Repair Cafés and the Friday Video

My friend, David Ochoa, emailed me a link to a New York Times story about repair cafés. Please do read it HERE. He suggested that the old Boy Scout Lodge on Trowbridge might just be the perfect place and stated that a repair café "may be a perfect idea for utilizing this building and enhancing quality of life activities as well as teaching people how to recycle/re-purpose household items." It certainly would be preferable to our consumer lifestyle of buy, throwaway, buy more. (I just remembered that as a child I would tell my parents to "go to the store and buy more." The consumer culture was already being imprinted on my mind.)

In an earlier blog post I wrote that we could either be "spectator" environmentalists and moan about the policies of the current administration, or we could make some real changes in our lives. I said: "The next four years gives each of us the opportunity to examine our own lifestyles and see what changes that we can make personally that are more environmentally friendly and ecologically and socially just." 

One of the things that we can do is to take David Ochoa's advice and look at having a repair café in El Paso. There is a rich resource in an online site - the Repair Café. Please visit it.

I have been told that the El Paso Library system is looking into sponsoring such a place. That doesn't surprise me because Dionne Mack, the woman who oversees our library department among other things, is quite the visionary and the facilitator of visions. Check out the Seed Libraries program. I have cabbage and greens and carrots growing now in my garden from seeds I obtained from the library.

Gardening, repairing - great ways to make our lifestyles less wasteful and far more enjoyable.