It is great to have support. I agree that the individual land should be run by a Coop, but the SHIRE umbrella organization in my opinion should be a non-profit that owns the land and encourages more research. Its goals are Charitable even if now we are not running as a charity, our goals are to research how to provide housing, food, power, education to all that are willing to put in the work.

Great ideas coming from this thread...keep em comin! Two things: first in response to local distribution, the second a response to the tax issue with goods.


Locality is definately an important issue, as transporting goods accounts for most of the energy uses of our country. So, local should be first in our minds. However, two reasons why to spread our wares to other locales: we have (will soon have) grease busses that use vegetable oil to transport goods. While large chain restaurants have contracts with biodesiel companies so that they both profit from the reuse of grease, small restaurants are shafted because they have to pay people to come take their grease. Those people take the small business' money, turn the product to biodesiel and resell it making more money. Instead, we take the grease from small business and transport our goods. Second reason to spread outwards from local is creating interest in sustainability in places that are not blessed with such movements as of yet.

Second issue is with taxes. Not only would any product we sold have to be taxed, but we would have to pay property taxes on any buildings we use to make the product, land we use to grow things that go into the product, and watch our NPO status carefully. However if the making of products is research or educational, the production is good to go. Then we can figure out what to do with the products. Just a thought, but lotsa hippies out there could do with some free soap, and it happens to have our info on the package.