Author: jennynazak

Doing a tour tomorrow for Ormond-Flagler Permaculture Group & friends. Making an outline.

Starshine House / Trailhead 501 tour

This house is the tangible embodiment of a manifesto I’ve developed over the years regarding money, occupational freedom, community, and life.

A physical hub for Daytona Beach Permaculture Guild

Permaculture design principles: Mollison book, Holmgren book

A bit about me, my background. How I came to study Permaculture.

Categories of basic human needs: food; water; shelter; transportation; energy; community. A lot of people focus on food because of course it’s important. I mean, we all have to eat. But by focusing on food and the nuclear household, at the expense of all else, we create massive energy drains and also cognitive drains.

Also: A pattern language, Last child in the woods, TEK indigenous wisdom, Vanilla Beans, Iban of Sarawak etc. Sharon Astyk, Riot for Austerity. Homegrown national park. The Non-Consumer Advocate group 152.8k members!

House has 2 missions/purposes: 1) experimental lab for low-footprint living; 2) support people in disengaging from conventional economy, dependence on “a job.”

Ecological urgency; economic hardships; outages from increasingly severe weather + disasters

Living/visiting here

Creative and occupational freedom. Right livelihood; “reduce your need to earn”. Creating a tiny wedge to spring ourselves.

Importance of joy & creativity

Examples of potential livelihoods/income streams from this one tiny 1/10 acre

Hurricane evac of 2017. I had presold enough copies of my book to make the rent, so I used my phone to send the PDF to the people who had ordered the book. This was in a room where I was staying at a friend’s house for hurricane evac.

Eric Brown author. To experience abundance, “crush” at least one of the categories. Transportation, housing, food, health costs, debt.

Porous property: Little Free Library, benches etc

Mini reading room

Passive cooling & heating. Trade-offs between shade, airflow, privacy. Noise buffer and light buffer etc.

Offering a counter alternative to violent and intrusive landscaping. “Neatness disease.” GROW FOOD. Also learn what grows wild locally. Free food and medicine. Try to get people to see the value in growing and foraging food. Local passionfruit vine, loquat trees etc. Beachside ecosystem. Oaks, saw palmetto, etc. Rebuild the sponge and buffer. Promote the beauty of traditional saw palmetto yard along the beach where you can barely see the house.

Also: food desert cuisine. Learn to make something with what’s available in walking distance.

Solar cooking, retained-heat cooking (haybox), twig-fired stove etc.

Preparing a basic hurricane toilet kit.

Rainwater harvesting. Brad Lancaster etc. “Minimum Viable Product” concept from entrepreneur/startup community. Every single place I’ve lived from desert to semi tropics has the same issues, flooding plus drought.

Work (manual tasks such as scooping water out of barrels etc.) “Obtain a yield.”

Laundry – a whole subject right there. And dishes and other traditional conventional housework tasks that can take over a person’s life and suck resources.

Move many tasks outdoors. Laundry, dishes, etc. Hand-wash stations also can be used for rinsing toothbrush after brushing teeth.

Reducing/eliminating: corporate detergents, purpose-specific household cleaning products, shampoos. Use homemade or local.

Occupations that wouldn’t be a full job in the conventional economy but support a household. And potentially enable home-based livelihoods. Clothespins & corks; keeping machines in repair.

Exploring patterns for house-sharing. Flexible stay, visitors, longterm residents. Some useful simple protocols for sharing space. Small areas for private space; most areas are common-use.

Collapse-awareness vs doomerism — Parallels with end-of-life Doula practice; hospice

Collapse is now. When does it become not a dress rehearsal anymore. When we recognize it now and choose to engage.

Practicing doing without things. Making it real.

Being local, neighborhood-based

Permaculture as a decolonization movement

Centralized top-down systems are not easing up. If anything many are doubling down. An adaptive response is to keep building our own parallel systems that reduce our dependence on the main systems and minimize feeding them. Reducing dependence on electricity & personal automobile is huge.

Withhold our labor and purchasing power from corrupt, unhealthy, harmful systems. This is a group task and one that we must help everybody navigate. No person left behind. What we do with our wealth and our labor is of paramount importance.

Special manifesto for fellow Boomers & older. On sharing intergenerational wealth.

Stocks and flows. Too much stock equals hoarding and spoilage. Design & utilize flows.

Definition of a civilized society. Superior culture. I would say a superior culture is one that loves and values and takes care of all of its members.

Use your talents, humor, creativity. So many things you know and are good at — all needed front and center. Community resilience.

When we really simplify, we can end up having what seems like a lot of time. Like maybe even an abnormal unhealthy amount of time on one’s hands. But I think this reaction is an artifact of our hyper-busy culture. There is value in sitting with the stillness and seeing what emerges. Or even just noticing that you can’t deal with stillness. If that happens, notice what your impulse is. What do you try to replace that stillness with. Reinforcing the sense of abnormality is that the world around us is still going on about its fast-paced frantic motions. This is another reason why it’s important to find likeminded people, even if it’s only online at first. Don’t worry, you’ll start finding them in real life too if you haven’t already. By showing up and stepping into an alternative way of being, we set an example and create space for others.

While learning to slow down and live quieter, we can also at the same time be using our freed up time and energy as a surplus to benefit our communities. “Share surplus.”

Action steps/movements. Riot for Austerity. Homegrown national park. The Non-Consumer Advocate group 152.8k members! Bryan Hummel – beaver biomimicry, sponge-building. Chris Searles trickle-watering experiments. Aprovecho Technology center; Kerr-Cole sustainability center.

Fiz Harwood – Solomon Islanders. Amazon tribesman “I store meat in the belly of my brother.” Flows vs stocks. Everything is perishable — even money, that thing we invented to surmount perishability. There’s more resilience in building flows.

Being community guardians/nurturers and agents of change, while at the same time relinquishing and letting go of control in more & more ways.

(for choosing to live without air conditioning)

My response to the permie friend who posted this:

Not really, I’ve just done various passive retrofits for shade etc. Basic stuff. Lived without AC in Texas also.

I also don’t like feeling trapped in a shut-up house, and having high electric bills.

And I don’t like seeing people held hostage by the power companies, so i try to share DIY low-tech stuff.

Visitors have commented on how (relatively) cool it is inside the house.

And of course humans lived without AC for millennia. It’s too bad our “modern” houses are actually so primitive, in terms of not being very adapted to the prevailing climate. We can retrofit, though.

Also (added later):

We never had AC in school when I was a kid in the 60s and 70s. Never had it in college dorms or classrooms, even.

Grandparents’ houses had no AC. And their houses and yards and surrounding neighborhoods were a kids’ paradise.

When I was young and skinny, I got cold really easily. After menopause I gained a very large amount of weight. So i do feel the heat more. I don’t care; I would rather incorporate that into my liberation experiments than endure life with AC.

(Like most people, on a super hot day I can certainly enjoy a bit of AC by going to see a movie or going to the public library!)

From talking to people and from my own experience, I noticed the body seems to have a set temperature envelope that moves up and down according to the season and place. So, for example, I’m a person living without AC who almost needs a sweater when the temperature drops to 78. (Once winter comes, my temperature envelope adjusts accordingly.)

NOTE this is not meant to shame people who depend on AC. There are many reasons why people have come to depend on AC. Part of my work is pushing for a return to more ecologically oriented building designs. As in more oriented toward the prevailing weather of each place. This is an area of Permaculture design that sometimes gets overlooked but it’s very huge and exciting.

Another, trickier factor in AC dependence: We can’t overlook people’s health issues, many of which are caused by hyper-industrialized capitalist culture. Unreasonable job conditions, vast climate-controlled mega-stores, and such keep people stuck indoors for huge chunks of their lives, and then they can’t handle the ambient temperature of their place.

Yet, it’s often very possible to live without AC (or at least get by with a lot less) if you have a properly designed building or some good retrofits. Window shades, awnings, trellises, etc.

And TREES.

Oh — Another trick that I sometimes forget to mention is that at some points of the day, outside is cooler than inside! If you can manage to create an outdoor screened structure, it can be a real asset. Or if your area doesn’t have many mosquitoes you could just go on the roof or sit on the porch even if you don’t have a screen.

And before anyone says try that in Florida … i live in Florida! And before anyone says try that inland and not on the ocean … I’ve done that also.

PS. And YES, it is hot! It’s summer! That’s how summer works, especially in Florida. To conserve money and fuel, the best approach is to cool the person rather than to cool the air. Everyone has a different comfort zone anyway, so in a given building, different occupants will be having different levels of comfort. Better to work on cooling your own body appropriately. With iced drinks etc. Also in an open-air house, you will quickly notice the warm spots and cool spots of the house. And the locations will change at different times of day. Hang out where it feels best!

It’s about shade, and airflow. By the way, I’ve experienced, and other people have told me too, that sometimes it’s cooler to let the air flow in naturally than to have a mechanized fan blowing air. But there are ways to position a fan to enhance airflow rather than impede it.

Another motivating factor in my choice to do without AC is that we are frying the planet by trying to forced-air cool the entire insides of our buildings. Making the streets hotter, and increasing misery for people who don’t have access to the same level of artificial cooling. And then it becomes a vicious cycle, as people just want to hibernate indoors because “it’s so hot outside.”

Further Exploration:

• Passive cooling (Wikipedia): “Passive cooling is a building design approach that focuses on heat gain control and heat dissipation in a building in order to improve the indoor thermal comfort with low or no energy consumption. … This approach works either by preventing heat from entering the interior (heat gain prevention) or by removing heat from the building (natural cooling) … ” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_cooling

• Passive design architecture examples around the world 2025 (by Saumya Verma; Novatr): “This article will explain passive design, what principles passive building design follows, passive design solutions and provide examples of passive design architecture from around the globe.” https://www.novatr.com/blog/passive-design-architecture-examples

• Want more? There’s so much! Search for terms like passive cooling, indigenous natural building, vernacular architecture in hot humid climates, and so on! If you want to know how to stay cool in your prevailing climate, search for how people in other times and places with similar climates have done it. It’s great, now we have access to building wisdom from throughout history and all over the world!

A question I hear a lot from people, second-guessing themselves and not trusting their gut. And I can relate, have been there, surely will be there again.

Most recently someone from my wider Facebookland circles posted this question. I don’t even know what her situation is but I already know her reaction is appropriate. It’s just that we’re steeped in a society that’s out of balance.

I commented:

The real question is why does society succeed in getting so many people to dumb themselves down and check out emotionally. You sound like you are reacting appropriately to the intensity of the actual situation.

(If the above helps, please feel free to take it as applying to you as well, whatever you’re navigating!)

In permaculture, one of the site design concepts we talk about is sectors. This is anywhere on a site where something comes in (or comes near enough to be an influence). Could be water, noise, sunlight, wind, streetlights, foot traffic, car traffic what have you. Everything has a use; nothing is ever only bad and there are trade-offs. Design creativity makes all the difference. The willingness to see all incoming elements as the resources that they are. (An organization can be a “site” too BTW.)

At our low-footprint-living laboratory, the sun has two personas:

• a fierce, ruthless, blistering death-star that we must constantly buffer our living spaces from;

and

• a beautiful, clean, free energy source for cooking food, sterilizing tools & cloths, drying laundry, keeping phones charged during outages, and much more! Including of course being the source of food for all the beautiful plants who grow here. Yes, photosynthesis is happening all around us and isn’t that a lovely thing!

See pix here on my DEEP GREEN book by jenny nazak Facebook page.

BTW my solar panel charging experiment yesterday, using the roof of the sea-grape arbor, didn’t work; no matter how i tried tweaking the position it never got up much wattage. Now I’ve plunked it in the middle of the sidewalk and am keeping an eye out to avoid inconveniencing people who need the sidewalk to get from point A to point B.

Charging-station using micro solar panel!

The fountain success (previous post) led me to rig up a little charging-station inside the sea-grape arbor, with the mini solar panel.

I had never put the panel up there on the roof of the sea-grape arbor before, or thought to make a little charging-station.

But when the fountain pump stopped, I realized the generator needed to be recharged and voilà it occurred to me to just try to charge it right here. (Usually I charge it out at the solar-oven platform by the sidewalk.)

As an unexpected bonus, by Murphy’s law, since I was wanting sun for the recharge, the sky clouded up and it just now started sprinkling. That’s actually fine with me, I’ll be happy to take a few clouds and raindrops — there will always be more sun later to recharge the generator!

Instant rooftoop micro solar!! Photos here.

That’s the great thing about deciding to turn one’s house into a permaculture guild headquarters and low-footprint-living laboratory: New possibilities always just pop up around the corner of every moment. That’s how our human minds work, when we can manage to allow ourselves to get out in nature and let ourselves be creative in the flow.

*Update: My solar panel charging experiment yesterday, using the roof of the sea-grape arbor, didn’t work; no matter how i tried tweaking the position it never got up much wattage. Now I’ve stuck it in the middle of the sidewalk and am keeping an eye out to avoid inconveniencing people who need the sidewalk to get from point A to point B.

Goals!!! Wooooottttt!

Hey! One of my crazy experiments actually worked. I have never had one of these fountain things, But I put in an order to the curbside goddess to manifest a fountain or mini pond and look what happened! Within a matter of maybe a week or so, a near neighbor stuck one out by the curb in front of their house.

The little pump is powered by AC current, which we don’t have an electric outlet outside, but my tiny little generator that we use for keeping phones charged during outages has an AC plug and it’s working great.

i’ve never known how much electricity these things used, but the sticker on the bottom said 120 V AC and 0.23 A, which if you multiply the volts times the amps you get the wattage which is under 30 watts! Not too much of an extravagance for a couple or a few hours a day.

This is a little bit of a mental/emotional win for me because in the past, after securing my wish from the curbside goddess, I would’ve just procrastinated forever on every single step of this, and this little curbside manifestation gem might have sat somewhere in a forlorn location in my yard until I gave up and stuck it back out at the curb for someone else to take yada yada. Thereby perpetuating the cycle. Instead I am breaking the cycle ha ha!

I said to myself, look, the worst that can happen is it doesn’t work, right? Also even if any part of it doesn’t work, things can often be fixed by cleaning.

And also, this cute object can just be a nice decoration even without any water or electricity. Yard decor in my little Sea Grape arbor — AKA the “faery squat” as one friend calls it!

BTW the little generator I’m using to power the pump is recharged by solar panel or shore power, and there are many similar brands commonly available.

This one is a 200 W generator which is enough for anything we need during a power outage — basically, charging our phones and maybe making a little smoothie with the mini blender ha ha. Priorities!

By the way, when my innocent civilian housemates or neighbors witnessing my various activities (ferrying jugs of rainwater here and there etc.) ask what I’m up to, I will often say “Ohhhh, just a little ‘spairmint!! If it goes well you’ll hear all about it — and otherwise I take the secret all the way to the grave!”

Just joking though, as I tend to keep iterating my processes until something works. And I also recognize that there’s value in reporting when things don’t quite work. And on some occasions I will actually decide to scrap a micro mission in order to use various energies more wisely elsewhere. Really tickled that this one is working though!

See pics here (for as long as infrastructure and the will of various tech bro’s shall allow haha).

Tasks around the house can feel drudgey and Sisyphean. Some big ones that come to mind are constantly trimming back vegetation, constantly dealing with laundry and dishes, managing water levels in rain-tubs, mending screens.

In a nature centered household where things are done mainly by hand and with DIY fixes rather than off the shelf store-bought stuff, tasks can feel exhausting unless we troubleshoot why this is.

Here are some factors that came to me:

• Having to do a task alone. Humans, even the introverts among us, are social animals. Big tasks such as large loads of laundry and dishes, are best done with friends and/or kids. And yes, the kids actually help! Or they’re just playing together nearby, which is helping you too. The modern capitalist society pattern, where each parent has to watch their kids in solitude — and hope the kids will let them alone long enough so they can maybe put in a load of laundry etc. — is just exhausting.

• Always being the one who has to do a certain task. Unless it’s your specialty that you love, and you have an agreed-upon division of labor, this is a quick recipe for burnout.

• Living with people who are fundamentally not aligned with your values. Of course, household members will always have different priorities, but ideally everyone can at least find alignment around a shared set of basic values.

• Not connecting the task with collective/community goals. If it feels like you’re only doing something for yourself or your immediate household, that’s not always a powerful enough motive. At least for myself, I find it easier to be diligent with tasks if I also see them as gathering data and improving processes for the collective good.

• Not obtaining a yield. When I say yield, I mean a benefit beyond just “this task is done.” For example, constantly trimming back vines can just feel so drudgey and relentless, unless I am thinking of it also as gaining a benefit such as harvesting basket-weaving materials, opening up areas of air circulation, opening up areas of sun for fruit trees, etc. Sweeping and mopping is a daily thing, but I usually don’t mind it because I enjoy the opportunity to exercise and stretch certain muscles that only get worked from sweeping in mopping. It’s also an opportunity to introduce pleasant scents to the house via essential oils. Mending towels and washcloths can be a pleasant meditative task and allows me to practice different types of stitchery.

• Having to work a “regular job.” By which I mean a job in the mainstream economy, 40+ hours a week, particularly one outside the home with a commute. Many of us are finding our way out of the stranglehold of having to work such a job, and are trying to help others do the same. But while you’re in transition it’s just going to feel exhausting to have to work somewhere outside your home all day (this also includes working fulltime enriching someone else even though you’re working from home), and then basically have a day’s worth of work waiting for you back at your own house. Ideally we would all be able to make our livelihoods from our homes and neighborhoods (and/or work itinerantly / nomadically with few or no constant household chores).

• Being very project-oriented as opposed to process-oriented. In other words, wanting to do a task and have it be complete and stay done. As opposed to needing to keep being done on a daily or weekly basis. Many of us just don’t have a lot of patience with tasks that don’t stay done. But we can train ourselves to be more process-oriented; in other words, less focused on getting some sort of big result. More appreciative of the flow. I’m not sure, but I think that being project-oriented, and not patient with process and flow, may be an artifact of colonizer culture. And as we are learning, we can dismantle our colonialist programming.

• Feeling like you have to do it perfectly. This is definitely an artifact of colonialism / white supremacy culture. Perfectionism is one of the 15 pillars of white supremacy culture. Read about the 15 pillars here: https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/characteristics.html

• Your house and yard are too big for the number of people living there. Move to a smaller place; or add more people.

Is there anything else you can think of that makes tasks feel relentless and exhausting?

Housework, and our whole lives, need not and should not feel like a Sisyphean grind. Of course there will always be some tasks we like less than others. But there’s no reason why we can’t experience things mainly as an iterative playful flow; and take a childlike delight in our continuous and steady refinement of processes.