Doing a tour tomorrow for Ormond-Flagler Permaculture Group & friends. Making an outline.
Starshine House / Trailhead 501 tour
This house is the tangible embodiment of a manifesto I’ve developed over the years regarding money, occupational freedom, community, and life.
A physical hub for Daytona Beach Permaculture Guild
Permaculture design principles: Mollison book, Holmgren book
A bit about me, my background. How I came to study Permaculture.
Categories of basic human needs: food; water; shelter; transportation; energy; community. A lot of people focus on food because of course it’s important. I mean, we all have to eat. But by focusing on food and the nuclear household, at the expense of all else, we create massive energy drains and also cognitive drains.
Also: A pattern language, Last child in the woods, TEK indigenous wisdom, Vanilla Beans, Iban of Sarawak etc. Sharon Astyk, Riot for Austerity. Homegrown national park. The Non-Consumer Advocate group 152.8k members!
House has 2 missions/purposes: 1) experimental lab for low-footprint living; 2) support people in disengaging from conventional economy, dependence on “a job.”
Ecological urgency; economic hardships; outages from increasingly severe weather + disasters
Living/visiting here
Creative and occupational freedom. Right livelihood; “reduce your need to earn”. Creating a tiny wedge to spring ourselves.
Importance of joy & creativity
Examples of potential livelihoods/income streams from this one tiny 1/10 acre
Hurricane evac of 2017. I had presold enough copies of my book to make the rent, so I used my phone to send the PDF to the people who had ordered the book. This was in a room where I was staying at a friend’s house for hurricane evac.
Eric Brown author. To experience abundance, “crush” at least one of the categories. Transportation, housing, food, health costs, debt.
Porous property: Little Free Library, benches etc
Mini reading room
Passive cooling & heating. Trade-offs between shade, airflow, privacy. Noise buffer and light buffer etc.
Offering a counter alternative to violent and intrusive landscaping. “Neatness disease.” GROW FOOD. Also learn what grows wild locally. Free food and medicine. Try to get people to see the value in growing and foraging food. Local passionfruit vine, loquat trees etc. Beachside ecosystem. Oaks, saw palmetto, etc. Rebuild the sponge and buffer. Promote the beauty of traditional saw palmetto yard along the beach where you can barely see the house.
Also: food desert cuisine. Learn to make something with what’s available in walking distance.
Solar cooking, retained-heat cooking (haybox), twig-fired stove etc.
Preparing a basic hurricane toilet kit.
Rainwater harvesting. Brad Lancaster etc. “Minimum Viable Product” concept from entrepreneur/startup community. Every single place I’ve lived from desert to semi tropics has the same issues, flooding plus drought.
Work (manual tasks such as scooping water out of barrels etc.) “Obtain a yield.”
Laundry – a whole subject right there. And dishes and other traditional conventional housework tasks that can take over a person’s life and suck resources.
Move many tasks outdoors. Laundry, dishes, etc. Hand-wash stations also can be used for rinsing toothbrush after brushing teeth.
Reducing/eliminating: corporate detergents, purpose-specific household cleaning products, shampoos. Use homemade or local.
Occupations that wouldn’t be a full job in the conventional economy but support a household. And potentially enable home-based livelihoods. Clothespins & corks; keeping machines in repair.
Exploring patterns for house-sharing. Flexible stay, visitors, longterm residents. Some useful simple protocols for sharing space. Small areas for private space; most areas are common-use.
Collapse-awareness vs doomerism — Parallels with end-of-life Doula practice; hospice
Collapse is now. When does it become not a dress rehearsal anymore. When we recognize it now and choose to engage.
Practicing doing without things. Making it real.
Being local, neighborhood-based
Permaculture as a decolonization movement
Centralized top-down systems are not easing up. If anything many are doubling down. An adaptive response is to keep building our own parallel systems that reduce our dependence on the main systems and minimize feeding them. Reducing dependence on electricity & personal automobile is huge.
Withhold our labor and purchasing power from corrupt, unhealthy, harmful systems. This is a group task and one that we must help everybody navigate. No person left behind. What we do with our wealth and our labor is of paramount importance.
Special manifesto for fellow Boomers & older. On sharing intergenerational wealth.
Stocks and flows. Too much stock equals hoarding and spoilage. Design & utilize flows.
Definition of a civilized society. Superior culture. I would say a superior culture is one that loves and values and takes care of all of its members.
Use your talents, humor, creativity. So many things you know and are good at — all needed front and center. Community resilience.
When we really simplify, we can end up having what seems like a lot of time. Like maybe even an abnormal unhealthy amount of time on one’s hands. But I think this reaction is an artifact of our hyper-busy culture. There is value in sitting with the stillness and seeing what emerges. Or even just noticing that you can’t deal with stillness. If that happens, notice what your impulse is. What do you try to replace that stillness with. Reinforcing the sense of abnormality is that the world around us is still going on about its fast-paced frantic motions. This is another reason why it’s important to find likeminded people, even if it’s only online at first. Don’t worry, you’ll start finding them in real life too if you haven’t already. By showing up and stepping into an alternative way of being, we set an example and create space for others.
While learning to slow down and live quieter, we can also at the same time be using our freed up time and energy as a surplus to benefit our communities. “Share surplus.”
Action steps/movements. Riot for Austerity. Homegrown national park. The Non-Consumer Advocate group 152.8k members! Bryan Hummel – beaver biomimicry, sponge-building. Chris Searles trickle-watering experiments. Aprovecho Technology center; Kerr-Cole sustainability center.
Fiz Harwood – Solomon Islanders. Amazon tribesman “I store meat in the belly of my brother.” Flows vs stocks. Everything is perishable — even money, that thing we invented to surmount perishability. There’s more resilience in building flows.
Being community guardians/nurturers and agents of change, while at the same time relinquishing and letting go of control in more & more ways.