Equinox Recap: Ditching Amazon, USD and connecting ecobricks with bamboo

GEA Center Circle -

Well, its official. We're a quarter of the way around the sun!
Whether its the onset of Fall or of Spring for you, March 20th marks the 2025 Equinox: and its time for our GEA quarterly update!

We're on to new ways of connecting ecobricks with bamboo to make geometric lattices! See the blog from Russell below...

As always, the medium is the most important message: and that's the case with this very newsletter!

The GEA has proudly completely ditched its reliance on corporate technologies platforms for 2025.

This Earthen update is being sent to using the opensource Ghost.org newsletter platform that we run on our own server. We've rebuilt our GoBrik app from the ground up to get off amazon servers (we're using Dewaweb.com's Jakarta based server). Our center circle has ditched whatsapp for signal. We're using nextcloud instead of dropbox and google for our documents. And our dev team has built our own open source Buwana account system so you don't have to sign into our services with a facebook or google!

We’ve ditched big-tech for 2025
It’s 2025! And the urgency to get off our reliance on big tech has never been greater. As google, amazon and other for-profit corporations amass vast monopolies and vast troves of our data, they also generate vast ecological impacts. Prime Polluter: Amazon’s Growing Emissions ProblemFive years on, Amazon’s
EarthenGEA Center Circle

Second, we're proud to announce that we've fully disengaged our finances and accounting from the US dollar. As you know, billions of US dollars have been used to fund the ongoing genocide and ecoside in occupied Palestine. Given the GEA's earthen principles, we cannot bear to have any part in the systematic oppression of a people and the destruction of an ecosystem. Consequently, we no longer accept USD, hold it or use it to denominate our accounting:

We’ve moved on from the US Dollar
Today, we’re announcing our transition from US dollars in our finances and accounting. Over the last year, we’ve been appalled by the dramatic escalation of ecoside and genocide in Palestine. With thousands of American made and funded bombs being dropped on Gaza, the correlation between our own finances and the
EarthenGEA Center Circle

Finally, we're excited to share a breakthrough by Russell Maier, one of our founders and a lead developer on our center circle team. Russell and his engineering team has been working on bamboo to connect ecobricks in all sorts of new geometric ways!

Their initial experiments are very promising! We're really excited to see where this goes:

New ways to connect ecobricks
How can used used plastic be put to good, local and green use without relying on capital and industry? This question has driven my work with plastic for the last years. Given that plastic is a key component of our industrial petrocapital age, a simple answer to the question provides
EarthenRussell Maier

Stay tuned.

As we get rolling with our new GoBrik and Earthen newsletter this year, we'll be able to share more great regenerative news, events and develops in the plastic transition and earthen movement.