Envisioning a convivial post-corporate world requires a diversity of new/old concepts, policies, technologies, best practices, etc. that are imaginable or currently available for decentralized implementation.

This blog is intended to collate promising contributions to this vision from experts in many fields.

Participants are requested to classify each of their posts with one or more of the Category Labels (listed here).

December 09, 2013

Grassroots Innovations Trove


After decades searching for ingenious rural innovations, Dr. Anil Gupta and his suite of organizations (Society for Research and Initiatives for Sustainable Technologies and Institutions [SRISTI ], Honey Bee Network, Grassroots Innovations Augmentation Network [GIAN], etc.) have compiled thousands of their findings online for use by everyone.

They are looking for help in setting up small manufacturing operations to commercialize some of these products to benefit their inventors. If you have any ideas or energy for that, do get in touch.



Rain Forest Advocate Taps Sugar Palm Energy

New Gifts from Old Cultures
- A Palm Tree with Countless Benefits and Virtuous Demands
A sugar palm energy researcher.
Scientist Willie Smits believes that the Arenga sugar palm may be the key to protecting tropical forest
 in Indonesia while providing opportunity for villagers through a unique process of biofuel production.

A Rain Forest Advocate Taps the Energy of the Sugar Palm
By Marianne Lavelle 
National Geographic News
June 22, 2011

One of Indonesia's most ardent rain forest protection activists is in what may seem an unlikely position: Spearheading a project to produce biofuel from trees.

But tropical forest scientist Willie Smits, ­­after 30 years studying fragile ecosystems in these Southeast Asian islands, wants to draw world attention to a powerhouse of a tree—the Arenga sugar palm. Smits says it can be tapped for energy and safeguard the environment while enhancing local food security.

Smits says that the deep-rooted feather palm Arenga pinnata could serve as the core of a waste-free system that produces a premium organic sugar as well as the fuel alcohol, ethanol, providing food products and jobs to villagers while it helps preserve the existing native rain forest. And scientists who have studied the unique harvesting and production process developed by Smits and his company, Tapergie, agree the system would protect the atmosphere rather than add to the Earth's growing carbon dioxide burden.

"The palm juice chiefly consists of water and sugar—made from rain, sunshine, carbon dioxide and nothing else," says Smits. "You are basically only harvesting sunshine."