Author: jennynazak

In my neighborhood there’s a young mother who walks around the neighborhood several times a day, walking her dog and pushing her daughter in a stroller. She says hi to everyone she passes, and, particularly for some elderly housebound residents, she might be the only person that they get to see all day! Even though I myself get to talk with a lot of people, this sweet young woman with her child and pup are always a bright spot in my day.

Two businesses, located catty-corner across from one another on a faded commercial street I love, that many people are trying to revitalize, have put tables and chairs out front of their doors. The other evening, the two sets of tables and chairs enticed several visitors/customers to sit down. The presence of the people sitting outdoors, in turn, prompted a number of motorists, who probably would’ve otherwise just kept driving, to stop and say hi and see what was going on. Many pleasant conversations ensued.

In my Little Free Library the other day I found a note scrawled on a scrap of paper: “TY so much for the books!” The little note warmed my heart and totally made my day.

I haven’t yet done this, but I think that when I mount my poster of the ecological activist poem “Hieroglyphic Stairway” on my fence next to my Little Free Library, it’ll add to the quality of people’s day, and contribute to the ongoing rise in the neighborhood’s vibe. (If you’re not familiar with this Drew Dellinger poem, you can read it here.) And here, on Drew Dellinger’s website, is where I ordered a beautiful poster of the poem. (Update: I posted the poem on a cork board on the corner of my corner-lot. Haven’t seen or heard any reactions yet, but it’s out there and that’s what matters. To quote my favorite lines of the poem, “I want just this consciousness reached / by people in range of secret frequencies contained in my speech.”)

My friends, a sweet couple who live in a rural area where the neighbors have not always been friendly and have sometimes been outright hostile, recently put a little stone bench by the entrance to their driveway. My friends noticed a positive shift in the vibe almost immediately. People have been stopping there to rest, and one neighborhood matriarch has even been known to “hold court” there!

My final example isn’t from right in my neighborhood, but I found it on my morning walk today. About a half-mile down the beach, not far from the usual trash can and recycling can, was an adorable painted box labeled “Mermaid’s Lost Toys.” Clearly meant as a place to drop off toy buckets, shovels, and other beach toys instead of tossing them in the trash. This little box conveys a big message about sharing; adds a sweet touch of whimsy; sets a cheerful tone while discouraging a throwaway mentality.

I mention these little things because 1) they do make a big difference; and 2) a lot of people give much of their attention to “big stuff” like infrastructure bills, government programs, large-scale projects — and place a lot of faith in such big stuff. And often wait around for this big stuff, and don’t always recognize how much power we have through the “small stuff” we can do right now with our own hands, and start seeing results right away.

Chuck Marohn’s recent piece in Strong Towns fits in well with this post. “Will We Have an Infrastructure Bill? Who Cares?” “I’ll spend an hour talking with a group about how we’ve overbuilt our infrastructure systems, what this approach is robbing from our local capacity and prosperity, how we need to get more out of what we’ve already built, and how we go about doing that in our cities from the bottom up. …Then someone asks me whether or not there will be a federal infrastructure bill. … I’ll keep answering the question about a federal infrastructure bill, but please understand that it matters far less to your future than what you and your neighbors choose to do in your own community. A nation of Strong Towns — one where the energy of Americans is not dissipated by the inconsequential horse race of political DC, but instead put to work making their own places great — is not something we have to wait for permission to build.”

Update Oct 12, 2021: Home improvement; neighborhood improvement!! By removing a side-gate that I never used anyway, and moving my trash can and recycling bin to the gate-gap which is right along the sidewalk that gets a lot of foot-traffic, I have added a bit of public value to my neighborhood. (Just in time for Biketoberfest that’s coming up this weekend!)

Before, I kept the trash can and recycling bin tucked away in a private spot. By moving it to this public spot, I not only add a community value (by providing a publicly accessible spot for trash and recycling), but also make things easier for myself and other household members, because all I have to do now to put the trash out is push the can and bin the couple of feet to the curb on trash collection day!

This is one micro-step in my experimental, exploratory process of making the public-private boundaries of my dwelling more “porous” and thus, I intend, more enriching to the neighborhood and to my household. You can see a photo of my new private-public amenity here.

One of my favorite teachers said that carrying a grudge is an injury we do to ourselves that’s on top of the original injury that was inflicted on us.

Forgiveness is a gift to ourselves. It’s a process of self-healing. It’s also a gift to the people around us, and to the whole planet. I’ve heard a saying, “Hurt people hurt people.” By doing forgiveness work (and yes, it is WORK, usually), we heal our inner wounds that might otherwise cause us to injure other people.

And, forgiveness is separate from one’s decision about whether or not to choose to have further interaction with the person who injured us. We might choose to keep spending time with them, or we might not.

If I choose (from a calm clear place, having done my inner work of forgiveness) to tell the person the effect their pattern is having on me, it gives the person an opportunity to wake up to their injurious pattern. They might wake up right then, or years later. Or never!

And a final note – I have been both Person A and Person B, many times.

Forgiveness work is priceless. So is being given an opportunity to wake up and change.

Unforgiveness — grudges carried around — can lead to violence in many forms, from assault and murder, to emotional injury, to self-medication via hyper-consumption that’s killing the biosphere.

‪No one should be FLYING to a climate conference. Or any conference, really. Virtual technology is more than adequate. Fellow activists, we need to set the example. We saw that virtual worked great during Covid shutdown; let’s continue to use it because of planetary climate pandemic. ‬

Some people will counter that “it’s not the same” as meeting in person. No, it’s not exactly the same, but virtual conferencing has some distinct advantages — for people’s time, energy, wallets, and the biosphere.

Here at Daytona Beach Permaculture Guild headquarters, the summer rains have come to a rather abrupt stop as of about 2 weeks ago, and we are steering into the fall period of what I have come to refer to as “The Big Crispy.” I have identified two Big Crispy periods of the year here: spring and fall.

The spring Big Crispy is when the rains that should start in early May don’t come, and meanwhile the air temperatures are climbing. This past spring’s Big Crispy was particularly brutal at DBPG HQ; we got almost all the way through June before any real rains came. This was the year I vowed never again to buy new shrubs or other plants in spring. Watering them was an exhausting daily routine, and some still didn’t make it. (And I’m talking about Florida-adapted native plants not making it.)

The fall Big Crispy is the reverse: The summer rainy season comes to a halt while high temps are still in the mid to high 80s. The fall Big Crispy is usually a little less brutal than spring because temps are on at least a slight down-trend and we can start seeing some nighttime lows dip below 70. Still, I’ve been hauling lots of water, and many plants including hardy natives are wilting and not even fully recovering overnight.

We did have an extra rainy summer but it was not enough to bring us up to our normal year-to-date rainfall.

Normal year-to-date 41.07 inches; our year-to-date 34.17 inches. We are at 83% of our normal year-to-date. That doesn’t sound bad at all, and if it weren’t for the Big Crispy times and lopsided rainfall, probably we would not even notice.

Normal September here 6.92 inches; this past month 3.34 inches. We are at just 48% of our normal total September rainfall.

People in other parts of the state have it quite a bit worse; I’ve heard permies reporting from parts of Florida that have had no significant rain in two years.

And of course, many people have it far, far worse in other parts of the USA and worldwide. So much worse that climate-induced migration is becoming a frequently reported reality.

From permies.com, here’s a thread someone started back in August asking drought-stricken permie folk in the West how they are managing. (Here is the URL in case you prefer to copy-paste rather than click https://permies.com/t/165847/wanna-hear-Western-Drought-Stricken .) People from all different regions, not just the Western USA, have commented in the thread. Lots of good info from people who use no sprinklers, running water, or other mechanical irrigation systems, instead relying only on rainfall, rainbarrels, hand-watering from watering cans. There are more of us out there than I thought.

I’m pretty sure this thread is public so you can access it without being a member of permies.com . That said, I have found it very worth my while and minimal “techno/electronic noise burden” to be a member, which I have been for some years now.

Everything I’m reading and observing tells me we can only expect drier dry times and wetter wet times from now on. Also, even here in a coastal, semitropical, rainfall-abundant region, where people tend to worry about flooding and sea-level rise more than about any other aspect of climate change, all of my research tells me the biggest threat here, too, is heat, droughts, desertification, wildfires. (I would be perfectly happy to be wrong about this; I get no pay and no joy from being correct in my dire predictions.)

Humans can engineer for floods, and even, to a degree, for sea-level rise. And, my feeling is that most public-works departments haven’t even scratched the surface of how much stormwater mitigation can be achieved with green infrastructure helping to take the load off the conventional “gray infrastructure” (storm drains, pumps, seawalls etc.). If we enlist permaculture principles, we have a lot of untapped capacity for dealing with stormwater and flooding and even, in at least some places, sea-level rise.

Drought and heat, though — once we reach a certain point, there’s no mitigation; we will quite literally be toast. The reports from around the world this past summer were horrifying. From Siberia to Italy to the Pacific Northwest and more.

Of course we still have a lot of room to mitigate drought-flood extremes by encouraging widespread use of rainbarrels, and popularizing land-management practices that turn the ground into a water- and carbon-absorbing “sponge” covered with dense vegetation and teeming with beneficial microorganisms.

Our choice. The forked path stretches ahead. One fork leads to more heat and drought, another fork might lead to successful heat and drought mitigation, and at least some restoration of the broken water-cycle.

This is one permie’s on-the-ground experience coupled with reports from people all over. (In the mainstream media as well as via grassroots channels.) If you have any reports you’d like to share (whether hard data, or anecdotal, or both) from your household and/or community, please do! Every additional data point we can gather might help motivate one more person to wake up and join in the monumental task of climate mitigation/adaptation.

Speaking of climate action, I am getting ready to email some of my city officials, ask if they will meet with me to share ideas on climate mitigation/adaptation. One of the main ideas I want to suggest is “more trees; and in general a shift in our landscaping focus from ‘neatness’ to ‘heat mitigation’.”

We can absolutely do this without sacrificing a cared-for appearance. Things will be softer and puffier and spongier yet still look obviously cared-for. Our obsessive need to tidy up the great outdoors and make everything buzzcut square is jacking up the temperatures, killing us with noise and fumes, limiting landscaping career opportunities, and squandering resources.

Done properly, climate-mitigating “puffy landscaping” could significantly boost our local economic resilience, not to mention our appeal to tourists (the latter being a strong concern of many government officials and everyday citizens in my tourist-attracting region).

Fellow permie Laura Oldanie (Rich & Resilient Living blog) is one of my top go-to sources for learning about wealth in its many forms, especially nonfinancial forms. On October 19, Laura is offering a pay-what-you-choose webinar on climate-resilient wealth; see her announcement below.

“I’m offering a pay what you want webinar on the topic of climate resilient wealth on October 19. I’m not promoting it very widely, but thought anybody in this FB group who found this comment in this particular post could be interested in participating.” Here’s the link for info and registration.

I’m doing a free webinar tomorrow Wed 9/29/21 at noon EST! How to efficiently share other people’s worthwhile posts on social media, but do it in an easy way so you don’t wear out your brain or your calendar or your keyboard. This will be my first go-round of this webinar.

Let’s face it: Sometimes other people’s posts are a lot of work to share!

Like, when someone sends you an email and they want you to share it on Facebook and Twitter etc. Argh, it’s a hassle! Especially those formatted emails — how are you supposed to share those?

Or non-copy-pasteable stuff … So that in order to share it you’re gonna have to retype it all yourself!

Or how do you deal with incessant direct messages by people wanting YOU to be their free PR agency?

If it’s just a spammer, they are easy to blow off. But a really worthwhile org or event, not so much!!

And unlike some government agency or corporate organizer etc who sent you the request to share their post, YOU won’t get paid for this labor!

And yet, when some really worthwhile event is coming up, we feel remiss not sharing it with fellow eco folk! So we end up working our fingers to the bone for hours sometimes … for free! Volunteering is awesome and all, and most of us do this as a labor of love AND climate reality … but hey, we’ve got our own lives, and bills to pay too, right?

With that very real struggle in mind, tomorrow I’ll be sharing some essential survival tips I’ve gained over my years of being a freelance eco educator which includes huge amounts of “sharing other people’s posts.”

Direct Message me to join me tomorrow for this Zoom call. To allow ample time for Q&A, I’m limiting it to 3 participants (now two, since one person signed up already)!

Don’t worry if this time doesn’t work for you. If lots of people end up being interested in this topic, I’ll offer the workshop many more times!! Also I will be recording it, and if there’s a way to share the recording link publicly, I will!

With a few simple hacks … “Sharing other people’s worthwhile events” can be so easy and so much fun!!!

P.S. Oftentimes people are really terrible at sharing their OWN posts. In other words, many people fail to promote their own very worthwhile endeavors. If you resemble this description, webinar will help you too! It’s no service to the planet to write a book, organize an event, teach a class, start a wonderful business — but then fail to promote it. If you (or your organization) fall down on the job of self-promotion, no one gets to benefit from your hard work — including YOU!

Announcement from my friend and permie activist colleague Chris Searles, whose organization BioIntegrity is working diligently to raise awareness of the importance of rainforests, and support indigenous peoples, the people who are doing the most to protect the planet and mitigate climate change.

“Last week Jeff Bezos said, ‘Nature is our life-support system. I was reminded of this when I went into space. I’d heard that seeing the earth from space changes one’s point of view, but I was not prepared for just how much that would be true.’

“He was announcing that the next $1B from his climate fund will go to protecting ecosystems in the tropics and sub-tropics, where Nature is most diverse and productive.

“Together, this community has been promoting this kind of action for years. Thank you!

“Check this article for some details.

“This is the second major announcement, this month, from the world’s wealthiest about the value of Biosphere Earth.”

When I posted Bezos’s announcement in one of my permie groups, it drew a lot of snide responses. People are skeptical and I suppose understandably so.

Myself, I’m always excited when someone experiences an epiphany about the importance of the environment. In my own personal experience, coming to eco consciousness (and social consciousness for that matter) is layers and layers of awakenings, with regret and repentance for my past ignorance and selfishness. Not all of us were born with a social conscience. Personally, I have had to do a lot of deliberate evolving in order to become the type of caring and responsible human being I aspired to be.

That said, I do hope lots of other people experience this kind of awakening without having to go up into space. Video footage and images online, and documentary films etc., can be quite wondrous and are free or cheap to look at not to mention the far-lower carbon footprint.

Someone commented, “He could start by paying taxes!”

A valid point – but in a way, this direct billion given directly to ptotecting ecosystems could be better than taxes, because if he were paying it in taxes a large percentage of the money would be going to pay for wars and prisons, as a big chunk of our taxes do in the USA.