Author: jennynazak

My final end-of-year housecleaning task today includes both paper stacks and electronic dregs. I forgot about some notes I’d scribbled from various webinars, videos, random fragments that popped into my head, talks that I was preparing, etc., in the latter part of this past year starting in August. Since it’s nowhere near as large a volume of material as “My Year in Webinars 2020,” a monster post I did back in September where I spewed forth a year and a half’s worth of conference and webinar notes, I’m pasting the text directly in here rather than uploading it as a PDF. Warning: The notes below are mostly just dribs and snips, unlikely to be useful to most folks. But, as always, if you/your community should desire a talk on any of the topics herein, I can either put a talk together for you, or track down other speakers for you. 

Meta-note: I’m doing this radical new thing where I don’t beat myself up and call myself a loser and a train-wreck for having scraps of tiny spiral notebook notes that I’ve left lying around for months without typing them up and doing something with them. This novel “not beating myself up” thing saves a wondrous amount of energy, which I can use to just type the darn notes up already and maybe enjoy the beauty of the day while I’m at it. If this self-leniency resonates with you at all, I encourage you to experiment with it! (As I type, gentle golden light beams over my shoulder and flickers on the wall, in the shape of the leaves of the trees in the yard to the west of my office window. And I hear some of the lighter-weight windchimes gently chiming every once in a while. Bonus: The breeze is strong enough to feel pleasant wafting through the window but not so strong as to scatter my pile of tiny little ballpoint-scribbled papers all over the room.)

Florida Native Plant Society Lunch & Learn Fri 8/20/21

FWF & FDOT study “Economics of Roadside Vegetation”

Partnership to Save Plants: FDOT, FWF, FNPS

FDOT Native Plant Working Group

ETDM planning phase is best time to get involved with a plant rescue

FDOT ETDM environmental screening tool

TRIBE On Homecoming and Belonging

Sebastian Junger

Humans need to feel:

1 – Competent at what they do; 2 – Authentic in their lives; 3 – Connected to others

“Treating combat veterans is different from treating rape victims because rape victims don’t have this idea that some aspects of their experience are worth retaining.”

3 factors seem to crucially affect a combatant’s transition back into civilian life:

1 – Cohesive and egalitarian tribal societies – resource-sharing; “social resilience” – egalitarian wealth distribution

2 – Ex-combatants shouldn’t be seen — or be encouraged to see — themselves as victim

3 – Vets need to feel that they’re just as necessary and productive back in society as they were on the battlefield.

“One way to determine what is missing in day-to-day American life may be to examine what behaviors spontaneously arise when that life is disrupted.”

THE REAL GOAL (notes for a permaculture talk I was putting together perhaps?)

• Can’t always get what we (think we) want

• Social Capital

• Leverage Points

Low: Tinkering with numbers

High: Beauty; what gets defined as beautiful

(Notes for another talk I gave)

Friday talk

– 5 R’s (Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose, Recycle)

– Story of Stuff 2:37 intro

– Cradle to Cradle book McDonough 

– Permaculture ethics; don’t buy anything you wouldn’t be willing to bury in your backyard (tall order but worth aspiring to)

– J2ZW; Terracycle.com

– Modular local plant (Dutch)

– Lo-Tek Resiliency book

– Ants, worms

– “Compost happens”

– New type of bioaccumulation

First permaculture design principle (that I learned) was

Relative location

– Food: grow some of your own and buy from local farmers

– Business: support local shops, restaurants

– Employment: DIY, telecommute

– Education: DIY, homeschool, online, unschool

– Church, community

Permaculture is a set of design principles, inspired by observing how nature works. It’s meant to allow people to more effectively meet their basic needs with less burden on other species and on the ecosystem. In fact, with ecologically smart design, we can actually BENEFIT the ecosystem more than if we were doing nothing (not that doing NOTHING is actually possible) by applying these principles.

I wonder what this country could have been like if African or Native American cultures could have become our dominant culture, instead of bleached Anglo becoming our dominant culture. People idolizing English-looking buildings, lawns, etc. Trucks with trailers carrying ride-on mowers and edgers and leaf-blowers to one piece of ground after another. Our culture is an experiment in what happens when a whole country decides that art and beauty are impractical and optional. 

New England Historic Society webinar

Transmission of material culture from England to New England 1620-1720

“You don’t have sumptuary laws unless people are dressing sumptuously.”

In England, materials were scarce and workers were plentiful. New England was opposite.

Woodlots limited in England – deforestation; wood plentiful in New World

Job opptys limited in England; construction jobs plentiful in New World (my ancestor who came over in 1630 was a house-carpenter and cabinetmaker, as was my ancestor who fought in the Revolutionary War)

Colonists enacted regulations re timber harvesting (uh hello! Native Americans had managed forests!)

Ornate chest on left was older — SIMPLE chest on right was newer; relied on technology and transport

Mortise & tenon joinery

A turner could make a chair five times as fast as a joiner could

PW – Peter Woodbury of Beverly

Sawmills were popular in colonies because unlike in England, joiners guilds didn’t fear competition, and also deforestation was not a concern.

Sawmills were the repository of colonial venture capitalist funds

Q&A

– How did Native Americans cut down trees and make furniture?

Don’t know; wish I had learned. Working on it right now.

Presentation by Nancy ___, senior curator.

Goofy cabinet design on spindly legs — maybe they did it “because they could” (new technology)

COP26 TED Climate Session 1 – YouTube

1) Slide of global tipping points – they cascade. Example: polar ice melting –> temperature turnover over ocean –> alters monsoon pattern in Africa

2) We have surpassed 4 of 9 boundaries

SPEED & SCALE

Action Plan for Solving Climate Crisis Now (6 components)

1 electric cars

2 decarbonize

3 food

4 protect nature

5 clean up industry practice

6 tech (mechanical trees etc) for carbon removal

Book cont’d

Climate change amplifies inequities. USA historically largest emitter, MUST go first. 

– to show world it can be done

– to drive down cost, AND

– to fund transition in less rich countries

Climate crisis is humankind’s greatest opportunity to address longstanding inequities.

Speaker on geothermal (young woman – impressive) – Drills, fracturing rock (my opinion it sounds like a deal w the devil) (Her idea of repurposing the oil drilling industry’s skills and equipment is very tempting in its sensibleness, however)

Greenhouse gases (different speaker I think?)

– Nitrous oxide

– Methane (holds heat)

– Carbon dioxide (lingers)

Most methane is from RECENT emissions; cutting methane is fastest most immediate opportunity to slow down warming.

Pie chart shows Ag, Energy, and Waste Management being about equal thirds

Energy production is largest and cheapest to address. Most emissions are from PRODUCING fossil fuels.

Oil fields in Texas are now wasting enough gas to heat 2 million homes. Mainly because government and industry have been DATA-DEPRIVED. But the technology is getting better. 

– Waste management solution: Generate electricity from landfill methane

– Ag: Suppress methane in cow guts. Use digesters to digest manure and make electricity. 

Also ag: RICE. Maintain shallower level of water in rice fields.

Countdown.TED.com or on YouTube channel

Solomon Goldstein-Rose (very young man – impressive)

– He considers nuclear “clean” (I disagree)

– Also seems to assume that our modern Western industrialist models of education, health, etc. are the ideal that we should impose on every other “backward” country (this was just my immed reaction; need to watch video again)

Says we need to multiply today’s global electricity production by 12 times! 

It’s not OK to simply replace today’s world with a “clean” version. 

Yesterday I subscribed to Netflix just so I could watch Don’t Look Up, the darkly comic portrayal of human denialism in the face of an impending event that will destroy the entire planet and everyone on it. The film, with its star-studded cast including Meryl Streep as POTUS, is currently trending #1 on Netflix. I found the film well worth watching.

Someone in the Deep Adaptation group just posted this link to a YouTube by Leonardo DiCaprio (who played the role of the lead scientist in the film):

DiCaprio on the film and the actionable window for climate…

At the end of his 4-minute talk, Mr. DiCaprio shares a link for those who want to know what actions we can take.

Also: Hear from director Adam McKay on that super-powerful triple ending!!

For the first time ever, DEEP GREEN book will be at the FRESH Book Festival! Dates are Fri-Sat Jan 7-8 at the Midtown Cultural & Educational Center in Daytona Beach. (There’s also a virtual component, so you can attend regardless of your geographic location.)

Admission: Kids, students, and teachers get in free!! Seniors are $5.00 and general admission is $7.00.

Special Note for kids, families, teachers! We have several really wonderful children’s book authors (some of whom actually dress up in character)! Please spread the word, the youth are out of school and we hope lots of young people can make it.

More info on this outstanding, internationally recognized book festival and also on the film festival (Thursday eve Jan 6; it is always excellent):
https://www.freshbookfestivals.net

So excited! I love this annual festival and always look forward to it. Am thrilled to be there as an author. Visit the link in the first paragraph to see the announcement poster with names and photos of all the authors.

Hey!! I have a TikTok channel now.
15-second micro video postcards from my everyday life. Hope you enjoy these little snippets! I set my standard video time at 15 seconds because I think that’s a cool length for a video. But, I’m not used to it, so I keep getting cut off. I’m really enjoying the format though.

For longer vids you can always visit my YouTube channel. I haven’t posted much there lately but I might again at some point. And, you can also just type my name in the YouTube search field; that’ll bring up a lot of videos of me speaking that are not on my channel per se.

First, two disclaimers:

• I’m not in any position to tell anyone how they “should” approach retirement, or any other aspect of their financial affairs. Everyone comes from different circumstances, and there are reasons why finance is a sensitive subject. As always on this blog, and in my book, I’m merely sharing my own ideas and my own journey, and hope you will find at least some of it helpful in crafting the unique work of art that is your own life.

• Even though I have my ideals that I’m aiming for, it doesn’t mean I’m there right now or will ever get there (though it is my aim). I always endeavor to be transparent about any gaps that exist between my ideals and my actual practice (be it in finances or in any other realm), but I’m mentioning this to you right now just in case it’s not clear.

OK! Disclaimers done.

In my book, I mention that at some point awhile back (actually wow, it was 20-plus years ago now; how time flies), I realized that my money that I had invested in a retirement account was out there in the world doing stuff that I might not approve of.

This realization hit me way before I had even heard of permaculture or regenerative living (living our lives in a way such that we give to people, other species, and ecosystems more than we take). So I wasn’t really sure what to do with it. It did stick with me though, and formed the seed for my current mind-set around income, retirement, and money in general.

For some years now I have been seeing as deeply problematic the whole idea of stockpiling a bunch of assets (in any form, be it money or otherwise) for the purpose of “retiring” or any other form of old-age security. I see this paradigm as problematic for many reasons:

1) Reliance on stocks (here I mean not stock-market stocks, but the permaculture definition of “stocks”: an amassed pile of assets — think of a squirrel’s acorn stash) rather than flows (“our daily bread,” so to speak) fosters insecurity. Stocks by themselves are more brittle than flows. Also, with stocks, the goalpost tends to keep moving. So, if I amass a million, my mind is going to start urging me to work on the second million “just for an extra cushion; just to be safe.” Also, amassed assets are more likely to make a person a target. And cost money and energy to protect.

2) I see “amassing” as a fear-based reflex, based on the idea (created by the industrial-consumer society we birthed in the USA) that “no one will take care of me in my old age”; “old people have no value”; “I won’t be able to engage in economically productive work once I reach age XX.” Rather than amassing personal stashes of assets, we’d do better to go directly to the root of the issue. For example, devise a regenerative career path that extends right up until we die. Could be teaching, tending sheep, grandchild-minding, business mentorship, herbal medicine consultation “wise witch lady”, shaman, master carpenter teacher, seed-bank tender, librarian/archivist, storyteller, musician, what have you. Traditional societies have always had economic roles for everyone from young children to the eldest elders. If we want to take a lot of the fear out of modern living, we need to retrofit this resilience into our society. My personal ideal is to develop an entirely flow-based path for myself, with maybe just enough stockpiled assets for an emergency house repair fund, though I am not at my ideal yet.

3) Stocks are more likely than flows to disrupt ecosystems (both social and biological; neighborhoods and rainforests). This is because chunks of money or other amassed assets always need a place to “park,” and they will exert a distortive influence one way or another. For example, my neighborhood is full of houses that people from other states have bought as their fourth and fifth houses, AirBnB investment properties etc. Meanwhile low-wage workers struggle to find a place to live in the dwindling stock of affordable rental properties.

4) The work that people are doing to anass that pile of money for retirement “so they can quit working” tends not to be work they’d really want in their hearts to be doing. This tradeoff comes at a heavy opportunity cost not only for individuals but for our collective wellbeing, as much creative energy gets dissipated rather than applied to building the beautiful abundant world we really want.

In a nutshell, my current ideal is to earn the minimum viable income to meet my needs, and be able to work for the rest of my life. And have just a small emergency fund. I don’t know exactly what that means. Income-wise my ideal right now is a steady, consistent $13,000 per year. (My target would be higher, but I am fortunate, through other people’s past hard work, not mine, to own my house free and clear, and have no student-loan debt.) Stockpile-wise, maybe 5k.

I’ve touched on various aspects of finance on this blog and will dig up some links to those posts for you. They include links to some of my favorite articles by other regenerative/permie thinkers as well.

Further Exploration:

• “Flowing Towards Abundance” (Toby Hemenway, resilience.org; originally published on tobyhemenway.com). In permaculture design class when we learned about “stocks and flows,” I immediately realized why no amount of stockpiled money makes people feel secure. It’s the flow, the knowingness of nature’s flow, that brings real security. Article by the acclaimed author of Gaia’s Garden gives an excellent overview of stocks and flows.

• Storing Food “in the Belly of My Brother” (post on my blog January 7, 2021). “In the grand scheme of history, it hasn’t been that long that human beings have had ways to store wealth. The relatively recent innovations of refrigeration, banks, and other vessels for storing surplus have made life easier in a tangible way. After all, what would we modern industrialized humans do if refrigeration didn’t exist? We’d have to grocery shop every day. And if there were no banks or other investment vehicles, where and how would we store our money? A cushion of surplus tides us over in lean times. But the dark side of storage is hoarding, and hoarding actually fuels scarcity. …”

• “Calculating Your Income Profile” (a post I made in October 2020). It’s eye-opening to see where your income, and your net worth, stand in relation to 1) other people in rich industrialized nations; and 2) even more mind-blowing, the world! I see extreme wealth disparity as a major source of damage to ecosystems and cultures.

• “Legacy for Future Generations” (a post I made about 3 months ago where I talk about some of my investment choices).

• “Becoming a Local Investor” (series of four posts I wrote when I was brainstorming places I’d feel comfortable (=ethical) storing money, that would give some kind of good return be it monetary or social or both.

I have a bad habit of scribbling notes on paper and then not remembering whether I typed them up or not. I kinda think that in this case I didn’t!

If you are on social media a lot, and especially if you are the admin of a group, you might get a lot of requests from people to share stuff. It could be a post about their own business thing, or it could be a post for the greater good such as an article about seed-saving, or protecting wildlife.

The natural inclination is to want to help the person, or people, or humanitarian cause, by sharing. But the volume of requests in your inbox (be it email, messenger, phone text or whatever) can get exhausting. A lot of the time it’s just a naked link, such as a link to a video with no explanation, so you’re supposed to click on the video and sit through it to find out what it’s even about.

Here are some tips I scribbled out one day when I was feeling overwhelmed by things in my inboxes that other people wanted me to share.

I. For those times you feel willing and able to share the content, you can streamline the process and make less work for yourself. Here are some tricks I’ve picked up over the years.

• Screen-shot and copy-paste for the win: Those fancy HTML/rich text newsletters we get in our inboxes from eco organizations and other worthy causes look nice, but can be a pain to try and share on Facebook or Twitter. Ditto for event invites that people send to your Messenger or phone text. My hack is to 1) take a screenshot, or screenshots, of the most powerful image from the email or message. (I usually don’t worry about taking the extra effort to crop the image; if it says TMobile and my phone battery capacity at the top, so be it.) Then 2) copy from the body of the email a short excerpt of what you see as the most essential text, plus (very important) the link to their website or event or whatever. 3) Open a post in Facebook or Twitter or wherever, and first paste the screenshot image you took, then paste the text and link. (If you paste the text and link first, Facebook or Twitter will end up displaying something that may not be the most powerful image from the email newsletter, and in fact may not be an image at all — might be just a line of ugly grey text. Keep visual control of the post and circumvent “default ugly link syndrome” by pasting the screenshot before you paste the text. If you forget and do it in the wrong order, as I often have, don’t worry, just scrap the Facebook post and start over.)

• Look for corresponding online presence: Sometimes it’s easier to just go directly to the person or org’s website and screenshot/copy-paste share from there, rather than trying to work with the email.

• Phone-text-to-self is your friend! This tip is for bloggers. When I’m copy-pasting an excerpt from a great article or email newsletter to this blog, I have learned to first paste the quote into a phone text to myself. Otherwise the 48-point font, yellow highlighting, and whatever other fancy HTML/rich text formatting the authors put into the website or email newsletter gets imported into my blog post and I can’t figure out how to get rid of it. Plain text is necessary, and I have found that the only reliable way to strip out formatting is by first phone-texting the excerpt to myself, and then copy-pasting from the phone-text to this blog. (Sssh, keep it quiet, or next thing you know we’ll have an “improvement” from the cellphone OS designers, allowing rich text formatting to be retained in SMS messages!)

• Note to people who send out email newsletters: Consider using just the default plain text of your email app, rather than all kinds of different font sizes, colors, etc. It’s actually a refreshing look! Author, speaker, entrepreneur Jeff Goins’ newsletter is my favorite example of an email newletter I always enjoy receiving, that uses plain text, often without even images. (You can still include photos and other images in a plain-text newsletter though. Of those who use photos/images, my favorites have only one or maybe two. Simplicity is so refreshing!)

II. For those times when you are not willing/able to take on the free labor of sharing:

• Message the other person back, “This is great stuff, really important and people need to know this! Please share it to the groups, not just to me!” (Sometimes fellow activists do this private-message thing; sometimes they just have a case of the shy’s and need a bit of encouragement to know that what they are sharing in your inbox deserves a much wider audience.)

• Don’t accept “naked links.” If someone sends you a link with no explanation, ask them to write a few words telling you their takeaways from it. I particularly do this a lot with video links. I’m not going to sit through a video just to get the main points to see if it’s worth sharing or not.

• Heads-up, if you are on social media a lot and dedicate a lot of your waking hours to activism, people might assume you are RETIRED or living a life of leisure. This has happened to me. I realized it’s on me to be more clear with people that I work fulltime and am not Richie Rich or Lola Leisure. Freelance yes, at-home (mostly) yes, but nonetheless I work fulltime. And even if I did not, my time and labor have value. As do yours! A good way of conveying our professional/occupational status is via our Facebook profiles, email signature lines, and so on.

• Share skills: If you come across any good online classes, magazine articles, TikTok videos, or other resources about how to post effectively on social media, share them on your page and in your activist groups. Same goes for basic computer classes and articles, if it seems like a lot of people in your network might just not know the basic nuts and bolts of a keyboard and operating system such as how to copy-paste, take a screenshot etc. Also I have found if I don’t know how to do something, google is my friend. I just type “screen shot ios” or whatever.

• Recognize the value of publicity: Social-media marketing, and writing, are two task categories that for whatever reason have become incredibly devalued. It’s ironic, because 1) these tasks are difficult and time-consuming to do well; and 2) I see so many good works and events and movements not getting the attendance or other awareness they deserve. Or people and organizations who should so totally know about each other and be working together have no clue about each other’s existence. Why? Because the owners/organizers didn’t take even the most basic steps to get the word out. If an event organizer doesn’t bother to do publicity, who should?

• Ask to get paid: If you find people turning to you a lot for help with publicity, you could consider becoming a social-media marketing firm and offering paid packages of services. I have sometimes thought of doing this but I’m pretty well occupied with other stuff.

• Ask for reciprocity: If you’ve gone out of your way to help someone get the word out about their thing, you could ask them to support your thing, be it by sharing your posts or donating money or signing up for your class or buying your product or Liking your page or whatever.

• (To use a permaculture design term): “Obtain a yield!” It’s OK to get something for your efforts other than just the warm fuzzy feeling of helping someone. So, for example, I’ll share someone’s link, quote their content, etc., on DEEP GREEN book’s Facebook page, Permaculture Daytona’s Facebook page, or my other pages. Their content is adding value to my page, and I am helping them by bringing their sweet juicy content to an additional audience. It feels like a fair trade! Also, people like recognition. I tag people or magazines or farms or whatever and praise their work (only if I sincerely mean it, of course), and often as not, the tagged person/org will stop by my page and say thanks, and sometimes also Like my page. Again, it feels like a fair trade.

Social-media sharing and other forms of publicity are more laborious than they might seem. By being more aware of this, and of how important publicity is, maybe we can shift the consciousness around this and share the publicity workload, to the benefit of us all!

These are just my tips; got any tips you’d like to share on this subject? If so, drop me a line, and also let me know if you’d like me to include your name, website, book title, etc. along with your tip. A bit of extra publicity never hurts, right?

As I write this, it is the Winter Solstice. The shortest day and longest night of the year. Rich, fertile time.

Also rich and fertile is my inbox (which I define broadly to include my newsfeed and the various periodicals I subscribe to). This week I’m trying something new: just posting links to some of the best articles I’ve read over the past week or so, rather than trying to do a different post on each very worthwhile topic I’ve come across. Just an experiment! If I like it, and/or if you my dear reader find it useful, I may do it again.

• Quote: “The chief danger in life is that you may take too many precautions.” — Alfred Adler, via Inspiring Quotes email newsletter. Commentary from IQ: “Austrian psychiatrist Alfred Adler was among the early pioneers of family and group counseling. One reason for his 1911 break with compatriot Sigmund Freud was that Adler believed external factors, such as adult relationships and employment, should be accounted for when treating patients (whereas Freud thought behavior was largely fueled by biology and childhood events). While listening to people reflect on their place in society, Adler heard lots of trepidation. This motivated him to help individuals grow comfortable with risks, because adventures and unforeseen joys await those who say yes.”

• The other week I was among a dozen or so citizens who got to visit my city’s wastewater treatment plant for a tour of their demonstration testing system for direct potable reuse. This was a two-year pilot program to purify wastewater effluent through an advanced purification system. It was only a test, for preparedness purposes, but there has been a lot of public misunderstanding, amplified by people referring to it as “toilet to tap” and “poopy water.” Never mind that it was only a test; that the water was never actually sent out to the public and there are no plans to do so. Also, this technology is actually in widespread use, and has been for years, in many parts of the world including drought-prone areas of Australia and the Western US. My take on this is that it falls under the heading of civil preparedness, and that if we don’t want to have to rely on direct potable reuse, we need to stop wasting water. I also agree with what my friend the environmental-sciences professor, soil & water conservation official, and all-around superwoman said: Anyone who is living with a well and a septic is already drinking poopy water! (though we count on the few vertical feet of soil to be enough distance for adequate filtration, so ideally it is NOT poopy). And everyone who’s living on planet earth is already drinking recycled wastewater! But the fear and resentment about the direct potable reuse demonstration test persists. To provide more information on the subject, I searched and found this great article by Jacques Leslie at yale.edu: “Where Water is Scarce, Communities Turn to Reusing Wastewater.” Finally, if we don’t want to drink poopy water, we could … stop pooping into water! In other words, instead of crapping into the world’s very limited supply of potable water in the first place, we could use compost toilets, the waterless receptacles that are the starting point in a humanure composting system. It’s a low-cost, low-risk approach that’s in common use in many places. (See Joseph Jenkins’ The Humanure Handbook, the definitive manual on this topic.)

• “Why 1,320 Therapists Are Worried About Mental Health in America Right Now“
(Tara Parker-Pope, Christina Caron, and Mónica Cordero Sancho; nytimes.com). “As Americans head into a third year of pandemic living, therapists around the country are finding themselves on the front lines of a mental health crisis. Social workers, psychologists and counselors from every state say they can’t keep up with an unrelenting demand for their services, and many must turn away patients — including children — who are desperate for support.” (I see this mental-health crisis as one symptom of our societal brittleness and anti-resilience; our hyper-individualist society doesn’t really teach people good skills for navigating emotions or for coexisting in close quarters with other people. The pandemic was maybe just a very large straw that broke the camel’s back. Good article; I read it as a call to cultivate nurturing communities.)

• “SEED KEEPING ‘AN IMPORTANT PIECE OF RESISTANCE’: Philadelphia woman starting a Black heirloom seed farm” (Stephanie Farr; Philadelphia Inquirer TRIBUNE NEWS SERVICE, published in Daytona Beach News-Journal). “‘A lot of my peers, their immediate thought was that Black people farming is just like slavery …’ But Mitchell’s mother also taught her that their people’s history didn’t begin with oppression and enslavement, that it had far deeper roots than that. I saw farming as an ancestral African practice that was exploited and this was a way to connect with those farmers even before they were enslaved and oppressed for it … And my instinct was correct – many Africans were enslaved purposely because of their agricultural knowledge and skill.’ For Mitchell, working with the land became a way to repair that trauma and to reframe farming as a ‘strategy of liberation.’ As she became more deeply involved in agriculture, Mitchell felt particularly called to seed keeping, the practice of not only saving seeds, but also preserving and passing down the stories of the cultures from which those seeds came. It’s an important piece of resistance.”

• “Flowing Towards Abundance” (Toby Hemenway, resilience.org; originally published on tobyhemenway.com). In permaculture design class when we learned about “stocks and flows,” I immediately realized why no amount of stockpiled money makes people feel secure. It’s the flow, the knowingness of nature’s flow, that brings real security. Article by the acclaimed author of Gaia’s Garden gives an excellent overview of stocks and flows.

• “Winter Storm Uri … What Went Wrong?” (Amy Stansbury; austincommon.org). Reflections on last winter’s deadly cold spell in central Texas offer lessons in energy preparedness, community resilience. Nice, highly readable graphic summary, with link to detailed report.