About Prosumer Programs
Our seven initial programs have been created to help communities become economically stable and food & energy self-reliant, while reducing global warming pollution. Each solution can be used independently or interdependently.
The primary objective of Prosumer Programs is to achieve ecological, socio-cultural and economic sustainability for local communities. When our proof-of-concept community has reached its goals of achieving food & energy self-reliance, we will expand to other locations and broaden the local benefits to include water, affordable housing, improved healthcare, experiential learning, etc. The expansion is made possible due to our private-labeling and licensing model. These Prosumer Programs make it easy for anyone to share their passions, make a difference and be the change for Healthier, Wealthier, Wiser Living.
Background
A "prosumer" is a healthy, proactive consumer. There is a very wide-range of consumers, from those who excessively consume to those who consume to satisfy their basic needs while ensuring the natural environment is maintained or enriched. When looking at the "consumer continuum" in relation to ecological health, it becomes apparent that there is more harmful consumption and disposal occurring than the global ecosystem is able to replenish, reabsorb, recycle or render harmless within a meaningful human time scale (20 years or less). One solution is to create cradle-to-cradle (c2c) supply chains, goods and services that replace non-renewable & toxic sources. Because c2c will take a long while to saturate the market, a critical question needs to be answered, which is, "why do people live beyond the means of their natural environment's ability to replenish and reabsorb"?
In answering that question, Sustain Hawaii explored another continuum - that which drives behavior - the pleasure-pain continuum. We all have an innate drive to maintain or maximize pleasure and minimize or eliminate pain. This is, more fundamentally, the drive to satisfy basic needs. Satisfied needs = pleasure. Unsatisfied needs = pain.
We are all born with this innate drive, but we are each born into unique social contexts. Within these contexts we learn strategies to satisfy our needs, but have little, if any, influence over the information received to create those strategies when our core belief systems are shaped.
The strategies (satisfiers) also live on a continuum from depleters to maintainers to enrichers. Our culture unknowingly tended toward the depleter side of the continuum. I say unknowingly because people were understandably unaware of the limits to growth at the time. Things are different now because we are literally bumping up against those limits - global warming being a primary example. This has caused many more individuals and groups to look at things more systemically, but systemic shifts (paradigm shifts - see Thomas Kuhn's "Structures of Scientific Revolutions") take a long while to transpire if a meta-perspective/map is not at hand. Since it seems prudent not to gamble whether or not we have the time to wait for the shift to occur, we are actively building systems to assist in expediting this process.
A transition period is necessary to get us to where we know we need to be, which is: 1) to consume to satisfy basic needs, while ensuring the natural systems are maintained or enriched, and 2) create a cradle-to-cradle supply chain that creates cradle-to-cradle goods & services. Since this period of transition seems inevitable, we hope to get the programs quickly launched so we can funnel the capital they will generate to help achieve goals one and two. We also want to eliminate as close to 100% of the global warming pollution and toxins from the entire lifecycles of the goods and services being purchased during this transition. We say "as close to" because the entire lifecycle is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to quantify. At some arbitrary point we need to delineate a boundary, when in reality no boundaries exist.
Programs
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