to Deal With Abundance
My next example takes me back to the time when I was a starving student in Tucson, Arizona, almost two decades ago. Attending university in the US, the words "broke" and "starving" are highly exaggerated, of course. Being broke only meant mac&cheese-broke, and starvation would have merely equaled poor nutrition, had I kept eating mac&cheese for an extended time. Still, I didn't feel like reducing myself to a cheap diet, so my flatmate and I decided to check out what the dumpsters had to offer.
We were no strangers to dumpster-diving, since that had been a regular thing at the housing co-op we'd been living at, up until it got disbanded a few weeks prior. But it was Summer, and everyone who could would leave sweltering Tucson to come back in the Fall. My friend and I had just found a one-bedroom place to share, and although the community was gone, we saw no reason to discontinue dumpstering.
Since we knew all the best dumpsters in town, it didn't take long before we had two backpacks filled with the most gourmet foods: fancy spreads, organic tofu, gluten-free naan, delicious rice-milk, exquisite cheeses, not to mention all the produce: fruit and veggies in quantities we couldn't possibly carry, so we took only the best. Needless to say, after only three nights our kitchen was stocked to the brim. That's when realization struck us: who's going to eat all that food?
No way we would take any of those goodies back into the dumpster, but having them go bad in our fridge or pantry would constitute the same wastefulness. We needed more mouths to feed. And if they didn't come to us (why would they, anyway?) we had to take the food to them! That's how we decided to cook Food Not Bombs.
At our previous housing co-op we had participated in FNB many times, scoring food from the dumpster or donations, cooking it at the house, and taking it to feed protests, or just anyone who was hungry at a downtown park. We still had a tablecloth with a big FNB logo on it, as well as lots of pots and pans. So even though there were only two of us this time, we cooked up a big meal, and brought it to the same park to feed the hungry.
The first serving was raging success. Lots of the people who came were obviously homeless, though there were a good number of better situated folks too, who came to taste the food or just to chat. Best of all, there were a good number of people offering us their help. How could we not accept? As a result, even on our first day we barely had any cleaning up to do. And things only became smoother from then on.
In only a couple of weeks we turned our one bedroom apartment into the local Food Not Bombs hub: During the day we had a pair of saw-horses set up in our only room, where something delicious was always being prepared. In the evening we gave people detailed instructions on which dumpsters to hit and at what time. At night the floor of the room would be cleared and converted into the sardine can where our 7-9 volunteers rolled out their sleeping bags, and slept side-by-side, just like sardines in a can. Meanwhile my friend and I moved up to the roof where I set up my sky-bed. In the end we had everything: an abundance of food, an abundance of delicious dishes, an abundance of helping hands doing everything that's needed, and an abundance of interesting folks talking, laughing, playing music, etc. The only thing we needed to do was organize things, and the abundance of one thing would beget the abundance of another.
Too Much of a Bad Thing... Is That Even Possible?
Finally, let me relate my experience of abundance of something not necessarily desirable, at least not for me directly. The element in question is the benign fruit-fly. Though far from the disease causing kind, and not even as annoying as a common house fly, when it appears in large numbers it can become quite a nuisance.
This happened at a time when I was living in Budapest, experimenting with indoor composting, in an apartment that didn't even have a balcony. My worm-box in the kitchen worked quite beautifully from September throughout the colder months. Once Spring had sprung, however, I noticed that the three (or so) tiny flies in my place had increased in numbers. By the time April came around there were clouds of them, and I was starting to get worried. Maybe my worm-bin needed more carbon-cover? But as it turned out, I didn't have to worry for too long. One day the population of fruit flies dropped dramatically.
It took me a while to figure out what caused the drastic decline in their numbers, until I noticed a little lizard on my kitchen curtain. That's where it would climb around, hunting the fruit flies from its three-dimensional vantage point. I was super excited about this uninvited by very welcome flatmate, and I named her Lizzy (though it might have been male). I have no idea where it came from, nor where it disappeared to once the warm season was over, but for the time being I was quite glad to share my living space with someone who grew fat on the abundance I had inadvertently created.
What's the Lesson Here?
So let's see, what can we take away from these three stories? I'd say, first of all, abundance is all around us. What we got t o do is realize it, seize it, and make the most out of it. Second, the abundance of one thing can lead to the abundance of many other things, if managed properly. Finally, even if some abundance is not immediately beneficial to us, someone else will surely enjoy it. And just like us, they can turn this abundance into other types of abundance, perpetuating this cycle, until something becomes abundant that is directly good for us. So what would happen if we we did not manage this abundance? I can guarantee, someone else would do it instead of us, reaping all the benefits. And more power to them! If we continue out wasteful lifestyle, without turning the abundance of a "problem" into a "benefit", then I certainly hope someone else will.
Please check out these great communities I'm contributing to:
#ecotrain | What is EcoTrain | Discord Community
#cyclefeed | Introducing CycleFeed | Discord Community
Introducing SteemitDreamit | Discord Community