My name is Tom Pfotzer. I created RealEconomy.org to help me learn how to fix the planet as I make my living.
I’m in my mid-sixties. During my professional career, I was an engineer and entrepreneur. I did some volunteering in the local civic scene, joining various progressive groups devoted to open space preservation and various forms of environmentalism.
After some years, I noticed that at every level, politics got in the way of getting things done – not just a little, but a lot.
So I de-coupled from the social scene. I narrowed my scope to those few places where I actually had influence, the places where I could actually change things. I focused on my own household.
I also came to an important realization. The main thing that’s degrading our planet is the design of our economy. The main production processes like energy, food, transportation, materials sourcing, and manufacturing are what’s currently damaging the environment.
Another watershed realization was that automation is systematically wringing labor out of those production process, and that has serious long-term implications for those of us that make our living selling labor.
That’s when I took out my clipboard, and started to design a household economy that I thought might meet my needs: fix the planet, make a living, find new markets for my own labor, and learn how to capture the benefits of technology and productivity for myself.
Just like the big guys do. Develop, own, and operate my own production processes, right here at home.
I didn’t do all that designing in a vacuum. Of course I spent a lot of time around the internet, reading other people’s work, and discussing the situation with them. I enjoyed it, but something important was missing.
What was missing was action. All that effort to identify, discuss and innovate ended up in the bit-bucket, never to be seen again. What a waste!
We need more places where creative people can work together to convert all these great ideas – and there are plenty of them – into operational solutions. We need more create-spaces.
This particular create-space is dedicated to developing household-scale production processes that fix the planet as we make our living. There are many such processes. I’m going to pick out a few of them, adapt them to my situation and operate them.
While I’m doing this work, I’ll report on it so you can see what I got right and avoid the mistakes I made.