Author: jennynazak

For a while now, our landscaping aesthetic norms have largely been directly at odds with the mandate to mitigate heat and absorb stormwater.

A few years back, I coined a phrase “puffy landscaping,” to give a visual idea of what a more sustainable form of landscaping might look like. It should save money; save water, labor, and other resources; create more vibrant career paths for land-based professionals; and add beauty.

Following our notes from some recent presentations I’ve given. I’m going to be developing a little card or pamphlet with the various bullet-points of puffy landscaping. Feel free to use any of this that might be helpful to you in your similar endeavors.

BTW puffy landscaping can be native, edible, drought-tolerant, “adapted though not native,” or some mixture of any of these.

puffy landscaping mini-festo:

•Cut back on cutting

•Leave the leaves

•Back off blowing & edging; 80-20 rule

•Soften the shrubs

•Cherish the canopy

•Cease the ‘cides

•Wildflowers aren’t weeds; wean yourself off weeding

•Puffy can be tidy too

•Borders add beauty

•Secure the slopes

•Veto the volcanoes

•Lift livelihoods; preserve their pay

5 minutes

1 Army Corps of Engineers presentation last night at City Commission

background – childhood; enviro-/> permaculture; sust ed” umbrella

2 Big ambitions

— restore the water cycle (40% of rainfall in an area is from the small water cycle)

— We are trashing our soil and water, doesn’t matter if you believe in climate change or not

— Cool science fact number two, plants actually suck heat out of the air

— stop the flooding-drought, extreme heat

— sales funnel for existing eco businesses

— healthy career path incl from young kids to elders

— shift the aesthetic norms to respect natural vegetation; support code compliance

— help local govt optimize use of money, water, labor

— reduce noise pollution & ugliness

— quickly build up local expertise in critical areas: food, arborist, green infra

— Kill the entire evil landscaping industry. Just kidding, things work better if I’m not trying to push Niagara Falls uphill with a teaspoon. Keep from going banana-pants crazy, or at least if I’m going to be banana-pants crazy somebody’s & the planet going to get something out of it

— Local unique beauty

3 – What can your yard do for you! And what can your yard do for the planet? A lot!

4 — Local economy, rewarding careers.

ACE last night at City Comm, wants to address the flooding so ppl can live here. Also mentioned that big difficult problems can be fun to solve.

Create a vibrant ecosystem of landscaping related professionals in Daytona Beach and throughout the region. Including rainwater system setup, IT and app makers, design & planning, and yes digging in the dirt. We need armies and armies of people dedicated to landscaping & array of supporting cottage industries: tool sharpening, welding, mower repair etc.

1 Background “sustainability educator”

— childhood, environmentalist, hated yardwork

— food, permaculture

— no one was doing it

— later more urgent: noise, fumes

— Homegrown National Park

2 Carrots and sticks, big world problems and petty personal annoyances

2 Big ambitions

— restore the water cycle (40% of rainfall in an area is from the small water cycle)

— We are trashing our soil and water, doesn’t matter if you believe in climate change or not

— Cool science fact number two, plants actually suck heat out of the air

— stop the flooding-drought, extreme heat

— sales funnel for existing eco businesses

— healthy career path incl from young kids to elders

— shift the aesthetic norms to respect natural vegetation

— help local govt optimize use of money, water, labor

— reduce noise pollution & ugliness

— quickly build up local expertise in critical areas: food, arborist, green infra

— Kill the entire evil landscaping industry. Just kidding, things work better if I’m not trying to push Niagara Falls uphill with a teaspoon. Keep from going banana pants crazy, or at least if I’m going to be banana pants crazy somebody’s & the planet going to get something out of it

3 Permaculture

— unnecessary work is a form of pollution Public Works many years ago, we are fighting nature, well you are still fighting nature

— “sustainability educator” green umbrella

— franchises like papparrazzi ladies

— Extreme emotional annoyance, stupid lawns in the middle of the street, sandpaper on skin, if I’m going to go banana pants crazy somebody might as well get something out of it. When you can’t tell the difference between an edger & sawing concrete, you’ve got a problem.

4 Formation of the concept; high aspirations

— permaculture

— natives

— Florida-friendly

— art/sculpting

— “sustainability educator” umbrella

— Army Corps engineers flood study update presented last night at city commission, we have big work ahead

— Create a vibrant ecosystem of landscaping related professionals in Daytona Beach and throughout the region. Including rainwater system set up, IT and app makers, design, and yes digging in the dirt. We need armies and armies of people dedicated to landscaping.

5 Services, contact

— mini consult

— code compliance help

— coordinate w your existing service provider

— concierge/portal incl finding you arborists, landscape architects

A tiny, tiny business that is way bigger than me. Creating livelihoods and solving our main big problems, both locally and worldwide. Our little yards are a huge leverage point.

Just now in the Florida Permaculture Community group, I shared this post with text & graph info from official government sources, regarding wet-bulb temperature.

A colleague (Koreen, of Our Permaculture Farm in Brooksville) commented about some of the things she is doing to keep volunteers on the farm safe from extreme heat. A lot of it involves going indoors where there is air conditioning, and using ice packs. (Koreen also makes an important point that beyond a certain wet-bulb temperature, dunking in water doesn’t always help, and can actually make things worse. I don’t know for sure but I suspect it’s related to the humidity factor. And the difficulty of water evaporating and having its cooling effect.)

Regarding her point about taking regular breaks indoors where it’s cool, I made the following comment:

Thank you Koreen. On a related note, a couple of things bear mentioning.

1) Indoors is only cooler than outdoors if you have a well-made passive-cooled house. Very rare with today’s modern industrialized houses in the USA.

Either that, or forced-air cooling. Not all people have AC available, and it is not always working, and it readily malfunctions. I read horror stories all summer every summer, and it just kills me to see people having to deal with this.

And even in cases where the mechanized forced-air cooling is not malfunctioning, a lot of people simply cannot afford the electric bill for it. I have heard of electric bills of $400 or more.

If one’s living habitat is not passively designed, and one cannot access AC, it is cooler outdoors than indoors in the summer oftentimes.

Exception would be if a house has a fully open screened porch. Unfortunately, a lot of our dwellings in Florida, even if they still have those old type of porches, previous residents have glassed them in.

I find that from about May through September, outdoors is usually cooler than indoors from about 11am to 2am at least, but not everybody has a safe spot to hang out outdoors. Yet another challenge.

(BTW I am one of the lucky few, I voluntarily do without air conditioning. I am not forced to do without it. I do without it because I dislike forced air and closed windows, and also because a core component of the mission of my house is to serve as a research station for 90% Reduction/Deep Adaptation/Degrowth -style resilience.)

2) Many people do not have a freezer that can make ice. Probably about half the rental properties I have lived in my adult life, we have not had a freezer, and/or not had one that got cold enough to actually freeze water. (I own the house that I am living in and that I share with 2 housemates, and we do have a fridge with a freezer that can freeze water. And I keep ice packs in it for emergencies such as heat exhaustion etc.)

In case the permissions get changed and the post disappears, I’m posting the basic text overview here:

Temperature/ Humidity
80 / 40% 🥵 (unpleasant; some danger)
91 / 40% ⚠️ (extreme danger)
105 / 40% ☠️ (deadly; most humans cannot survive for more than a short time)

84 / 75% 🥵
92 / 75% ⚠️
103 / 75% ☠️

34-to-36 degrees Celsius

PS. A key front of our work in reclaiming sustainable shelter, will be finding ways to retrofit existing modern homes with little “passive” mods, while remaining within city codes etc. Or else, we have to work to try to get the codes changed. And, even in rural areas, I am constantly hearing all kinds of stories about how prohibitive the codes are.

Further Exploration:

• “We Can’t Wait: How Black Neighborhoods Are Preparing for the Summer Heat” (capitalb.org): “Since the 1960s, the average number of heat waves every year across the country has more than tripled. Nationwide, the issue has led to a 900% increase in heat-related deaths compared to then. Indigenous people and Black people have experienced the worst effects. It kills more people every year than hurricanes, floods, and tornadoes — combined. … Last summer, the death certificates of more than 2,300 people in the United States mentioned the effects of excessive heat. It is the highest number in 45 years of records. As the nation’s electric grid slips into disrepair, a major issue driving these deaths is the growth in heat-induced power outages. …”

Of course, it’s great! But, I would add that a lot of us adults need to take those same lessons. We are all homeschool children in Mother Earth’s homeschool. We can’t send children to nature education and expect them to save the world, when OUR wallets and our attention are pointed in a whole other direction.

Part 1. What do I mean by “civilian”?

(and pardon the grammar and sentence sloppiness, I am writing this on the fly. You know how I am, if you’ve been following this blog for longer than five minutes ha ha. And even if you’ve only been following this blog for five seconds, you are warmly welcome here and I deeply appreciate your presence thank you.)

This is for any of you, whatever you call yourselves be it collapse professional, climate activist, whatever. When I say “civilian,” I’m talking about anyone who’s not a “professional” (however you yourself would define professional, whether you are a paid consultant, speaker, writer, yadda yadda, or a grassroots volunteer activist, or both, or something in between, in any of the terrain related to climate awareness, climate collapse, societal collapse, permaculture activism, or however you would word it in that whole ball of yarn.

If you are in someway dedicated full-time, fully committed, whatever you want to call yourself, then my current label would be something like collapse professional. Or maybe eco soldier, earth guardian, or something like that.

All of us who devote most or all of our working hours (or maybe even most or all of our waking hours, some of us) to work centered on any of the following movements, I would consider us as a kind of eco-soldier / professional.

Those movements are: Riot for Austerity (AKA 90% Reduction Challenge), Degrowth, Deep Adaptation.

And Permaculture design movement. Regarding that last one, a big caveat: I’m not just talking about homesteaders who are growing food for themselves I am talking about people who are full-on involved in the design and education movement. That includes all aspects of permaculture awareness such as energy descent; building community.

And people who do not place themselves in that category — those folks, I would label “civilians” for purposes of this blog.

Now, civilians can care very much about the environment, and be collapse-aware, so it’s not a term that connotes any particular lack of knowledge or awareness. Rather, I use the word civilian in the same context that military people use the word civilian. And, a civilian is somebody that we have responsibility to protect and watch over.

As for what I mean by “The Talk,” that is, in a nutshell, asking people where they want to be, and who they want to be with, as things start going downhill.

You can word it however you want. Some civilians might resonate with the phrase “financial collapse” or “currency collapse” or something, for example. Even if they cannot at all relate to the concept of biospheric collapse, climate crisis, etc. Receptivity will also depend on how serious the conditions have become in your local area.

Or you can just refer to upcoming political unrest. A lot of people in the USA are expecting some pretty serious stuff to hit the fan this fall, leading up to the elections in November.

You can also just refer to “things going downhill”; TSHTF.

We can’t force people to make plans, but we can encourage them in that direction. In Part 2 of this post, I will talk about potential ideas that you might want to include in “The Talk.”

This post was motivated by my walk home the other night in the rain, which started out as happy happy joy joy singing in the rain, posting a gleeful Live video from under my umbrella as I splashed through the puddles.

But then as I got closer to my house, I ended up walking through 18 inches of water in the streets. (The water was only barely lapping at the curb, no water in our houses.)

It came to me then that I needed to have “The Talk” with my housemates.

We can also have some version of this talk with other people who live near us, as well as with people who don’t live near us but are in our sphere of caring.

Part 2. Questions/topics to bring up

“The <flooding, drought, fires, political unrest, etc.> seems to be getting more intense. Last night’s flooding was a wakeup call. Have you thought about where you’d like to be, and the people you want to be around, as things get worse/if things really start to go downhill?”

That question and approach worked well for my household. I also let them know that, as a research station and lifestyle lab, I myself am not likely to be going anywhere unless physically compelled to move.

If you would like to add any thoughts, drop me a line. Let me know how your discussions go.

This post will be added to on an ongoing basis.

Landscaping fabric:

In my experience (in my own yard and in my eco landscaping business), landscape fabric is way more trouble than it’s worth.

1) It makes it harder for water and nutrients to reach the plants you are trying to grow.
2) Makes it harder to pull out the plants you don’t want growing in there.
3) Over time, it leads to soil compaction.
4) The fabric disintegrates over time and makes a mess.
And 5) The fabric gets in the way of raking; makes it difficult to impossible to rake out beds.

Oftentimes, you’ll see a story in the media about some very scary insect or spider or snake or what have you. It’s always good to do research to investigate what’s being claimed. A nice public service is to post on social media to ease peoples’ fears.

The most recent example I encountered was when somebody posted a link to an article about a supposedly “giant venomous flying spider” that’s getting ready to invade the Northeastern US. Known as the Joro spider.

It looked to me like a cousin of what we used to call a banana spider, which are very large and brightly colored but not dangerous. Even though it can feel alarming for a second when you walk into one of their big webs, which I have many times!

Inevitably, as usually happens, several people had commented on the article, saying that’s terrifying, I would have to light myself on fire, where can I move to avoid these, etc.

So I looked into it and based on what I found I shared the following:

Not to worry!!

1) Almost all spiders are venomous. They almost all have venom. However, the majority of spiders do not use their venom on humans. It’s for subduing the insects that are their food.

And 2) The Joro spider is not dangerous, according to websites of multiple pest-control companies. It “can bite humans and pets, but as is with all orb-weavers, it has small mouth parts and is not aggressive. Because of their small mouth parts, the Joro has been deemed as harmless and typically not a safety concern. If someone were to be bitten, it would be comparable to a bee sting.” (from Arrow Exterminators, Texas)

3) No spiders fly. Rather, some use a technique called ballooning whereby they shoot silk out their spinnerets and use it to ride air currents. It’s really pretty cool, and lots of spiders do it!

“Once baby spiders emerge from the eggs sac, they stay close to their nesting area for many weeks before traveling to new places.
They normally stay within the egg sac until they go through their first molt. After a few more days or weeks, the spiderlings start to disperse and explore new territories. Through a method called ballooning, they take on their first journey away from their birthplace. Some adult spiders undergo ballooning as well. Garden spiders, for instance, use this strategy to look for potential mates in other locations. If you see a flying spider in your yard, don’t be scared. These little arachnids don’t pose any threat and are nothing to be concerned about.” (from Stampede Pest Control, also in Texas)

4) The Joro is an orb-weaver. So mostly, when it’s not ballooning, it weaves a web and hangs out waiting to catch bugs.

And finally 5) Ooooooooh, awwwwwwe, pretty colors! Such a garden beauty!!!!!

PS. I really appreciate that the pest-control companies did the public service of letting people know that they don’t have to worry.

Oh, and kudos to this news station WKFR103.3, for posting an article on why Michigan might want the Joro spider to come to town.

One easy way to promote low-footprint living is to talk up the simple attractions of the place where you live.

Somebody posted on NextDoor that they just moved to Daytona Beach, with their child, and they are looking for different activities and to meet people. A lot of people chimed in with great ideas and recommendations.

This is just a few things I thought of off the top of my head to share. Everything I mentioned is either right in the downtown area, or accessible by public transportation.

I love my adopted home city!

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Welcome! I second the recommendation of Sweet Marlays coffeehouse. Also City Island library and the riverfront esplanade park. And first Fridays food truck nights on Beach Street.

If you want to experience beautiful beach nature, go down to Ponce Inlet. There is a nature trail and learning center and various restaurants and a lighthouse you can visit. It’s quite a climb if you take the stairs up to the top!

Of course there’s the beautiful ocean right here in Daytona Beach too if you like to take a dip. And if you like a water park as well, there is Daytona Lagoon which is right near the Ocean Center. They offer games / indoor amusements as well.

One really interesting spot that a lot of people don’t know about is the historic cemetery on Main Street, across from boot Hill saloon. It’s so interesting reading the old headstones, and it’s beautiful in there with lots of big oak trees and colorful dune wildflowers.

Speaking of history, if you like history museums check out the Halifax history Museum on Beach Street. You can find out so many cool things about the history of this area. They have lectures and other events there too.

We also have a minor-league baseball team, the Tortugas. They play at the historic Jackie Robinson stadium right downtown. The games are a fun and reasonably priced way to spend an evening. And the Tortuga’s organization does so much for the community. They have special fun activities for kids, and they are very supportive of seniors as well with various senior discounts.

And concerts at the Peabody Auditorium, there are quite a variety!

And I keep thinking of stuff I forgot… Concerts at the bandshell and so on!