Author: jennynazak

“BS” is an abbreviation for a colloquialism which is not G-rated if spelled out. An alternative G-rated rendition would be “excrement of the male bovine.” And the term is popularly used to mean lies; falsehood; deception; fake; insincere; nonsense; something completely untrue; and so on. I believe it originates with USA American English though I could be wrong.

In any kind of organization, there are various essential and valuable roles. Perhaps one of the most essential and valuable is that of the person who is capable of detecting assorted forms of falsity and nonsense. A.k.a., BS detector.

This role may or may not overlap with formal roles in the organization. For example, your CEO could be really good in that role, but they are not particularly a good BS detector. Doesn’t matter as long as they are a leader who was able to recognize the person or people playing that role within the organization, and draw on their insights. Instead of feeling threatened by such insights.

This article is getting long-winded already. Long-windedness, by the way, is one commonly recognized indicator of potential BS, so one needs to be careful of getting too long-winded.

An organization can be a corporation, a nonprofit, a neighborhood association, a school faculty, a congregation, even just an informal group of friends, or a family. Basically a collection of people choosing to associate for the purposes of accomplishing tasks.

The BS detector is often very quick to be fired, either literally or metaphorically. This is because it’s not pleasant to hear BS exposed. Sometimes an organization is getting along very happily with its BS cushion, and the revelation of BS brings discomfort or even misery. On the other hand, the revelation and exposure of BS can bring such fresh air and liberation. If the organization is willing to work through it.

Oftentimes the BS detector person is seen as not a team player; not a helpful person; a contrarian; a difficult person. But a lot of the time those personality traits are actually just the persons allergy to be as manifesting itself. The person is basically saying hey listen, I can’t be with this BS. Obviously I love you guys enough to stick with you, and try to fix things, but if you’re not going to fix things, I’m going to have to leave.

Oftentimes, though, people are very happy to see them leave so they can get back to their peaceful organization. So the detector’s attempt to rid the organization of BS does not work.

But on some level, everyone feels the falsity and stiflement. An organization without BS detection capabilities may feel peaceful and effective (at least to its inner-circle members), but it’s not going to stay healthy in the long run. And it’s going to be squandering human energy, creativity, and other precious resources.

Now, if you happen to be the BS detector in a given situation or organization, here is a big pitfall: Typically, the BS detector does not want to leave the organization. The BS detector is committed to the organization’s mission, and/or feels some form of love and duty to the people in it. The BS detector wants the organization to get free of the stranglehold of BS, so that it can achieve its full greatness.

And when I say that the BS detector is readily fired, unfortunately it’s not a really clear-cut thing. It’s not like anyone will come to you and say you need to go. Rather, you can expect to experience all sorts of ostracism, usually very very low grade and petty, of the sort that will wear you down slowly and make you question your sanity and validity. I’m talking some unbelievably, fiercely, viciously petty stuff. And, as many of you know who have experienced it know, the little stings can be a lot harder to counter than an overt attack, because of plausible denial by often very socially and politically adept individuals.

So, if you really love an organization and are committed to it, and this has started happening, you need to take steps to guard your own emotional safety. Don’t wait for someone within the organization to validate your sense that this is happening. (Anyone who would agree with you is too busy trying to survive in the organization to be willing to admit to you out loud that they share your assessment.)

Just check the results of your bloodwork (if you get health checkups), your inner gut-check, or any other tests that you do to monitor your well-being.

And, you need to know when to cut your losses. Because if an organization just does not want to let go of its BS, there are almost certainly better uses for your heart, energy, and soul. Beware the occupational hazard. The medical consequences and emotional consequences of trying to ride out such malevolent weather can be quite deadly. Even if you consider yourself a person who handles stress well. Maybe even especially so.

As I was typing the title of this post, it struck me that “Don’t fire your BS detector” is true on an inner level as well. We each have our own little inner BS detector, although some of us have unfortunately managed to bludgeon it into silence over the years in order to get by in the world. We need to value and nurture our inner BS detector. Not fire it! No matter how stunted, wilted, pale and scrawny it may be, it can be nurtured back into life. Ways of doing so including spending time alone in nature, spending time with people who have their own robust BS detectors, and just spending time one or two people who truly, deeply love us and get us (although it can be hard to identify such people, if our BS detector is broken — thus creating a vicious circle).

If you are tempted to fire your inner BS detector so you can get on with the rosy business of clinging to the fruits of blissful ignorance (be it a little bubble of popularity, some crumbs of recognition, a 401(k), a nice-looking and only mildly abusive partner, or what have you), please reconsider. Much better things are in store for you if you are willing to face down BS within yourself.

I started making a little video tour of my house. It was inspired by a conversation with a friend who is navigating some life stuff, but also in general by so many things I’m seeing in this world, people being economically precarious.

And I really have to wonder sometimes if the art and loveliness that is deficient in / missing from this world nowadays is at least roughly correlated with the amount of precarity that people are experiencing and therefore being impeded from stretching, taking a full breath, using their voices, doing their art.

Although art and creativity almost certainly thrive on various forms of tension, some sort of stability, usually in the form of cheap housing, is extremely helpful or possibly even necessary I truly believe. Looking back at various housing situation’s I have been in and witnessed, and the amount of art and creativity that were able to grow there.

The people I see walking around adrift, some probably in need of mental-health services, some very seriously in need of same — for a long time now I have been wondering if a lot of them are the missing artists.

And also, too, I’ll see some guy out there wandering the streets or just sitting on the ground and think hey, back in the olden days he would just have been herding sheep or something, having a useful function, getting to be himself and be considered a member of society but not having to fit himself into a harsh mold he didn’t fit into.

Or what about all the missing rug weavers, mat weavers, basket weavers, roof thatchers. And I wonder if you drew a line for them on a graph, if it would run roughly parallel to the line representing “invasive grasses,” “yard waste,” etc.

My house tour videos, the couple that I’ve done so far anyway, are posted on my YouTube channel @jennynazak764 . Yeah, I don’t know why they put the 764 after my name, it used to just be my name, but then at some point it changed to have a 764 on the end. Maybe I committed some YouTube sin like be too obscure or something.

A few years back, I stumbled on an online course in behavioral economics. It sounded really interesting so I took it. I was definitely not disappointing. It was indeed very interesting and useful.

Behavioral economics is sort of a mix of economics and psychology. Basically, studying the reasons underlying why people do what they do.

Behavioral economics is applied by advertisers and marketers to feed the engines of consumerism, so people may well be inclined to mistrust this branch of social science. But it can just as easily be applied by beneficial social movements. And by us as individuals trying to motivate themselves to adopt beneficial actions and behaviors.

That’s one of the things I realized about this whole “deep green” thing I coined to sum up my book, blog, & other channels: It’s a behavioral-economics gig. Like, how do I motivate people to take some beneficial actions on behalf of the biosphere and on behalf of living things other than themselves?

How do I motivate people to see that they have a self-interest in taking certain actions and adopting certain behaviors, when doing so involves moving out of the comfy groove of established norms?

And, this applies to me motivating myself also.

If we think of it as behavioral economics, we can see that it’s a soft discipline as opposed to needing some sort of special equipment or hardware. Unless you consider our brain equipment and hardware, which actually yes I kind of do.

BTW, for those of you who may not be aware, online courses have existed for a very long time. Long before the pandemic shutdowns. Many prestigious universities offer free online courses known as MOOCs (Massively Open Online Course).

I guess it’s sort of the modern computerized version of what used to be called correspondence courses. Yes, back in the “old days,” people took courses by postal mail. There were correspondence courses in shorthand and other secretarial skills, and I imagine there were academic courses offered by mail as well. And definitely drawing, painting.

One of my takeaways from that course was the idea that the more times in a day that we are compelled to exercise our willpower, the more worn-down we get and the harder it is to exercise our willpower successfully by the end of the day. I guess that makes sense. If you think about what it’s like being on a diet, for example. Or trying to avoid single-use plastic without having to starve or go thirsty.

And add to that the fact that many of us in the Degrowth, Deep Adaptation, and related movements feel we are some sort of helpers/guides for some level of planetary biospheric hospice care. And just like with a hospice patient, we don’t know necessarily what stage of the end-of-life we are in. That kind of thing can wear on a person’s mind and heart. And we still have to keep a level head for the little daily stuff all around us.

Further Exploration:

• The behavioral-economics MOOC I took a few years back was titled something like “The science of irrational behavior.” It was offered via Duke University and the professor was Dan Ariely. Here in this article by Isabel Engel on CNBC.com, Ariely offers his top 4 money tips. You may find some overlap with your efforts to make daily living choices that are more ecologically aware. Especially the first two tips I find resonate very much. The novelty of new stuff wears off fast; and also we need to consider the future, not just the present.

• I can’t seem to find a reference to Ariely’s MOOC that I took, but he does have an extensive online presence, including a YouTube channel and writings.

• And here’s another Scooby snack for you, this one courtesy of Farnam Street blog. Dan Ariely on 10 irrational human behaviors.

• “Alienation Is a Losing Game: What Urbanists Can Learn From the Haters”. Article by Tristan Cleveland; cited in StrongTowns digest newsletter today. Talks about how we (activists etc.) often make the mistake of using speech that adds heat and divisiveness instead of being persuasive. Cleveland mentions three recently published books about changing minds. He also mentions Daryl Davis, the black jazz musician who convinced multiple KKK members to leave that organization. He did this by spending hours talking with them and listening with them. Links to this transcript of those conversations are included. So definitely some reading homework for me there!

• The three books Cleveland mentions in his article on StrongTowns are: How Minds Change (David McRaney); Think Again (Adam Grant); and How To Have Impossible Conversations (Peter Boghossian and James Lindsay). I haven’t read any of them, but they are all instantly bumped to the top of my nonfiction reading list.

Sunrise at the beach at the end of my street.
I somehow had not noticed until today, how contiguous the graffiti on the wall had gotten.

For liking the graffiti, I am some sort of traitor to the class I was supposedly born into. I’m supposed to not like the graffiti, I’m supposed to be appalled at the disruption of law and order, same as I’m supposed to be appalled at the number of people curled up sleeping in the parking lot.

I am saddened and appalled but not for the reasons that society says I should be. I’m supposed to want more of our tax money to go to “law and order.” Instead, I want people to have the right to sleep outdoors if that’s the only place they have to go and nothing better is being offered to them. Or, even if that’s not the case, I want people to have the right to sleep outdoors.

I’m supposed to think of graffiti as a “broken windows” crime. Instead, I am quietly celebrating feral self-expression; tiny scraps of human vitality that spring up unauthorized. Like the dune flowers who spring up amid the rocks, defying the feral-flower-assassin trucks that roll into my beach neighborhood with their tree-hearses and their straight-line noisemakers.

Update 2 days later: I was down there at the wall again this morning and some power-that-be had started painting white to cover the graffiti on the wall.

see pix here, on my art & design by jenny nazak page

It’s that time of year again, when friends start posting their “travel porn.” Yes, even fellow eco-activists can be quite the summer jetsetters. I am learning to just keep my mouth shut and not be a wet blanket on their social-media pages. It doesn’t help shift attitudes, and plus I just don’t want to be like that to my friends.

And yet I feel a deep heavy pain in my heart. It’s disconcerting and disheartening to see people in their 60s and 70s and beyond who express deep concern about climate and ecosystems, and who have traveled extensively in their younger days already, but are still taking annual vacation trips to Europe, cruises, and so on.

One way I handle it is to make posts on this blog and on my Facebook page, to try to educate and persuade people who are open to that. In that spirit, I googled “overtourism” and found a good article that mentions Santorini Island, one of the most picturesque places I’ve ever not seen in person.

https://worldcrunch.com/food-travel/santorini-overtourism

(“Santorini To Machu Picchu To Mount Everest — The War Against Over-Tourism Is On”; article in Worldcrunch.com Feb 16, 2024; by Marine Béguin)

“Environmental damage, deteriorating cities, overcrowding, rising prices and an impediment to local people’s way of life are all consequences of international mass tourism.”

This theme of overtourism even shows up in fiction. For example, a series of novels set in Venice, the Commissario Brunetti detective-story series by Donna Leon. (I fell in love with this series in the process of doing armchair tourism, specifically, finding ways to experience Venice without the footprint of travel.)

As Commissario Brunetti of the Venice Police walks around his ancient beautiful city solving crime (and never forgetting to admire the cathedrals and other architecture), he often ruminates on not being able to find real shops because everything’s gone over to tourism. And observes the thousands of tourists getting disgorged from the cruise ships with their noisy wheeled luggage.

From the article linked above: “As one of Europe’s most popular destination for tourists, Venice has seen its population move away and abandon their houses due to rising prices, flash floods and rising water levels but above all the invasion of international tourists, which sometimes amount to twice the cities’ inhabitants.”

The article talks about efforts being made in various over-touristed places to mitigate the impacts:

“In response, many touristic localities are taking this issue head-on by implementing innovative strategies to combat the negative effects of excessive tourism. These initiatives aim to protect the environment, preserve local culture, and ensure the long-term sustainability of these cherished locations.”

We can also teach ourselves to find the remarkable beauty and richness that are everywhere around us, and celebrate the culture and nature of our own local places as deeply as we yearn after the more famous beauties in distant lands.

We can also take the invitation to reflect on our own lives, and consider what it is that we feel we need a vacation from.

As I talk about in my book and blog, Travel in my younger years was very formative and deeply meaningful for me. And I cannot point-blank tell people not to travel; can’t tell people to forgo the deep learning and inner enrichment that happens with travel. But I can plead, for those of us who are older and have gotten to travel in our younger years, to exercise some voluntary self-restraint and maybe take a no-fly pledge.

Of course it can happen that with travel, the same way as with any luscious food, no amount ever feels like enough. Some people might even be unconsciously playing out a planetary grief/trauma response that’s taking the form of extreme compulsive travel consumerism. You know, a sort of last-gasp, last-hurrah, “party like it’s the apocalypse” response.

I have found it very helpful to look within. Emotional healing is a very key component of this behavioral-economics puzzle of trying to convince ourselves to exercise voluntary self-restraint. Separating out the grief, drama, unresolved yearnings, unfixable regrets.

Yes, choosing to limit travel is a sacrifice, but for those of us who are concerned about biospheric collapse and the harm that billions of people worldwide are already experiencing from climate change, we know that a bit of sacrifice is going to be needed. No one said it was going to be easy. But we will rest better knowing that we did our best for current and future generations. And choosing to forgo such luxuries as leisure travel, and tune ever more deeply into our home places, can be fun and liberating. I offer lots of suggestions on my blog and in my book. And on this page too.

I can tell you personally that when I was “caught between a rock and a hard place” of longing to see Venice on one hand, but not wanting to incur that travel footprint on the other hand, I have had a blast being an armchair tourist of Venice and feel very deeply connected.

My choice even sparked a lot of creative thoughts about sea-level rise and flooding in my home region; I started getting visions of how our coastal cities could morph into floating communities. People have lived floating on water since ancient times.

My favorite examples are the Venetians; the marsh Arabs of Iraq; and the indigenous Uros people, who live on floating reed islands on Lake Titicaca. I have never been to any of those places, and feel no need to. It’s enough just to see some pictures and admire the beauty of their highly adapted human-built environment.

PS. Santorini is a gorgeous island; if travel had a zero footprint and caused no negative impact on the host place, I would want to go. Actually no, I still just wouldn’t want to deal with the rigors of such a long trip. Half-asleep, half-awake, gritty-eyed and slogging through airports and just everything. I’d rather just enjoy the pictures.

Although most people think of me as a positive person, and I do in fact try to focus on the positive, the truth is that I get extremely annoyed by certain things. Like annoyed to distraction, like I have a hard time thinking of anything else.

Examples: the sound of leaf blowers and grass-edgers on a rainy day. I mean, the sound of either of those things any time grates on my nerves horribly, not just because of the noxious, loutish racket itself, and the fumes, but also because these landscaping practices have come to represent a huge waste of money and resources. And because they embody our society’s preoccupation with compulsive tidiness in the great outdoors despite the fact that said preoccupation is actually killing off the biosphere.

But somehow it’s especially nerve-grating on a rainy day.

The grass-industrial-complex noise is just one example, but I can really get going about that.

So I can attest to the effectiveness of the following survival tip:

The best way I have found to not completely be driven crazy (and go down the rabbit hole and get distracted from my purpose), is to be too busy doing something fun, cool, and/or mission critical to pay much attention to the gross annoying thing that’s happening. It never quite disappears, but basically the volume gets turned way down.

Or as I once heard it expressed (I think it was from some ancient Chinese philosopher but I’m not sure; if I find the source I will let you know):

To defeat evil, make progress toward the good. In other words, focus on the good thing you’re trying to create, not the bad thing you’re trying to stop. It’s what I call a probiotic as opposed to an antibiotic approach.

If you try this approach, or if you have already used it, let me know how it works for you.

And just like that, the barrels and tubs of rainwater, which I had strategically used up over the past few weeks, are back on their way to be full again. We got a big fat rain in the early hours this morning, after getting some yesterday and a bit the night before.

According to my weather app, we got 1.45 inches of cloud-juice in the past six hours, and 1.9 inches in the past 24 hours.

Here’s a post I made yesterday on my DEEP GREEN Facebook page, with a video:

(video duration 2 min 46 sec)
Rainwater catching setups range from very sophisticated, with connections and sensors and all sorts of things; to stacked containers with hoses and spigots; to the simplest which is just lining up containers under your roof line.

My setup is somewhere in between; among other things I actually invested in used barrels and a set of (new) tubs. I live in a 1000 square-foot house with three of us living here, but I needed for my system to be able to be managed by myself alone because the other two household members have their own fulltime occupations.

The water is used mainly for supplemental irrigation during the dry season, and for cooling off during the hot season. And, in all seasons, for washing (clothes, and body).

I periodically do strategic releases of the water for evaporative cooling, and or management of high stormwater volumes.

Note, I do this by hand, but a person with the skills and inclination and financial means could have a system of hoses and sensors and things.

I will say, there are advantages to doing tasks like hauling water. It can be fairly beneficial to a middle-aged body, as long as one doesn’t try to do too much too fast, and it saves money that I used to spend on the gym in my younger vainer days.

And, I often joke that as I get old-old, one day I will have instant Brady Bunch grandkids, great-grandkids, Zombie Apocalypse lifestyle apprentices, or whatever, and they will be out here helping with the water and we will all be having fun splashing each other. <laugh icon>

Additional recommended resources:

•Brad Landcaster YouTube channel, “Planting the Rain to Grow Abundance” (TED Talk; about 16 minutes) and all of his other videos also.
•My friend/permaculture colleague Chris Searles BioIntegrity YouTube channel, check out his videos about making it rain in Texas through strategic watering of large oak trees & other deciduous trees.

You can check out the video here, on my deep green Facebook page.

#water #rain #stormwater #mitigatingdroughtfloodextremes #microclimate