Our County Council is having a special meeting today on managing growth. The meeting is for four hours from 10am to 2pm. Not sure if I will get a chance to speak, but I’m organizing my thoughts just in case. Also using it as an opportunity to write down ideas for a possible future permaculture design workshop, a presentation, or other longer thing. And also writing these thoughts down in case they might be useful to some of you in your efforts to push for more inclusive and environmentally friendly housing options in your geographic area.

It’s popular for citizens to talk about developers as “them” — i.e., the bad guys. We talk about our elected leaders that way too. But when it comes to the living ecosystems on which we all depend for survival of human life, there is no “us and them.” There is only “us.”

Just about all the Council candidates in our upcoming election have stated “no increased density” as a campaign promise. As I see it, this opposition to density is misguided. Density, incrementally increased where it’s needed, is actually the exact thing we need more of, to put the brakes on new sprawl development. And also to retrofit existing sprawl developments to make them more livable and reduce the pollution, water waste, and other social and environmental problems they cause.

Some people think of density as only being good for developers, because it allows them to make more money by fitting more houses (or other residential units, or commercial) on less land.

But density is also good for ordinary people in many ways. Density can make it more feasible for households to live without a car. It also allows more social interaction in neighborhoods. And, through smaller homes (or apartments) and smaller lots (or no individual lots at all), it can reduce the cost and labor of home and yard maintenance. Not everyone wants to spend their days off mowing the yard and shopping at big-box stores.

All too often, the “solution” to development woes such as traffic and the oft-cited “infrastructure” boogeyman is to reduce density: reduce the number of houses the developer is allowed to build, so we end up with fewer houses on bigger lots. But this puts a drain on public finances, as the sparse density means there are fewer people to share the base cost of the roads, pipes, and other infrastructure. Abundant data show that sprawl development does not pay for itself. Sprawl puts us always in the hole financially.

NIMBY!! water & infrastructure arguments are red herring or disguised NIMBYism

If you had a friend who was making a million dollars a year, yet they were always broke, you wouldn’t say they needed more money; you’d probably say they need to learn how to manage their money better. We in Volusia County are in that position with water.

Rainwater-harvesting activist Brad Lancaster lives in Tucson AZ where they get ELEVEN inches of rainfall a year. And, he observed that if that rainfall were utilized wisely, it would be enough to meet the needs of every city resident, including municipal government needs. Here in this part of Florida, we historically average about 49 inches of rainfall a year! We just need to catch it and slow its runoff so it gets filtered by healthy soil and plants and percolates down to recharge the aquifer, instead of running off of pavement to pollute our waterways and miss recharging the aquifers and springs.

“people won’t get out of their cars” —> actually, many want to! Not everyone wants to live the same. As a resident of a neighborhood on the beachside with tiny lots and walkable distances to basic stores and restaurants and bars and the bank and the ocean, I always think “No one would want to be stuck in a place way out by the interstate where there’s nothing to walk to and you’re totally dependent on a car,” especially old people who are getting too old to drive.

I say “nobody would want that” — but obviously I’m wrong since so many people choose that life. It’s the same for apartments, townhouses, compact houses, and car-free or car-lite living. Some of you might think “no one would want to live like that” — but in fact, many of us do, and more of us would if given the option.

(to be continued; going to make coffee now)

Brain dump: density, water, infrastructure

“We don’t have enough water to support more people” and “we don’t have the infrastructure to support more people” are assertions I’ve heard often. Usually from comfortably-off people in single-family neighborhoods.

In some cases these assertions may stem from incomplete information (not everyone knows about green infrastructure, compost toilets, low-impact development, and other ways of reducing water use and taking the load off of infrastructure, and making infrastructure able to accommodate more people).
I think they also stem from NIMBYism, which is really just a manifestation of fear. People are worried about their quality of life deteriorating.
But there are many ways to have development while using much less water, increasing mobility (= moving more people though not necessarily decreasing road congestion), and otherwise addressing these “water” and “infrastructure” arguments.
Saving water is easy. One example is waterless toilets, which have been known and used by RV- and boat-dwellers for a long time. There are many types of toilets that don’t create sewage. “Sewer vs septic” is the eternal argument but I choose option C: compost toilets of various kinds.
Put housing units and commercial buildings, and their parking, on the smallest possible footprint of land, leave the rest as-is (trees; uncleared land). Maybe add a walking trail through the uncleared part of the site (unpaved; nothing fancy; minimally maintained).
Smaller buildings, smaller lots.
“Landscaping” is one of the most environmentally unfriendly aspects of human-built environments. By reducing the footprint of “landscaped” areas, we can radically reduce water use (as well as petroleum consumption, air pollution, noise pollution).

Dixie Highway, home to multiple sprawl developments (sprawl = post-WWII development pattern characterized by attributes such as being located outside the historic urban core, not served by transit, not accessible safely by any means other than private automobile, and not having any basic commercial services for people’s daily needs in walking distance. Only single- family houses for acres or even miles on end.)

I suggest adding Votran service to serve the current sprawl developments on Dixie Hwy (if not served already; I don’t recall there being any). Also retrofit the roadside with walking/bicycle paths. (I rode my bicycle from Bunnell to Ormond along Dixie Highway a couple of years ago and there was no good bicycle access at that time; I do know RSTPO is planning Dixie Hwy/1 to be one of its cross-state bicycle network but don’t know if they have added it yet).

*Colonizer-culture-deconstruction note: Can we acknowledge that “Plantation” isn’t a good thing to name a housing development or indeed anything? Any of us white people who get a warm fuzzy nostalgic vibe from hearing the word “plantation,” our ancestors were probably never enslaved on one.

Stop fretting about “zero lot lines” (a lot of suburban folk fret about this). No one is asking you to give up your big half-acre suburban lot or your car-dependent lifestyle. Think of density (including apartments, townhouses and so on which might have “zero lot lines”) as allowing you to continue your lifestyle, while adding fewer cars to the road AND while making room for wildlife.

Development can be beautiful and creative! Here are some possible “pockets” we could retrofit in or near suburban sprawl developments:

Agri-hood
“Nature HOA”
Worker village (think of small cottages occupied by students, gardeners, landscapers, CNA/ homecare, chauffeurs, delivery drivers, etc.) all serving the needs of homeowners in a suburban sprawl enclave — thus REDUCING the impact of the existing sprawl). Might even have a little corner store, pharmacy, other small shops intended mainly to serve just the immediate residents of the worker village and mansion enclave.
Veterans, students, elderly seniors … How many categories of people have to become housing-insecure and/or socially isolated to the point of sickness and death, before the single- family-home, large-lot residents will see that density serves and helps us all?
Density can help protect the environment in multiple ways:
Reduce water use (from lawns, car-washing, & other outdoor consumption, which makes up 50% or more of the total water use in the USA)
Support nearby commercial services, businesses, thus reducing car-dependence
Support public transit; make routes fiscally viable
Take pressure off of wetlands, forests, & other undeveloped land, as well as agricultural land
WATER
If we had a friend who made a million dollars a year in salary, but was always broke, we probably would not say that friend needed more money. We’d say they need to learn how to manage their money. Volusia County (and many other places) are in that position with water use. We have ENOUGH water; we just need to stop wasting it, and also we need to try to undo the damage we have done to the natural cycle of rainfall, percolation, groundwater replenishment.

In Daytona Beach given our historic annual average rainfall of about 49 inches, my 1,000 sf house’s roof can collect more than 30,000 gallons of rainwater a year! My setup is not optimized, so my tubs and barrels probably collect only a fraction of that, say about 5,000 or 6,000 gallons a year. Even so, it is PLENTY, if used wisely. I have done extensive experiments of living off collected water.

Tucson AZ gets ELEVEN inches of rainfall a year, and yet according to Brad Lancaster (rainwaterharvesting.com; Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands books — I recommend to EVERYONE living in the rich industrialized world, so we can mend our ways), that rainfall is enough to meet the needs of every resident and all municipal functions too.

Rainwater collection does NOT have to be barrels or tubs. Best (most efficient and most economical) collection is to turn the soil into a sponge so the land collects, retains, & percolates its own irrigation water.

Interesting idea!
Stop making developers and builders provide “landscaping.” We often require developers to put in “landscaping” (mainly ornamental shrubs & sod) to replace the mature trees they cut down. Developers & builders are NOT landscapers, and they don’t know about native landscaping, and the big-box stores don’t know much either. A lot of times they consider landscaping just a burden or afterthought. And from an aesthetic perspective, waxy cartoon plants and dyed orange mulch are a poor substitute for the mature trees and healthy soil that were taken out for the development. So let’s offer another option: Donate to Florida Native

Plant Society (or local chapter thereof), who will then buy plants from nurseries or get them from their own members, and do the planting. Then the developer gets a tax-deduction too (since FNPS is a nonprofit).
Density critics: Stop saying “People won’t get out of their cars.” YOU won’t get out of your car, that is your business. But millions of other people want to be less dependent on private automobile ownership. Also many many people want to be free of the burden of taking care of a whole yard. Density is not the enemy!

Environmentalist’s friend
Developer’s friend
Money-crunched everyday person’s friend

Sprawl development is a ponzi scheme; the infrastructure does not pay for itself.
Green infrastructure includes techniques that have been known to indigenous communities since ancient times.
TEK: Traditional Ecological Knowledge
Do we really not want more people here near us? Our friends, our kids, grandkids, aging parents? Do we really not want more customers for businesses to support a year-round economy instead of being a brittle tourist economy? Is that why we are opposing density? OR, is the reason we don’t want density more rooted in the fact that our development patterns are UGLY? If the latter, that is easy to change! Development does not have to be ugly or take up tons of space.
“Not enough water” — Even if not one more person moves here, it doesn’t matter: We STILL have disrupted the water cycle, the natural rain cycle — and we still need to repair it. Even if not one single other person moves to Florida.
Permaculture: a design system for creating SUSTAINABLE human environments. Ecologically, financially, and SOCIALLY. Also, by sustainable we actually mean REGENERATIVE: give back more than they take. Includes both tangible and intangible resources. Food, safe drinking water, biomass, knowledge, skills.

(The following is a Facebook post I made in February 2021 to the Transformative Adventures group. I had meant to copy-paste it here but evidently forgot til now!)

PATHS!!! That was the topic in our PDC last night. (Sorry I could only stay for one hour, had another meeting but even just that one hour was great stuff – thanks Mike and everyone!)

Paths at Harvey House (AKA Heaven’s One-Tenth Acre), located in Daytona Beach Florida three blocks from the Atlantic Ocean, are actually not all that time-consuming to maintain. I layer grass or leaves or whatever, and add new layers as needed. In some areas I use stepping-stones (urbanite, scrounged from curbside with my trusty garden cart, Ms. Carty Cartwell or her big bad sister, Ms. Dolly DoRight (a large dolly bought used on NextDoor).

My paths, besides facilitating walking around my yard, serve also as “fertility farms”: When I need some soil to pot a plant, I dig for it under the leaves or under a concrete chunk that’s been sitting for awhile. After three years living in this house, building the soil with grass clippings and leaves and food scraps, I finally am starting to HAVE actual soil here, as opposed to the parched combination of beach-sand and weed n feed residue that came with the house.

What DOES take a lot of time & energy to manage at my place is what I call the “public interface sector.” Living on a corner lot, I have two sides of my house fully exposed to street view. This takes a lot of energy, thought, and sometimes money too to manage.

Am striving to plant as many different natives & edibles as possible. These not only provide food & habitat for critters, and food & medicine for me, but also serve as living buffers for:

1) aesthetics – I like my clothes washing area, outdoor kitchen area, etc., just fine, but don’t prefer to inflict views that neighbors might not find aesthetically pleasing;
2) visual privacy (I don’t particularly want to be in view all the time doing everything);
and
3) screen out excess streetlighting, to provide at least a little oasis of nighttime darkness for the house’s human occupants & wildlife.
4) stormwater sponge; mitigation of drought-flood extremes
5) mitigation of temperature extremes

Recently I noticed that even though this is a lot of work, it has also brought me satisfaction and even joy. I love it when passersby tell me they love my yard. And when they ask what the different plants are, etc. It’s fun too to overhear passersby saying “This is a cool yard. Hey look at that Wildlife Sanctuary sign, that is dope!” — etc.

My fence line also, it occurred to me yesterday, serves as a “nurturing my neighborhood” sector. Along with the Little Free Library, and the empty tin cans that I fill with cut wildflowers and attach to the top of the fence for added beauty (when I have to cut back the wildflowers because they are starting to block the sidewalk), and the “Dream Big” sign I found at a thrift shop and screwed onto the fence, there are also many other things I could potentially do along the fence line to show love and build community.

Last night, my creativity sparked by the “Paths” class, I started a list. (I would not necessarily do all these, such as the aquarium — but it is fun to brainstorm freely!!)

• Aquarium
• Bench nestled into fence, under shady tree
• Beverage dispenser
• Cookie jar
• Mini wading pool/pond super accessible at corner of lot, with flat stones for sitting on
• Public food garden box
• Art pod (mini paintings etc hanging in a shadow box)
• Clothes closet – take what you need!
• Attractive compost box with signage “please feed the earthworms” etc
• Seed station (I actually did that at one point but my design was flawed, the seeds got rained on and the box labels faded in the sun)
• Community jewelry box
• Cork bulletin board for posting “word of the day,” local business cards, neighborhood announcements etc.

Of course, the entire sidewalk that wraps around two sides of my yard is ITSELF a path!! A path that the city maintains of course, but also a path that I need to give attention to in order to be a good neighbor.

Fabric in my house travels a path from clothing to useful rags to compost. A cherished quilt that’s wearing out will get reinforced by sashiko-inspired visible stitching. And friends have expressed interest in learning how to do mending, so I will share my knowledge with them via multiple PATHs — a photo essay, maybe a Facebook Live, and even a Zoom meeting!

Even my hair travels a path to the compost. (Actually I lean over the compost area to cut my hair, so it goes straight from my head to the earth, do not pass go, do not collect 200 dollars!!!)

My feeling is there are a lot more artists / artistically inclined folks than we think, but colonizer-consumerist-capitalist culture discourages people from expressing those inclinations in any way. CCC culture (and creeping fascism) ridicules the arts (other than sometimes in a “museum/upperclass WASP”-sanctioned, setting).

If we have the audacity to do it as our job/career/calling, mainstream culture calls it irresponsible or useless or bad life choices.

Same with any of the humanities: anthropology, philosophy, etc.

We are the only ones who can dismantle this stranglehold. Art is revolution. Reducing our need to earn money, and reducing other aspects of our dependence on the “official” system, is revolution.

Permaculture, occupational co-ops are one way to build a resilient parallel structure.

Art and creativity in all forms is absolutely essential; we cannot allow our sick culture to tell us otherwise.

For many of us everyday people, throughout the ages, art has taken the form of the common household items we make (or adapt). Clothing, linens, furniture, tools. Many old tools were artistically embellished by their users.

I use the phrase “mailbag” loosely here, to indicate communication that comes my way via email, social-media comments, or whatever channel. Here are a couple that stood out for me as needing thought and response. (Some comments may be edited for brevity or to protect the person’s privacy.)

1. From a friend & neighbor (via a local group we both belong to on social media): “Jenny Nazak, you are such an inspirational neighbor. The evidence of your touch is constantly spreading. I’ve heard neighbors say, I really want to use some chemicals, but I’m afraid Jenny will catch me. LOL.”

This bugged me immensely but I had to think for a bit to figure out why. After reflecting on it a bit, I felt clearer. Here is the response I would give them:

1 – Why would you put the approval of one neighbor ahead of the wellbeing of our entire beautiful planet and all her creatures, including yourself and all other fellow humans?

2 – So if I have to move out of the neighborhood, or if I die before you, you’re going to feel free to start poisoning the pollinators, birds, pets, aquatic wildlife, waterways, your household, and other humans, just so you can have a perfectly neat lawn or whatever?

(Oh, and I would add that I would be happy to help them come up with healthy alternatives to deal with the situation that is prompting them to feel like they want or need to use chemicals.)

And, my response to the friend/neighbor who shared this bit of neighborhood intel with me:

Fear of my disapproval is the WRONG reason for them not to use chemicals. They should be motivated by concern for waterways, wildlife, & their own family’s health! (including pets). I do hope more people are waking up to the urgency of things!

That said, you are an awesome neighbor and thank you for respecting Mother Earth and caring for our fellow humans too!!

And thank you for prompting me to engage in this reflection!

*************

2. From a fellow activist offering a rideshare: “Unfortunately, I’ll be driving a minivan. It’s not the most eco-friendly method of transportation, but we’ve been in the market for an EV for a while now. Anyway, if you’re okay with riding in a minivan, I’d be happy to give you a ride.”

My response:

Rideshare is always better than each person traveling alone. BTW electric vehicles are not necessarily “better” in eco terms. And the footprint of any new vehicle is significant (manufacture of new vehicle, etc.). The most eco-friendly vehicle is oftentimes the one that a person already has, coupled with ridesharing and errand consolidation and other basic ways of optimizing usage; cutting unnecessary trips.

What I would have said as well if I had thought of it: Seriously. You are offering me a ride. PLEASE don’t apologize for your car! Also, as eco-activists we need to be aware that electric cars are not some world-saving panacea that will rescue us from having to change our habits. If you want ideas for reducing your transportation footprint, I’m happy to help! Don’t apologize to me though.

3 – General comment to a lot of my fellow eco folk who say they look to me for inspiration, but who seem (rather than being inspired) to just be stuck in feeling guilty and apologizing: I’m here to support you in your stated aspiration to live more lightly on the earth; I’m not here to grant you absolution. If we should be apologizing to anyone it’s to the communities and ecosystems we have wrecked with our colonizer consumerist culture. But really we just need to stop apologizing & feeling guilty; just set about making changes.

*************

PS. The main demographic I’m addressing, my target audience, is the same group that first made me realize I needed to write my book DEEP GREEN. The same group I myself belong to: white; self-described environmentalist or at least “environmentally concerned”; Baby Boomer generation (born 1946-64). I have literally never heard the abovementioned kinds of comments come out of the mouth of anyone who doesn’t fall into all three of these categories. White eco-boomers, our generation is huge in number; our cultural norms have done more harm to people and the planet than all previous generations combined; we have spending power; we have social influence; we have white privilege; and we need to use our power to dismantle the colonizer culture. No excuses.

PPS. My book was originally going to be titled GREEN SMACKDOWN, but I decided that sounded a bit harsh. I now think a bit of edge might be needed though. Call it a bit of tough love mixed with the TLC I set out to offer. Fellow white, environmentalist, Boomers, I’m calling you in!

A good succinct definition of Degrowth:

“Degrowth is a planned and democratic reduction of production and consumption in rich countries to reduce environmental pressures and inequalities, while improving well-being. It has four main characteristics: sustainability, justice, well-being and democracy. Unlike a recession, degrowth is not accidental and general but chosen and selective. It is a societal project that aims to abandon the race for monetary accumulation in favour of a vision of development centred on social health and ecological resilience.”

(“Degrowth goes more far beyond reduction of GDP”; by Timothée Parrique, in Polytechnique insights.)

There’s a big Facebook group for local issues in my area. It tends to generate a lot of polarized discussion. Someone posted a question to the effect, “How do we increase the safety of public schools?” Predictably, a large percentage of responses fell into two camps:

1) We need to make it not so easy for people to access guns. Especially young people, especially people with mental-health issues. And make it difficult or impossible for people to get their hands on semiautomatic weapons. And

2) We need MORE guns. Arm the teachers! And MORE security. Barriers, locks, etc.

As you can probably guess, I side with the “camp 1” type comments.

Also I added some comments of my own:

• For a long time, I have been a staunch advocate of homeschooling, neighborhood co-op schooling, and unschooling. Even if not for the shootings. Recent events just reinforce my stance.

• Quote from Caitlin Johnstone: “If you took any armed population and psychologically pummelled them from birth with narratives about how mass military slaughter is fine while turning them into underpaid, alienated gear-turners and giving them an artificial culture mass-produced in Los Angeles, you’d probably see some mass shootings.

“There’s only so far you can warp the human psyche before it snaps. Bash hundreds of millions of people in the brain their entire lives with indoctrination programs telling them madness is sanity and sanity is madness, and eventually a few of them are going to wind up mass murderers.”

(My point in sharing this quote here is to observe that our society is sick. We have gone off the rails, and certain dysfunctional trends seem to have accelerated over the past 20 or 30 years. The rampant consumerism, the militarization, the glamorizing of violence, the shredding of economic and social safety nets.

(Mental health is definitely a huge part of the mass shootings and other violent incidents, but maybe in a different way than we have tended to think. Yes, some individuals are going off the rails. But I think the deeper root is a societal descent into craziness. It’s hard to put into words, I feel shy talking like this in a big general-public space like this, but I know some of you know what I’m talking about. Now of course, we can’t as individuals just fix societal craziness. And it won’t be fixed by voting (though yes we all DO need to vote). What we can do as individuals is what I see a lot of people doing: small individual daily acts that increase kindness and connection, cohesion, compassion. We all have to look out for each other and not rely on guns and walls and metal detectors to provide “security.”

(Finally, no offense to teachers (it is not their fault), but if it were up to me, I would not send anyone’s kid into the prisonlike places our schools seem to have become more and more. Prisonlike both physically and mentally.)

In my book, I mention that I’ve found it helpful to deliberately moderate my intake of news. This doesn’t mean avoiding reality; it just means not taking in more media stories than I need to stay informed and on-task.

I’m well aware of the biospheric crisis, and don’t gain anything from hooking myself up to a steady drip-feed of horrific reports.

Then again, taking in a certain amount of the really scary news helps me maintain a healthy sense of urgency. When I say sense of urgency — in my case, I always know it’s urgent, but sometimes I need to be nudged to step up my communication with public officials and community leaders. The scary stories help me with that by reminding me of what’s at stake. Also they help me feel less “weird” and “goofy” in the face of mainstream people (or even fellow environmentalists sometimes) looking askance at what they see as my “excessively radical” lifestyle.

The horrifying news reminds me that nope, my lifestyle’s not at all inappropriate given the gravity of the situation. So when I find myself hanging back in my civic communication and other advocacy, I make sure to take in some scary climate coverage, backed by science, from the sources I trust. On the other hand, if I find myself getting despondent to the point of being paralyzed or nihilistic, I have no qualms about taking a news break. And this is my suggestion for everyone: Regulate your media intake as needed.

Here’s the latest horrifying report I’ve read. From Umair Haque, writing at medium.com The Age of Extinction Is Here — Some Of Us Just Don’t Know It Yet :

“My friends in the Indian Subcontinent tell me stories, these days, that seem like science fiction. The heatwave there is pushing the boundaries of survivability. My other sister says that in the old, beautiful city of artists and poets, eagles are falling dead from the sky. They are just dropping dead and landing on houses, monuments, shops. They can’t fly anymore.

“The streets, she says, are lined with dead things. Dogs. Cats. Cows. Animals of all kinds are just there, dead. They’ve perished in the killing heat. They can’t survive.

“People, too, try to flee. They run indoors, spend all day in canals and rivers and lakes, and those who can’t, too, line the streets, passed out, pushed to the edge. They’re poor countries. We won’t know how many this heatwave has killed for some time to come. Many won’t even be counted.

“Think about all that for a moment. Really stop and think about it. Stop the automatic motions of everyday life you go through and think about it.

“You see, my Western friends read stories like this, and then they go back to obsessing over the Kardashians or Wonder Woman or Johnny Depp or Batman. They don’t understand yet. Because this is beyond the limits of what homo sapiens can really comprehend, the Event. That world is coming for them, too.

“The analogy is often used to describe ‘climate change’ of frogs in a boiling pot. It’s useful, but only to a certain degree. When the pot boils, they’re taken out and eaten. We were in a boiling pot, and now we’re at the stage where we’re about to get taken out and eaten. This is when things start to get really, really bad — really, really fast.

“I don’t use the words ‘climate change’ to describe any of this, because, well, they’re inadequate. The way that we tell that story has led to a kind of shocking sense of apathy and ignorance about the reality of what we face. People read the science, and think that if the temperature rises by one degree, two, three, what’s the big deal? Ha ha! Who cares? That’s not even a hot day? Wrong. A better way to tell that story is something like this. On average, when the temperature rises one degree, the seasons change by a factor of ten at equatorial regions. One degree, one point five, which is where we are now — the summers are ten to fifteen degrees Celsius hotter. Two degrees? Twenty. Three degrees? Thirty.

“We’re heading for three degrees.

“It’s already 50 degrees Celsius in the Subcontinent. Spain is bracing for an extreme heatwave, of about 40 degrees plus as is Europe, as is much of America. That’s at one degree or so of global warming. At two degrees? The Subcontinent hits 60 degrees Celsius. Spain and Europe hit 50. At three degrees? Equatorial regions hit 70 degrees Celsius or more. Spain and Europe hit 60.

“Extinction happens.

“This is the threshold. We are already hitting it. We can see it now in startling, grim, vivid detail. The Event is not some kind of abstraction or prediction. Extinction is now really happening in plain sight in places around the globe — and they are revealing to us the limits of what our civilization can survive. That limit is hit somewhere between 40 and 50 degrees. After that point, life as we know it comes to an end.

“My Western friends still don’t really grasp this at all. They imagine that as the seasons get exponentially hotter, they can simply…turn up the air conditioning. LOL. Sorry, it doesn’t work like that. Why not? Not just because energy grids will fail, or even because at a certain point even air conditioning just fails. It’s because of life.

“My Western friends don’t think these days. This fantasy of turning up the air conditioning and sitting in your apartment or house? They ignore the now obvious signs. Birds falling from the sky, Dead things lining the streets. What are you going to do, sit in your air conditioned home while everything else goes extinct?

“It doesn’t work like that. Those things, those beings — birds, cows, sheep, chickens, whatever — they provide us with the basics, too. They perish, we perish. Insects nourish our soil, birds eat insects, and on and on. My Western friends don’t understand that we are part of systems. Ecosystems, in this case. And as their foundations are ripped out, we can scarcely survive. The idea that you can sit in your air conditioned home in comfort while everything else goes extinct is a fantasy, a delusion. What will you eat? Who will turn the soil? Who’ll keep the crops healthy? Where will the basics of life come from?

“Our civilization collapses somewhere between fifty and sixty degrees Celsius. Bang, poof, gone. Nothing works after that point. Everything begins to die — not just animals and us in the case, but our systems which depend on them. Economics crater, inflation skyrockets, people grow poorer, fascism erupts as a consequence. You can already see that beginning to happen around the globe — but it’s just the beginning. Imagine how much worse inflation’s going to get when Extinction really begins to bite.”

https://eand.co/the-age-of-extinction-is-here-some-of-us-just-dont-know-it-yet-7001f5e0c79a

SenseOfUrgency