One weekend, he needed a chainsaw to chop up some rotten wood in his backyard in Atwater Village, but he didn't feel like buying one. So he logged onto NeighborGoods.net and listed the chainsaw on a virtual "wishlist" for his friends and neighbors to see. A few days later he was the proud borrower of a chainsaw belonging to his friend Damien.

"I would never have known that Damien had a chainsaw that he was willing to loan out to people," Felice said. "How do you know that about your friends?

Since then, Felice has payed it forward, loaning out a book, some bongo drums and some "really long extension cords" to various people - some of them total strangers save for the fact that they, too, have accounts on NeighborGoods.

The site is a cross between Facebook, Craigslist and Freecycle - an online social network where people lend and borrow stuff they own but hardly ever use.  

That's it.  

No profit for the lender, just the satisfaction of knowing that ThighMaster or electric mixer was put to good use.  

NeighborGoods is just one example of several new California-based portals trying to foster "borrow-economies" and reduce consumption. Maybe the inspiration is the state's rotten economy, which has left us with little but our good will and WiFi connections, or maybe it's just a marriage between the green movement and the rise of social networking. Either way, start-up sites are increasingly helping Californians look to their neighbor's yards before venturing to the nearest Target.  

"We didn't create the desire to help people," said Micki Krimmel, the founder of NeighborGoods. "We're just capitalizing on it."

As a new business owner, 32-year-old Krimmel combines the ardor of a sustainability activist with the fierceness of an entrepreneur, but not in the greed-is-good sense.

"She really wants to win, but she's ethical about it," said Krimmel's longtime friend Daniel Hengeveld. "She hasn't stepped on anyone to get where she is."

Though she spends nearly all her time thinking about her business, in the few hours that remain, Krimmel skates with the L.A. Derby Dolls - an activity that seems perfectly suited to her both in its intensity and hip-factor.

She talks a mile a minute, pounding out e-mail reminders to herself on her iPhone and bursting at the seams with ideas. You can find a repository of some of them on her blog, Mickipedia.com, and on her YouTube channel: what it's like to be an entrepreneur, tips on social networking and even a few rants about atheism.  

"When she's passionate about something, the whole building will know," said Cris Dobbins, Krimmel's friend, office-mate and fellow Derby Doll. "She enrolls you in whatever she's talking about. All of the sudden you're in tears because of one of Micki's gripping stories."

She works out of a chic downtown L.A. loft and wears her black hair in an edgy side-swept cut. Her work outfit consists of leather boots and a sleeveless cotton dress, the better to show off the tattoos on her biceps. One is of Pablo Picasso's 'Girl Before a Mirror," and the other is of the Los Angeles freeways - "my favorite view of the city," she said.

"People think of L.A. as fake, but it's the most authentic place I've ever seen because it's difficult," she said. "Everyone comes to L.A. because they want to do something. I like that you kind of have to make your own way here."

Krimmel came to L.A. eight years ago from Boston, where she was working as a film production assistant until one particularly bitter winter sent her packing.  

She got a job with Participant Media in Beverly Hills, where her Web outreach was partly responsible for the success of Al Gore's little slideshow movie. After that, she did consulting work for a while and became known as a "community person" who could help companies bring people together online.

Micki Krimmel (Olga Khazan)

And she's doing it again for NeighborGoods. Since the beta version launched in Los Angeles last October, the site has shown promising growth to a membership in the thousands.  

But online bartering sites have been around for a decade, and their names - Intellibarter, MrSwap, and SwapRat -  don't ring a bell quite like, say, Amazon.

So Krimmel and others entrepreneurs like her are tackling an interesting challenge: how to wean American consumers off shopping and get them addicted to sharing.

And on the revenue side, there's an even more complex puzzle: how do you build a business in the business of not selling?

A pleasure trip turns business

It makes sense that Krimmel's first business venture would be on the Internet. For one thing, she's almost as Internet-famous as Ashton Kutcher or the keyboard cat. She began blogging in 2000, well before "blog" was a verb, and she's a regular keynote at interactive media events, including SXSW in Texas later this month.

"I like meritocracies," Krimmel said. "In 2004, people were first talking about blogs and how you can use the Internet for social change. Then it was primarily about politics, but now it's about everything."

2004 was the year Krimmel was hired to do online outreach for "An Inconvenient Truth" - a job that made her realize that even movie Web sites could become hubs for activists.

"I wanted there to be a place for people to go and be part of the movement rather than just paying $15 for a ticket," she said. She also solidified her place in the sustainability movement as a blogger on WorldChanging.com.  

But NeighborGoods isn't about environmentalism, it's about stopping the onslaught of what Krimmel feels is our creeping consumerism.

The idea started with a backpack. In 2007, Krimmel was between jobs and needed a backpack for a trip to Thailand - the sturdy kind that can tote a traveler's life on their back for a few weeks. She tried to borrow one from friends but ended up having to buy one for $200.  

"I knew I was only going to use it that one time, and I realized that was true of a lot of the stuff I owned," she said. "So NeighborGoods' goal is to give us an alternative to buying stuff that you only need once and getting more value out of the stuff that we already own."

When she talks about why that's important, Krimmel's pace ramps up to mach III, transforming her from a sweet and earnest netizen to an incensed activist.

"We live in a consumer culture," she said. "For so long, our social status was defined by how much stuff we owned. 'Not only am I going to buy a citrus juicer, but I'm going to buy the best citrus juicer.'"

"But that's not economically sustainable, that's not ecologically sustainable and that's not even socially sustainable," she said.

She also disdains environmentalism done the corporate way. Krimmel says companies have started exploiting the green trend in order to boost sales while making a feeble show of social responsibility.

"Oh hey, I know how you can be more green, buy more green stuff!'" she said, mocking things like "green" Windex and "sustainability labels" at Wal-Mart. "I like solutions that enable people to break free of their consumer cycle at times - the solutions that happen between neighbors. We aren't going to shop our way out of the problem."

Getting people to go local

In fact, we might be shopping our way into a problem.  

The U.S. now has 2.3 billion square feet of storage space, with one out of 11 Americans renting a storage unit.

Sure, it might be a waste of money, but Krimmel thinks all that stuff literally hurts our society on some sort of metaphysical level.

"These items that collect dust have potential energy inside them," Krimmel said. "We work so we can buy more stuff and build up the barricades around us to protect us from other people. If we lower the barricades just a little and give other people access to the stuff we already own, there's a lot of social good in that."

Krimmel on top of her downtown office building. Behind her is an ad for storage spaces. (Olga Khazan)

NeighborGoods is a novel idea, but it isn't quite the first of its kind. In the past year, a handful of entrepreneurs have been trying to make sharing easier by taking it online.

In the Bay Area, Kaytea Petro took her thesis from the Presidio School of Management and launched a site called NeighborhoodFruit.com on June 1 of last year. Visitors can use the site (or its companion mobile app) to find fruit trees near them. Then, depending on if the tree hangs over public property or someone's yard, they can either pick the fruit for free or contact the tree's owner and take those surplus kumquats off their hands.

"A mature orange tree can produce 400 to 600 pounds of fruit - that's a lot for someone to manage," Petro said. "A lot of people who have these fruit trees are aware of the incredible waste that happens because they don't know how to get rid of it."

And later this month, Harvard-trained and San Francisco-based architect Stephanie Smith will launch WeCommune.com, a site that hopes to carve cold, impersonal cities up into resource-sharing hamlets. With WeCommune, neighbors could find ways to barter goods, share lawnmowers or take turns walking each others' dogs - all arranged by the glow of a computer screen.

"When you share resources, you become closer to the people around you," Smith said. "Everything takes on a smarter, more connected, better-for-the-Earth kind of affect."

Their delivery mechanism might be newfangled, but the creators of these sites seem to idealize a bucolic heartland straight out of "Little House on the Prairie" or a GOP campaign ad. Real America, they believe, yearns to share.

"We're advocating an older set of American values," Petro said. "The close-knit community, sharing, placing value on things that are free and are not necessarily value-less."

In Krimmel's experience, social connections aren't just how you grow a business, they're the key to a happy, functional life. Almost every day, she meets with various real-life cliques -  church groups and mom's circles - to tell them about NeighborGoods and how it can help them save money on baby contraptions and step-ladders.  

"This is just part of that trend - getting people local, going to the farmer's market," she said. "I think people are just sick of living in their private, closed off spaces with all the stuff they've accumulated."

Krimmel is banking on the idea that the first people we want to help are our friends, so the first thing NeighborGoods users see after logging in are all of their friends and their various needs. When a user lends out an item, the site shows them how much money their friend saved.  

There's also an option to charge people for borrowing an item, but Krimmel said that hasn't been as popular.

"Most of the transactions are free," she said. "We're really focusing on the 'help your neighbor' approach. But as we grow, people might be interacting with people they don't know."

For that, there's the Wishlist feature, which allows users to list items they'd like to borrow in the hope that someone else will offer them up.  

"It's more than me needing a power drill," said Dobbins, who has used the site for a number of transactions. "It's me connecting with people."

Catering to spend-thrifts

For today's customer, "free" is an increasingly attractive starting price. Since the recession hit, "saving money" has become the new "spending money," and suddenly cheap candy sales are on the rise, library circulation is up and product packaging is all about value.

"It's a recession like no other," Smith said. "What is new about this recession is that people are much more connected online than they have been before."  

"Technology triggered the recession," she said, referring to the global connectivity and high-tech trading systems that encouraged risky financial trading. "And it can also lead us out of it."

But Smith and the other entrepreneurs aren't suggesting that their sites will replace traditional shopping altogether. After all, borrowing has major logistical drawbacks. Finding someone who has the ideal item, is willing to loan it out and even arranging a time to meet can be an arduous process.

Once Felice realized his neighbor had a chainsaw, "the challenge was finding a time to get it," he said. "When is he going to be home? Oh, I missed his call."

"We invented money for a reason - because money is easier than all that," Smith said. But she added that it just takes newer and better approaches to get people to re-think the way they shop. "It's just like going on a diet - it's going to take a while to develop new patterns of behavior around money."

Unlike the barter sites of yore, these new ventures encourage sharing based on proximity and friendship. Just as Facebook provides privacy settings to keep away strange voyeurs, NeighborGoods allows users to restrict their available goods to just friends, or just friends of friends. In doing so, they hope to soothe their customers' privacy concerns.

"A lot of times people say, 'What if someone steals my chainsaw and uses it to murder me?'" said Ben Brown, NeighborGoods' Web developer. "We've taken big steps to prevent that from happening, and it's fully within their control to deny any request that comes in that they find objectionable."

"Also," he added, "I don't think people are out there using Web sites to murder people with their own power tools."

Turning positive energy into profits

But even if their primary goal is a better, more resourceful society, the founders of these sites are still looking to turn a profit in the end. Not that the two are mutually exclusive. After all, the "don't be evil" adage has worked out well for other companies.

NeighborhoodFruits, for example, charges users for the private backyard-trees finder unless they offer up some of their own fruit in exchange.

NeighborGoods might experiment with premium services for rental companies. But bottom-line thinking can be hard for a site as inherently idealistic as this one.

"There's the business and the social benefit aspect, and they're always pulling [Micki] in different directions," Brown said.  

Brown recalled a time, back when he and Krimmel were looking for investors, that they opened a presentation to a venture capital firm by saying NeighborGoods could help reduce the demand for cheap disposable goods "made by children in China."

The firm's president interrupted, saying, "I don't need to think about child labor when I'm thinking about investing in a company."

"It's not an invalid thing that [Micki] is thinking about," Brown said, "There are all these issues in the world, but it's not what you lead with in the Powerpoint deck."

Krimmel is determined to expand NeighborGoods from Southern California to the rest of the country once she finds a sustainable model for the site. She's hoping it will catch on not because it's easier than shopping, but because it's better.

"There are easier ways to get books. There are easier ways to get movies," she said. "Even if we're not the most efficient way to get access to that thing, you still do it."

In the meantime, Krimmel is constantly working to make borrowing easier. She's coming out with iPhone app that would let users take photos of their belongings and upload them to the site.

"I added everything in my kitchen. Strangely, two people have already asked to borrow my citrus juicer," she said, and then burst out laughing. "I think because they're doing the master cleanse."