Author: jennynazak

Sometimes I’ll reread something I’ve written (or replay in my head something I’ve said), and think, Gosh that sounds so extreme! But last night in the middle of the night, I suddenly woke up bolt-upright remembering something really extreme I read recently, that reminded me of why I’m so adamant about minimizing my footprint and encouraging others to do the same. You can see it in the “Further Reading” section at the bottom of this post.

In my previous post “Moving the Needle,” I wrote about how we green-minded people have the power to shift the mainstream norms of consumption toward a norm that’s sustainable. We can’t control what other people do, and most of the time we can’t change them by verbally trying to tell them what to do. However, we can influence people by the example of our own actions.

Like, if I refuse to accept any car rides that are out of someone’s way, it makes an impression on people. It might make some of the people around me stop and think about their own tendency to get in a car and drive somewhere when they could instead walk or bicycle, or even eliminate the trip entirely. At the very least, it shows them that there are people getting through the day another way. Our visible actions (or non-actions) can stick with people more than we think (as I have sometimes found out long after the fact), and can motivate them to reflect on things they hadn’t given a second thought to.

Today I read an article about a woman who was feeling deprived because travel restrictions had kept her from taking her daughter to visit her parents, the daughter’s grandparents. The granddaughter, age 3, had “only” gotten to see the grandparents three times. I should mention that the mother, her husband, and the kids live in the USA; the parents live in a Middle Eastern country. So, about 7,000 miles and a 14-hour flight away.

The mother wants her parents’ help with the kids. Perfectly natural! Raising kids is a huge task, and one of the wrong turns I feel we’ve made in USA society is being so individualistic that we end up being too cut off from multiple generations of family.

The child is missing her grandparents. Also perfectly natural.

What’s not natural is that the mother in this article didn’t seem to see a problem with the fact that, during her daughter’s first nine months of life, she and her daughter flew to the Mideast to see the grandparents three separate times. In nine months. (After that, the US government implemented travel restrictions against the country where the grandparents were born and still live.) Why didn’t she see a problem with taking three trips of that magnitude in nine months? Because air travel has become so commonplace and (relatively) inexpensive. The Mom isn’t wealthy or anything; she works in academia.

The mother laments being cut off from her parents. That’s natural.

She says getting to see your parents isn’t privilege. Well, actually, if you choose to live halfway around the world from your parents, getting to see them is privilege.

I forget where I first read it, but there’s a phrase “love miles.” It’s the miles we log traveling to see family and friends who live far away. And what allows them to be far away from us, or we from them, is cheap air travel, plus probably at some point someone took the bait of a geographically distant job opportunity. Nothing wrong with that, but there are consequences of it that we’ve been in denial about. Fragmented families and social isolation, for example. And a big fat carbon footprint.

Anyway! The reason I bring this up in the context of “moving the needle” is that as I was reading this article, my blood was boiling and I had the fleeting urge to write a social-media post about how obnoxious and spoiled this woman was. I did not do that. I even had the fleeting urge to tell the woman herself what a planet-trashing spoiled brat she was. I did not do that (and wouldn’t have even if I’d had a way to contact her).

Not only would either of those actions be unkind and unnecessary; they also would be very unlikely to motivate this person or anyone else to want to think about the carbon footprint of their travel. (Besides all that, I don’t know this person’s circumstances other than what was mentioned in the article, and I really have no business judging her.)

What I will do, is continue to pursue low-footprint alternatives of travel. And low-footprint alternatives to travel. And I’ll share my choices in a matter-of-fact way, when the topic of transportation comes up on Zero-Waste and permaculture groups. Or when friends ask me about vacation plans, or ask me if I’m attending this or that event that’s not either online, or outdoors in walking/cycling distance. I’ll also continue to praise the organizers of conferences, webinars, and meetings for having their events online. Even small communications of this kind help set new reference points; encourage people to reexamine norms that have become very solidified.

Further Reading:

Sometimes I’ll reread something I’ve written (or replay in my head something I’ve said), and think, Gosh that sounds so mean and so extreme! But last night in the middle of the night, I suddenly woke up bolt-upright remembering something horrifying I read recently, that reminded me of why I’m so adamant about shifting the cultural norms around travel and other high-footprint human activities. The following is an excerpt from a piece by Bill McKibben, in his email newsletter “Climate Forward” (New Yorker Magazine). It’s titled “Way Too Soon To Hack the Sky”:

Sometime in the next two weeks, an independent advisory committee is expected to issue a recommendation on a request from a team of Harvard scientists to fly a balloon from Kiruna, in Sweden’s Lapland region. The team would test a flight platform that might someday be used to inject a sample of aerosols into the stratosphere. Though this initial request is only for a test of a flight platform, a successful run would likely mean more tests, with aerosols of calcium carbonate and sulfates. These particles could hack the planet’s climate, by reflecting some of the sun’s light back out to space before it can reach the ground. It’s an ominous moment in the planet’s history—and one we should back away from for now.

This so-called solar geoengineering is the ultimate, break-the-glass response to the climate crisis. It’s been in the air, so to speak, for a long time (I wrote about it in 1989, in “The End of Nature”), but the fullest account yet comes in my colleague Elizabeth Kolbert’s marvellous new book, “Under a White Sky.” The title acknowledges the fact that this atmospheric hack could change the blue dome above our heads to a milky gray—which should give you some sense of the scale of the intervention. The argument in its favor is that humanity has done so little to address the climate crisis, despite thirty years of scientific warning, that we might have no choice but to follow our injection of CO₂ with an injection of sulfate aerosols. Think of it as Narcan, on a global scale. “Geoengineering is not something to do lightly,” Harvard’s Daniel Schrag told Kolbert.

Indeed. So, in light of this development, does fretting about a wretched excess of air travel (and about destruction of old-growth forests, and about the wealthy world’s other deadly habits) sound so extreme?

On a final note, something I always try to remember to mention when talking about air travel. If you need to travel by air, you can purchase carbon offsets to help mitigate the footprint of your trip. (You can purchase offsets for travel by train, bus, car as well.) According to my research (including information from deep-green professionals who have to fly at times), the best type of offsets to buy is the Gold Standard. They only add a few dollars to the price of your trip. If you can afford long-distance travel you can afford to buy carbon offsets.

As environmentalists, we can’t control what other people do. We can’t make other people care more about the impact of their activities on other people, other creatures, and the planet.

What we can do, by our choices and by our public declarations/demonstrations of how those choices, is help re-set the mainstream norm. Move the needle, so to speak. (This terminology comes from old-fashioned speedometers and other instrument gauges, I think. Old-fashioned as in having a red needle that points to a number, as opposed to having a digital display of just the number itself.)

We can publicly share (verbally and by living example) how our more eco-friendly choices are improving our lives while also helping the planet. And when it comes to our own personal living choices, we get to be as “extreme” as we want, because we’re not trying to tell anyone else what to do. We’re simply acting in accordance with our eco values, plus other values we might cherish, such as valuing our own time and money and energy.

By being more public and vocal about our choices, we furnish additional data points to the world. We give data points that are “further off in left field” (a metaphor from baseball, if I’m not mistaken), and by so doing, we contribute to a shift in where the “middle of the bell curve” lies.

I used to be reticent to publicize my practices such as aiming to use only 10 gallons of water per day (often it is much less), or keeping my electricity use to about 5-10 percent of the USA average. I figured I’d turn people off; scare them away from trying to lower their eco footprints. Instead, I’ve learned that setting the bar high gives people new reference points.

Shifting the societal norms of consumption is a major part of our work as self-appointed freelance guardians of Mother Earth. It’s actually a lot less work than fighting to verbally convince people what they “should” do.

One way I have moved the needle in my neighborhood is by turning my yard into a lush micro-oasis of native and edible plants that also happen to be pretty. Now a bunch of my neighbors and friends are starting to incorporate a few native plants and fruits/veggies into their yards.

Whew! Very relaxing. Much easier and much more effective than yelling at people for using leafblowers, ruining the air quality with their excessive mowing, etc., and trying to tell them why they should not do that. Or ranting on social media about the endless expanses of scalped grass along roadsides (far better to show beautiful photos of the roadside meadow corridors that are flourishing with the blessing of some highway departments).

So go forth and move the needle in some area of your choice today! Your eco choices, especially when you are visibly enjoying the benefits of those choices, set a great and much-needed example in the world.

My rainwater catchment “system” is super basic, about as simple as you can get: just barrels and stock tanks lined up under the roof line. I have done extended experiments where I live on just rainwater, which I scoop out of the barrels with a pitcher or saucepan (though my house is a normal urban house hooked up to city water).

I live in a part of Florida where we rarely get a freeze, let alone a long deep freeze – but we never know when one could hit here too, huh! Encouragingly, many of my friends in Texas who have rainwater collection found that their water didn’t freeze solid even during the recent multi-day siege of subfreezing weather.

Rainwater catchment is a useful and simple way of maintaining household fresh-water supplies during extraordinary weather events and other disasters of all kinds. Rough rule of thumb: A 1,000-square-foot house can collect up to about 600 gallons of water off its rood from a 1-inch rain.

Dealing with mosquitoes: It’s actually not hard. I simply keep the barrels covered when they are not actually being used to collect rain. Another reason I keep my barrels and tubs covered is so insects, lizards, and other local critters will not be in danger of falling in & drowning.

My simple setup collects and stores a total of about 500 gallons. But you can get started collecting lovely fresh water with even just a single barrel, or even just a line up of large pots, pans, buckets under your roof line.

Filtering/treatment of rainwater for emergency use for drinking and cooking: Many types of homescale filtering systems are available. The simplest and most popular I know are the Brita and the Berkey.

Rainwater collection is like money in the bank. It gives you, your household, and your landscape a natural buffer against disasters and against increasing drought-flood extremes.

Last night in my usual wee-hours awake-window, I googled “pandemic forgetfulness” to see if I was the only one. Nope, apparently an unusual degree of forgetfulness is a phenomenon that’s affecting many people. (Strange dreams are another widely documented Covid phenomenon, but I had already read about that in addition to experiencing it.)

The first article I visited from my search results was written by a woman who experienced not just the scatterbrained absentmindedness I’d been noticing in myself over the past year (I mean, above and beyond my usual degree of scatterbrained absentmindedness which admittedly is considerable), but an actual full-blown amnesia episode. That must have been quite scary but it sounds like she got some profound realizations from it.

Other articles from my search results confirmed that an increase in basic scatterbrained absentmindedness had become a fairly widespread pandemic phenomenon. This gave me permission to put away my low-grade nagging worry that I might be suffering from some early-onset dementia. (I still might be, but I choose to believe I’m not, and the articles helped bolster my chosen belief.)

Anyway! In this post I’m highlighting that first article (by the woman who experienced the amnesia episode) because she says something about activism that I can really relate to:

“Brother Toby of the Starcross Community, a monastic spiritual sanctuary, wrote recently that we need both strong, young, yang-oriented activists on the front lines of vital battles being fought now … and quieter, yin-oriented seniors to hold what Swedish economist Dag Hammarskjöld called ‘sanctuaries of peace.'”

I deeply appreciated reading this. Not that a person can’t do both forms of activism (and not that it is necessarily age-specific; I know lots of very elderly folks who continue to be very “outer” in their activism), but I’ve been noticing in myself a sort of inward-turning direction, while I see other people really being so much more out-there-in-the-world, and I’ve been giving myself a hard time about it. Reading this reminded me that the inner landscape is every bit as valid and necessary a front of activism as the outer.

(And I’m looking for the original quote from Brother Toby, and if I find it I will share it here.)

Further Exploration:

• “Pandemic Stress Leads To Forgetting and Remembering: A frightening episode of Transient Global Amnesia (TGA) results in reflection” (Donna Baier Stein; NextAvenue.org). “I know I’m not alone in experiencing stress levels that sometimes feel hard to bear these days. Strange dreams, anxiety attacks, insomnia. We each have ways of coping with COVID-19’s psychological impact, but earlier this summer my brain found an unusual retreat from the mayhem.”

Early this morning I crawled out from under my toasty warm quilts and stood up in the chilly house. Brr! (Actually it wasn’t all that cold; maybe high 50s or low 60s. But under my blankets had been toasty warm, in the high 70s!)

Last night three friends and I had a gathering on their porch, but with the high winds and chilly temperatures, even with layers of clothing and the delicious food and drink and good company we didn’t stay out there long. I walked home and soon dove into bed, and I imagine they did too.

(Actually the temperature was fairly mild in objective terms — at 57 degrees Fahrenheit / 13.9 Celsius — but we all agreed it felt outright cold, probably a combo of the wind and humidity.)

This morning my house was chilly as expected. But when I walked outside I got a pleasant surprise. It was windy still, but warmer than inside the house! This is a phenomenon I’ve often noticed in winter and early spring: Sometimes you wake up to a chilly house but when you step outdoors, you notice it’s warmer outside than in.

It occurred to me that this is true of my own private mental cocoon also: Many times it’s warmer outside than in. Inside can feel cold and stale and isolated, unless I’m checking in regularly with other viewpoints. (The other viewpoints can be live or in writing.)

“Warmer outside than in” is something I am realizing is often true from an activist standpoint as well. As activists, we’re supposed to be working with other people and organizations to make change happen. But oftentimes even if we are connected with other people and groups, we can still feel isolated. At least I can, and others around me seem to fall into that also.

I’ve found I absolutely have to constantly keep reaching, reaching for connection with likeminded people and groups. They are out there! And many times all the “reaching” I have to do is to click on a post that shows up in my social media feed. Or even just have a receptive attitude, so that when some new person or group drops into my space, I’m open to them rather than shutting them out.

This happened a few weeks ago when an ad for something called The Nature of Cities conference popped up in my feed. (A friend, who obviously knows me well, texted me the link later that week, after I had already signed up for the conference!)

Why I’m mentioning TNOC is that this conference, which I had never even heard of, has been going on for years, and involves hundreds or even thousands of people from all over the world! (Update, just got the organizers’ welcome email; they say “This Festival is about 1500 people from 65 countries, from all corners of green urbanism.”)

A similar thing happened last spring, when I first became aware of an organization called 1,000 Friends of Florida, and started attending their webinars. An incredibly organized, professional group catalyzing change in landscaping methods, wildlife conservation, responsible development, and much more.

And there was my “discovery” of a pocket of fellow permaculturists called Transformative Adventures, who are teaching the best Permaculture Design Certificate course I have ever taken. (It’s via Zoom and is the best PDC I’ve taken so far, which is saying a lot, as I’ve previously taken four, and they were all outstanding.) Even though I have ties with permaculture people and groups all over the country and even the world, expanding my ties by connecting with this group has given a major boost to my work.

I could go on but you get the point. What I’m trying to suggest is that if I don’t constantly expand my horizons, it gets to feeling lonely and hopeless, because the problems of the world are huge, and if we only hang out with one small set of people (even really good ones), it can feel like being inside a cold hopeless little tin cylinder where nothing really changes. Maybe it’s the same for you too.

Oftentimes it really IS warmer outside than in! And then the warmth outside warms my core, so I then end up feeling warm inside as well.

In my house, my work room is like a tiny cell (albeit a tiny cell decorated with trinkets and memorabilia and pretty fabrics). I love having this tiny cell as my “Command Center.” It’s cozy in there, I know where all my stuff is and everything is in arm’s reach. Writing supplies, sewing supplies, art stuff. It’s easy to write or do other work without distractions. (This is also my sleeping room; I sleep on the floor on a lightweight mattress that I fold up and stash against the wall in the daytime.)

But if I stay cloistered in there too much, I miss out on sunsets, moonrises, neighborhood sights and sounds, and this warm light that coming through my south-facing big living-room window right now, where I am sitting on the sofa typing this. In the warmth of the sunny window, I can feel myself getting physically warm almost to the point of needing to take off a layer!

All of this is to say: If you’re feeling chilly, try stepping out of your house. It may be warmer outside than in! (Note, if you are in a place where it’s freezing outside, I encourage you to only take my advice metaphorically! Unless you get energized by stepping out into the cold, in which case have at it! Sometimes I enjoy that too.)

Be encouraged. No matter how outnumbered or isolated you might feel, someone out there is working for the same things you are. In all probability many someones; more someones than you can imagine. Reach out and find them. (And if you don’t seem to be finding them and would like some assistance, I will help you find them.)

Further Exploration:

• The Nature of Cities festival: “TNOC Festival pushes boundaries to radically imagine our cities for the future. A virtual festival that spans 5 days with programming across all regional time zones and provided in multiple languages. TNOC Festival offers us the ability to truly connect local place and ideas on a global scale for a much broader perspective and participation than any one physical meeting in any one city could ever have achieved. The TNOC festival will take place from 22-26 February 2021.” (It’s amazing so far! Note, the Chrome browser is needed in order to participate in the field trips and virtual networking room. I don’t have Chrome and cannot download it (incompatible with my computer or something), but am finding TNOC very worthwhile even just for the plenary sessions of which there have been two so far today. It’s definitely a nice complement to the Transformative Adventures PDC, as well as other excellent webinars I’ve attended over the past year. So many people all over the world are putting their hearts, brains, and muscles into healing the divide between humans and nature, repairing the damage we’ve done, and creating truly wonderful places. Go Team!! We are all in this together.)

Many people want to be able to embark on a self-employed sustainable livelihood. However, many feel afraid to quit their rat-race jobs because they don’t want to lose their health insurance. The following post is my attenpt to address that elephant in the room, and hopefully to help some of you feel more able to “make the leap” to your self-employed right livelihood of choice. Be it teaching, childcare, eco-friendly laundry service, regenerative landscaping, farming, art, making yogurt, starting a neighborhood composting business, sewing, carpentry, bicycle repair, community event planning, singing/songwriting, publicity, journalism, or whatever your passion that meets a real need in the world. (Note: This is a USA-centered post but may be relevant to folks in other countries also.)

What’s missing from a lot of the discussions on this topic is that self-employed people can in fact get health insurance coverage under the Affordable Care Act. My understanding is a person just needs to have Adjustable Gross Income of 13k or more to qualify (Actually I just read the minumum for 2021 is $12,760). For many self-employed people, this is very do-able. And at that minimum AGI, my understanding is that the premium is very low, maybe $10 or $20 per month (but this can vary by state).

I’m self-employed and don’t have health insurance – do not meet the income requirement to qualify. (My adjusted gross income is too low.)

As a person with anarchist leanings politically, for a long time I was hesitant to even think about getting subsidized insurance (or recommending it to others). Like, if my state (Florida) had expanded Medicaid, I would have felt guilty about being on it, because I’m a privileged person who chose to drop out of the middle class, and burned most of my bridges to middle-class income.

But over time, my thinking has shifted.

1) The crisis in our healthcare system has mainly been caused by government and insurance companies, so for now at least, government and insurance companies will need to be part of the solution.

2) It is in the interest of the collective public health for each individual to have access to affordable healthcare, not be at risk for losing the roof over their head any time they get sick.

And moreover, 3) My work as a self-employed sustainability educator is a worthwhile contribution to society, despite the fact that I have not yet consistently reached my target annual income of 13k.

So I am now tentatively recommending that folks who are trying to muster the courage to quit their jobs and pursue their dream sustainable/permaculture self-employed right livelihood, do so, bearing in mind that all you need is less than 13k AGI to qualify for insurance. With the 12k standard IRS deduction that should mean you only need to gross 25k a year to be able to get your health insurance premium fully covered. (My AGI for the past few years has generally hovered around 5k to 10k, but i am aiming for 13k.) I am not 100% certain about this but it is to the the best of my current knowledge and research.

One friend who is thinking along similar lines says her understanding is that a person’s gross income doesn’t have to reach $25,000 to meet the approximately $13,000 AGI threshold necessary for ACA Marketplace insurance. Her understanding is that a person obtaining health insurance through the marketplace simply needs a gross (not net) income of $13,000. I will update you with any more definitive info I find.

Another key point: People with kids may have higher premiums. I had been assuming that children would come under some sort of state or federal coverage — they do even in my home state of Florida, which is not known for such socially minded things. I will comment more on this essential aspect of coverage for kids as I find out more.

So there you have it. Encouragement to pursue self-employed right livelihood that will fulfill you while also enriching your community and helping to build a greener, saner world! If you want more encouragement, I strongly suggest you join the Transformative Adventures group on Facebook. Hope to see you over there! It’s a nurturing pod and an inspiring incubator!

Oh, and a final note from me: Never forget that health insurance is not synonymous with actual health care. Though the latter term often gets used when what’s meant is “insurance,” it’s good to remember they are two different things.

Further Exploration:

FI Healthcare (“Healthcare Options, Explained — For Those Pursuing Financial Freedom”): “It’s time for the FI/RE movement to come together to help each other figure out health care options in early (or semi) retirement. No, it’s not the most glamorous topic, but this site was developed for those who believe it is time to come together with a united purpose of making health care options better understood – now, that’s what we call exciting.”

2021 Obamacare Subsidy Chart & Calculator (healthcareinsider.com): Subsidy calculator tool lets you input your ZIP code etc.

Harnessing Healthcare (Facebook group for health-insurance-related info).

A lot of what I’m saying here is too late to help those of you who motivated this post — my Texan friends and colleagues who are dealing with electricity outages and water shutoffs precipitated by an extended period of record-breaking cold temperatures and snow. I am very sorry I did not have the foresight to write this up before, when the weather forecasts first came out and it might have helped more people. Sometimes I tend to think that if I know something, it must be obvious to everyone.

(Lesson for each and every one of you, as well as a reminder to myself: Don’t sell your knowledge short! You too have valuable skills and info you may be taking for granted. Share it. If it might help even one person, it’s worth sharing.)

Unfortunately much of this may be too late to do my friends in Texas any good right now, but I’m sharing this for future reference. It’s good disaster-preparedness information and can help you anytime you’re hit with an extended electricity outage, and/or extended water shutoff. Many experts predict, and I agree, that we’re only going to be seeing more extreme weather as time goes by.

The following tips can be useful in hurricanes, floods, droughts, and other extreme weather, as well as the current deadly cold spell in Texas. Being always prepared for disaster can make the difference between mere inconvenience and brutal hardship.

Emergency Water:

The following tips on water are a combination of my own experience, research, and tips from friends including a home-renovation contractor.

Although I am not a fan of bottled water (for many reasons), I am hoping most people have some stockpiled, because otherwise I don’t know how people are supposed to get water right now when the water is shut off, or how you are supposed to boil water when the power is out (and you don’t have a gas stove). My best advice regarding this is, if you do have stockpiled bottled water, share with your neighbors to the extent that you are able. I mean go around knocking on neighbors’ doors giving out water if you can. And if you have no drinking water, knock on a neighbor’s door and ask if they can spare some. Really I apologize that this is the best advice I can offer right now; I should have thought to make this post a week ago when it might have helped more people prepare. Fortunately, by now at least some people have been able to clear the ice and snow off their cars (those who have cars) and venture out to stores (those stores that are open, and have water in stock), so that should help to a degree.

Now, looking beyond the immediate crisis: It’s pretty easy to keep enough drinking water on hand for emergency purposes. Allow a minimum 64 ounces (the oft-cited “eight 8-ounce glasses”) per adult per day just for drinking. That’s a half-gallon. A gallon per person per day should be enough to cover tooth-brushing and even wetting a corner of a face-cloth to freshen yourself up (helpful for morale).

So if you are a household of one, 7 gallons will get you through a week; 14 gallons will get you through two weeks. For a household of four, that’s 28 gallons and 56 gallons. In the future, once the water is back on: To store energency drinking water, you could fill one-gallon jugs from your tap, or fill yourself a few of those rugged plastic containers of the type that water-delivery services use; those are about 6 gallons. This can take up a lot of space in a small apartment or trailer but beats the alternative of not having safe drinking water on hand.

My own water storage is mostly outdoors: rainbarrels. I have instant access to about 400 gallons of fresh water, which I can filter as needed but I know at least that it is not affected if the city water pipes burst, city water system gets contaminated, etc. A few years back, in the aftermath of a hurricane, our water was out for a couple of days, and even with the one 40-gallon barrel that was all I had back then, I was able to provide neighbors with emergency cooking water along with having enough for myself.

Right now, my friends in Austin are being advised to boil their drinking water because of potential contamination from burst pipes. And such boil-water notices are not uncommon during hurricanes and other weather disasters also. And during an extreme drought, someday there might not even be water coming through that tap at all. Anyone who knew to keep emergency drinking-water supplies on hand is having one less hardship to deal with. This boil-water notice is especially grave right now because many households are without electric power, and have electric stoves rather than gas, and therefore have no easy way to boil water.

During times of extreme cold, when pipes can freeze and burst, I suggest preemptively shutting your water off at the street (or consult with your apartment landlord and fellow residents, if you live in an apartment building), and opening up your taps to drain the pipes and get some air in there to help keep them from bursting. I don’t know if this is 100% protection against pipes bursting but from everything I have heard and read, it’s a pretty safe bet. Be sure to open your outdoor tap(s) too. (If there’s a hose attached, I would detach and drain the hose; use the water to give plants in your yard an extra drink).

What about showers? If it’s bitter cold, you probably won’t want a shower anyway. But if you’re reading this and your disaster doesn’t involve cold weather, you might well crave a shower. But, you can get by for a few days without it. You might be uncomfortable but you will be OK. Your daily 1-gallon water allowance should be enough for a very minimalist washcloth-dampening sponge-bath, which helps a lot. Even just wetting and wiping your face can be remarkably refreshing. A drop of essential oil on the cloth, in your favorite refreshing fragrance, helps a lot.

But what about the toilet? In Austin, with the power outage some people’s houses are so cold I’ve heard reports of water freezing in toilet bowls. In a situation of extreme cold coupled with electricity outage, along with opening the taps as above, I would flush the toilet so there’s no water in the bowl or tank.

But then how do you pee and poop? Read on.

Emergency Bucket Toilet:

The following is based on my experience at permaculture gatherings, eco farms, festivals, and elsewhere where compost toilets were used. Here, I’m assuming most of you teading this have no experience with compost toilets, and I am adapting my tips for just “emergency waste management & disposal” purposes, not composting humanure per se. If you want to learn about compost toilets, I highly recommend The Humanure Handbook by Joe Jenkins. (I am a strong advocate of compost toilets; they are easy to use and I give info about them in my book and elsewhere on this blog. But for the moment, I’m just trying to help you get through the current emergency.)

Some of my friends in Texas are bringing snow indoors to melt as toilet-flush water. This is a viable strategy as long as your pipes aren’t frozen and burst, and as long as the temperature inside your house is warm enough to melt snow — both of which are not the case in many households I know right now. The emergency bucket toilet removes the need for flush-water.

In a nutshell: Poop in a bucket. Five-gallon lidded buckets are ideal; they’re a good size and a comfortable height. But a smaller bucket like a kitty-litter bucket will do. If you have a portable camp toilet, which has a removable mini-tank that’s designed to easily empty into your regular flush toilet (once your regular flush toilet is working again), even better. But I’m assuming most folks reading this right now don’t have one of those.

If you can pee outside rather than in the bucket, do so (on top of a pile of leaves or wood chips is good, or on the mulched area by a tree). As much as possible, save the emergency bucket for just pooping. If you have to pee in the bucket that’s OK, but the less you pee in the bucket, the more days of use you get, and the less smell.

If you have sawdust or partially decayed leaves on hand, put some in the bottom of the bucket as a starter layer. Newspaper or cardboard will work too. After each poop, cover your poop with a layer of sawdust, decaying leaves, dried grass clippings, or if you don’t have any of those, then newspaper or cardboard. Tear the paper or cardboard into small pieces. Newspaper can be crumpled into balls. One bucket should be enough to last one person one week or even longer. The purpose of the cover material is to absorb as much moisture as possible, and minimize odor. (Dead leaf matter, newspaper, and other aforementioned materials are high in carbon, which balances out the high nitrogen content of poop and urine. This cuts the odor and also breaks down the waste.)

After a bucket gets filled, start another bucket.

Disposal: Basically this is a giant version of a pet poop bag, with leaves or sawdust or whatever mixed in. Note, I am only advocating this as a last-resort emergency measure. If your toilet is frozen or your pipes are burst, you have a bona fide emergency. If you have those thick plastic garbage bags, those should suffice for disposal. You can even make your disposal task easier in advance by using plastic garbage bag as bucket liner. (Or line the bucket with a paper bag if that’s what you have.)

I know all this might sound foreign and yucky to the uninitiated, but the alternative is a lot yuckier, as people who have had sewage back up into their house when the municipal infrastructure malfunctions (such as during a long heavy rain) are all too aware. Anyway, most of us have dealt with our pets’ or kids’ poop, so the emergency bucket toilet shouldn’t be too onerous.

For the Long Term:

• Water: Collect rainwater. Even one 50-gallon barrel can give your household an emergency drinking-water supply for a week or two. Gutters and downspouts make rainwater collection faster and more efficient. But if you don’t have them, no problem; just put a barrel underneath an edge of your roof where the rain drips off. (If your roof has valleys, position the barrel underneath a valley; it’ll fill up even faster.)

Rainbarrels can freeze solid; I recommend using up the water before you think a long hard freeze is coming. Or if the barrel is just partially full just leave the lid off or loose so the freezing water can expand without cracking the barrel. I have had some plastic rainbarrels warp, or the bottoms poof out and become rounded rather than flat, during a long hard freeze, but they snapped back to normal after thecweather thawed.

To filter the water, a Brita filter or Berkey filter is a good investment. Personally, I have oftentimes used unfiltered rainwater for both drinking and cooking, but I would encourage folks to invest in a filter. For the DIY-minded, you can even make your own water filter using sand and pebbles. (YouTube videos and written tutorials abound; I will look for a good one and post it here.)

• Toilet: Invest in a camp toilet (or several, maybe one for each household member). The kind that you empty into a regular toilet (once things are back to normal) is handy. Portable toilets are handy to have in general; they’re great, for example, when you have houseguests and you don’t want a lot of people to have to share one bathroom. You can give the “real” bathroom to the guests, and use the portable toilet yourself, and empty it after your guests are gone.

Read up on compost toilets and, if regulations in your area allow, start turning your “waste” into black gold. If regulations in your area don’t allow, get with likeminded people and look into getting the regulations changed. These days with all the hurricanes, floods, and other disasters hitting our conventional water and sewer systems, you might find more likeminded people, even within the ranks of your own local government.

A New Normal

Unfortunately, extreme weather events are only likely to intensify in the coming years. And in many places, government and infrastructure are simply not equipped to cope with these historically unprecedented events. Our best hope is to fortify ourselves with simple, low-tech measures for maximizing household and community resilience. A rainbarrel and a poop bucket could make life a lot easier for you.

These tips I’ve offered for getting yourself and your community through severe weather are also tips that’ll help you save money and resources, and have more peace of mind.

If I’ve left anything out, or if anything is unclear, please get in touch. 512-619-5363 voice or text. You can contact me at any hour of the day; if I’m asleep or in a meeting or something I will get back to you as soon as possible. Also please feel free to contact me after the immediate crisis is over, and I will be happy to help you get your long-range plans and systems in place. I offer this as a free service, paying-forward the permaculture knowledge and other skills I have been privileged to be able to afford the time and money to learn and practice.

Further Exploration:

• “Experts: Deadly Storms To Endure; Cracks in preparedness exposed by winter’s fury” (Associated Press article by Matthew Daly and Ellen Knickmeyer; published in Daytona Beach News-Journal Feb 19, 2021). “Deadly weather will be hitting the U.S. more often, and America needs to get better at dealing with it, experts said as Texas and other states battled winter storms that blew past the worst-case planning of utilities, governments and millions of shivering people. This week’s storms, with more still heading east, fit a pattern of worsening extremes under climate change and demonstrate anew that local, state and federal officials have failed to do nearly enough to prepare for greater and more dangerous weather, experts say.”

• Candles as emergency fuel for cooking, lighting, heating (The Provident Prepper). I forgot to mention candles! My house is full of candles for emergency light, heating, and cooking. This article by the Provident Prepper offers some good detailed info on which types of candles have the longest burn times etc. (The improvised tea-light stove and oven she talks about seem like they’d be good in a pinch, though they need a lot of candles. I have heard about people being able to boil water and even cook food using just a single candle underneath an upside-down institutional-size tomato can that has an air opening cut into it; will post link if I can find one.)

• Oh! Speaking of candles, here’s another good thing I forgot about: “Buddy Burners.” It’s an old trick from Boy Scouts. Fill an empty tuna can with a roll of cardboard and pour melted wax in there. One of these can supposedly provide an hour to an hour and a half of cooking time. I’m going to make some of these and add them to my preparedness kit. (Great use for old candles that have lost their effectiveness and become just huge chunks of wax because the wicks got buried or weren’t made properly. I have several of these old candles.)