Author: jennynazak

This guy disconnected from the electrical grid and water for eight months — in Manhattan. (Joshua Spodek; arstechnica.com) He learned a lot; great article. Many of his experiences are similar to mine.

I actually have been thinking about this very thing lately, as we had a significant electric repair bill last week and are now facing what might be a significant plumbing repair bill.

Was just thinking about this. So many permie-oriented people romanticize moving out to the sticks and “living off-grid.” I do it in my urban place when I want to, and would do it all the time except I have “civilian” housemates who I need to provide running water & electricity for.

If it were just me here or if i had permie housemates, I’d very likely just turn off the watermain; we have enough rainwater, and also have a well (which a friend helped me retrofit with a hand-pump).

I’ve always felt like having indoor running water was a bit overrated for the cost & risk. At one point I lived without running water inside my home for 10 years, and this was in the heart of a city. I came home to my trailer one day to find a flood. Rather than call a plumber to find and fix the leak, I just shut the indoor water off. And bought a six-gallon water container with a tap. I’d refill the container every few days from an outdoor tap.

And re electricity, when it comes right down to it, I really only need electricity to charge my phone (although i cook on an electric burner & heat water with an electric kettle because it’s convenient).

None of this is to brag. I just want people to be able to work around outages; know they have options; not feel they have to panic; not get charged inordinate amounts of money for repairs.

Go read that article; he describes in detail how he did it and how he ended up making some changes permanent.

I really like his attitude, as embodied in this quote from the article:

“Attitude was more important than technology, though. Attitude made my setup doable. I’m not suggesting that “because I could do it, you can do it,” but I did tell myself that if humans could do without power for 300,000 years, then I could do so for a month.

“The experiment inspired me to learn from indigenous cultures about their practical knowledge of doing without power, including from guests on my podcast who lived among the San in the Kalahari Desert, Hadza in Tanzania, Kogi in Colombia, Tsimane in Bolivia, and Matsés in Peru. Some cultures have lived tens to hundreds of thousands of years with no electrical power—talk about resilience—and continue to choose not to adopt it.

“From them, I learned to appreciate cultural activities with friends, family, and community, like preparing food, making clothes, gathering plants, singing, dancing, and storytelling. I switched from seeing these things as luxuries to experiencing them as time and money savers. I still live in Manhattan, but I now feel I’m living in a different culture, one that values resilience, creativity, humility toward nature, and responsibility to others affected by my actions.

“Regardless of any wider effects of my experiment, it has been important to me personally. A biography of Abraham Lincoln led me to a quote of his: ‘Nothing is more damaging to you than to do something that you believe is wrong.’ In polluting as much as I was for my comfort and convenience, I was doing something I believed was wrong. Resolving that issue has at least helped me sleep better at night.”

The comment “There are just too many people” (and variations on it) pops up a lot in eco discussions online. It’s usually well-off people leading a typical upper-middle-class American lifestyle who are saying this.

A couple of my recent responses to “too many people” comments:

• Actually it’s not that we have too many people; it’s just that we have too many cars for the number of people.

• Fortunately it’s not that there are too many people (that would be tricky because are some of us willing to step up & volunteer to be killed?); it’s that the people in the rich consumerist industrialized countries (mainly USA) have a huuuuuuge footprint. People in most of the world have a tiny fraction of the typical USA resident’s footprint, consume far fewer resources per capita.

I say fortunately because we in the USA are only a tiny share of the world population, so if we get our act together and make thrift the cool thing instead of consumerism & excess being the cool thing, it’ll go a long way. The daily habits of mainstream USA put huge pressure on people & ecosystems worldwide, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

One encouraging trend is the “rewilding” movement, also known as Homegrown National Park. Many people are now rewilding their suburban and urban yards, and the effect is huge.

Another movement that’s gaining traction is Strong Towns, which is about reintroducing sustainable design into our towns & cities, so the landscape no longer needs to be dominated by cars and roads.

Also: The permaculture design movement is longstanding, and growing.

Yet another positive movement, though it has not yet caught on to a widespread degree, is the Degrowth movement. Check out the Facebook group Degrowth – join the revolution.

(FB post I made this morn in BNW News. Feel free to adapt this to your own neighborhood group, congregation etc.)

Foraging for delicious nutritious wild native plants that grow on the beachside & throughout our bioregion. The things we call “weeds” have names and offer many benefits in addition to maintenance-free, unique bioregional beauty.

Lunch today will include fresh tasty greens! Too many of the veggies I’m seeing from the store, including sometimes even the organic local veggies, are yucky and slimy from being stored in plastic.

NOTE! Photo is for visual enjoyment only; do not try to ID plants from a photo. NEVER eat wild plants unless you know what you are doing. Also: To protect other species who depend on native plants, and to protect ecosystem health, never take a whole plant or even part of a plant unless you know what you are doing. And never take the first plant you see, because it might be the only one of that species in the area.

Daytona Beach Permaculture Guild offers foraging walks in the Main Street area of Daytona Beachside, & in our city’s core historic neighborhoods on the mainland. Comment below or PM me if you are interested.

In permaculture design, “Zone Zero” is inside the house. For me, having Zone Zero organized is a very beneficial thing that ripples out into all other zones of my life.

Lately I’m into pondering various ways for housemates to share stuff, reducing the need for each of us to buy/have/keep track of our own everything.

Today, on the backside of each of the house’s main entry doors, I put up hangers for the reusable shopping bags. Anyone in the house can take any shopping bag (or umbrella, visor etc.) to use.

The hangers were things I scrounged awhile back from that fabulous emporium known as “curbside”. Another prime source of our household items is the stray stuff left in the garage by previous occupants of the house. We go “shopping” in our own house and find stuff we didn’t even know or remember was there!

I have hung my handmade bead necklaces on some of the doorknobs, where they do double duty as interior decoration and grab & go personal adornment. Anyone in the house can grab necklaces off the doorknobs to wear for the day if they want, though so far it tends to be just me.

And in the common livingroom area, there’s a laptop computer which I recently bought used and decided to have it be a “house computer.” Anyone living/staying here can use the computer. (I store my personal files on a memory stick and backup USB drive.) But, mostly we each just use our own phones as our computer. Still, I like the concept of a house computer and it can be handy to have a laptop rather than a phone for some tasks.

It’s amazing what a difference these kinds of little things can make in people’s ability to share a space without things becoming too crowded or cluttered. I have literally seen people move out of perfectly good houses/apartments because they couldn’t see solutions to their Zone Zero space challenges.

Reading this over, it seems kind of mundane and obvious so I almost thought it was too trivial to post and came close to deleting it. Yet these little things make me happy and seem to help, so maybe others of you will find it useful and fun too.

See pics with the FB post here for as long as the whim of Zuck shall permit.

#ZoneZero #HouseSharing #Experiments

UPDATE: My sharing of this post in the Transformative Adventures group has elicited some fantastic comments!

Thank you to Australia-based fellow permie Delldint Megan Fleming for contributing the following. So inspiring!

“I also live in a permaculture sharehouse. I provide a house computer and landline phone for anyone to use. We have an op shop box that we put things in for others to take. Every so often if no-one in the house wants the contents we donate it further afield. We have a free shelf out on the street frontage with a fridge, many people donate food there to each other. We actively cultivate gifting economy in our local area and are part of a widening circle of friends who help each other out for friendship rather than trade.”

And:

“Last week we set up a free box of clean bags at our free shelf and a sign ‘Walking to the shops? Forgotten a bag? Clean bags are in the box under the shelf’ This morning I noticed all the bags were gone, then an hour later someone else had refilled the box 🙂 likewise there is a cupboard full of clean jars for jam making etc. Today is very hot and the shelf is empty, so I changed the blackboard to say ‘You are welcome to fill your water bottle at the tap behind the shelf'”

And from another Transformative Adventures member, Nora Hauk:

“I think being very intentional about shared items in collective spaces is a good idea. In my experiences living cooperatively (in intentional cooperative houses), there are times when one housemate’s items spill into/ overtake common spaces, often narrated as ‘they are there for anyone to use’ but in practice are only used by that housemate. Intentional discussions about those common areas were really crucial for deciding how to use that space. What feels like sharing for one person may not for someone else and that’s okay.

“I’ve visited cohousing communities where beautiful shared workshop/craft space has been totally taken over by a single person’s piled up stuff because they are unwilling to throw it away and want to ‘share.’ To me, this is a genuine challenge of any type of cooperative living: how to genuinely share space, and things within it.”

So true, all of that. Very important! I once worked in an office where a well-intentioned community bookshelf started out as a great asset but over time devolved into a graveyard for people’s unwanted books and magazines.

Now, I should mention that my house is not an intentional permaculture cooperative house per se. Rather, it’s a house where I implement permaculture design principles to the greatest extent possible, while accommodating my “civilian” housemates. It’s a grand experiment. Many of the “sharing” experiments I’m doing are largely still theoretical.

For example, although the livingroom is a space I have made available for common use, both housemates prefer to treat their rooms as micro-studio apartments and stay in there most of the time when they are home.

One housemate does use the kitchen cooktop a bit, but they each also do a lot of microwave cooking in their own rooms.

As for the grab & go necklaces … well, both of my current housemates are men who don’t wear jewelry, so the point is admittedly moot.

Still, I treat the common areas as if I were sharing them fulltime. So, no leaving my personal stuff in a common area unless I’m in there using it. My office setup, crafting supplies, etc get picked up and put away in my own room each night or as soon as I’m done using them for the day.

This self-imposed discipline is something I find very helpful to my ongoing design experiments aimed at creating “sharing structures.”

I’m sitting enjoying a book after dinner and suddenly realize I am hearing a marching band. Sounds like it’s coming from the next block! In fact, it’s coming from a couple miles west of here, on the other side of the bridge. The Intracoastal Waterway amplifies sounds. My guess is that I’m hearing a practice session of the Bethune-Cookman University marching band. But it could be a high school or other school band. What a treat!

Almost daily, I am treated to the amplified whistles of passing freight-trains, courtesy of that riverine sound-magnifier that lies between our barrier island and the train tracks. I especially love hearing the richly melodic train whistle, the clacking of the wheels and chuffing of the engine, the metallic sigh of the tracks, late late at night when all else is quiet.

And when there’s a race at the Speedway we can sometimes hear the cars vrooming even though the Speedway is 5 miles from here.

A banquet of human sounds intensified by nature!

Treats such as the sounds carried to our doorstep by the “Intracoastal Amplifier” are everywhere, every day, all around us, for free. I try to always take time to appreciate them.

What sort of rare or quirky treats are brought to you by your natural surroundings?

A very knowledgeable fellow permie in the Transformative Adventures group hailed this <link to 53-minute video titled “Homestead Paradise, got barren land, purchased it at a profit”> as “one of our best permaculture sites.” (“Our” being the global permaculture movement.)

OK so I watched the first minute or so and already what I would consider the most “permaculture” aspect of it seems to fall apart, when the group of 3 young couples/families who started to buy a piece of land together (yayy!! great to hear! we need more of this!) ends up falling apart, and it’s just one couple living on acres of remote land. I would tentatively say this looks like a good and admirable example of permaculture-informed land restoration, but seems lacking in the community aspect which has tended to be the most scarce and most sorely needed aspect of permaculture.

— BUT without wading through an entire 53-minute video (which I may at some point be up for but probably no time soon), I freely admit my conclusion might be premature. I’m going to see if I can find a website or something where I can read about these folks, as I tend to find videos tedious & too time-consuming unless they are super short.

It could be that they are building community by becoming part of the social/economic ecosystem of the nearest town or something.

Another factor in whether or not it’s permaculture, is the notion of “profit.” Is profit inherently anti-permaculture? Some would say yes; some might say it depends what they are doing with the “profits.” If they are returning profits as surplus to the land and community, then yes that could be a good demonstration of the third ethic of permaculture design.

One thing inherently anti-permaculture is the “homestead” concept and word, which originates with our pioneer/colonizer culture roots. The colonizer government encouraged and incentivized our European-American settler ancestors to spread themselves very thinly across huge expanses of the continent as part of its policy to eradicate indigenous peoples. I do think more of us in the permaculture movement are catching on to this and are shifting out of the “homestead” terminology and mind-set. The lack of community created by this settlement pattern was not only genocidal to indigenous peoples and destructive of the land; it also had a deeply harmful impact on the settlers themselves, in terms of lack of community. Something that persists to this day among us Anglo/Euro-Americans.

Final note: From his voice and vibe, the guy does sound like a genuinely nice person rather than some rah-rah permie braggy bro who are so common in the “permaculture homestead” neighborhood of YouTube.

PS. Here is a permaculture success story I would like to see: Several people/couples/families embark on a plan to purchase a piece of land together, but their plans run aground on interpersonal conflict. Here’s how they SURMOUNTED their differences, formed a pod, and restored the land while becoming an asset to the surrounding social ecosystem too.

Better yet, I would like to see land “ownership” cease to be a thing, and am listening to indigenous people to find out more about how we can bring this about.

Update: A fellow member of the TA group commented in response to my comment: “Jenny Nazak I think you should reserve your judgement until you see his system and watch the video, I did find some of your conclusions here premature and acknowledged by the video itself.” — In reply, I thanked him and told him I accept his word. (If I get around to wading through that 53-minute video, I’ll update my observations as needed.)

Update 1/7/23: After letting it percolate, I realize my critique is directed at us as the permaculture design movement, rather than directed at this site or its occupants. Specifically, I see a problem with the term “permaculture site” as we are using it in the permaculture design movement.

In the permaculture design movement, the phrase “permaculture site” has come to be used to signify a (typically rural) agricultural site or a “homestead.” The more accurate term would be “permaculture-inspired farm,” “permaculture food forest,” and so on.

It might seem like I’m nitpicking, but bear with me.

Permaculture is a set of design principles and ethics that are meant to sustainably address basic human needs: food, water, shelter, transportation, energy, community.

The principles and ethics of permaculture design are applicable to all facets of the human-built environment. It’s possible (and desirable) to apply permaculture principles to the design of neighborhoods, factories, organizations, shopping centers, power plants, banking, and just about anything else we humans create.

It has therefore always irked me to no end that we as a movement have developed a habit of synonymizing “permaculture site” with “rural agricultural homestead.” It’s very damaging to the movement, and it detracts from a lot of people’s excellent and much-needed work on the many other aspects needed for a sustainable culture.

I can’t even count the number of times I’ve heard someone apologetically say they weren’t “doing permaculture” because they weren’t growing food on a site in a certain type of manner. Meanwhile, they were operating a tool lending library, or coordinating shared transportation with neighbors, or helping kids with reading, or leading people on urban foraging walks, or having a whole nesting stack of family-owned local businesses that are supporting multiple households while leaking immense value, and compounding value, into the wider community (Eric B, I’m talking to you!). All of that IS DOING PERMACULTURE — and yet even people who have taken a PDC and been involved with the permaculture design movement for years, applying the principles and ethics to enrich their communities and design their own lives, are prone to fall into the vegetable apology fallacy. Ugh! Can we stop this please!

To get back to the original seed of this post … the site hailed as “one of our best permaculture sites” looks to be a fine example of permaculture-informed agriculture and land restoration, and furthermore it looks like someone is making a livelihood of it. Right livelihood is a key concept in permaculture.

Saying “farm inspired by the principles and ethics of permaculture design” is sort of a mouthful though. I think “permaculture farm” is acceptable shorthand. And in a similar vein: permaculture food forest; permaculture land-restoration site; permaculture eco-restoration project.

And, along these lines, I’m looking forward to seeing some forward-thinking developer build a permaculture apartment complex in my neighborhood, as we need more housing and more density in the urban core area of our little city. I would also love to see, in walking distance on one of the many vacant parcels of commercially zoned land in my neighborhood, a permaculture shopping center where the businesses form a mutually supportive social and economic ecosystem amongst themselves, as well as meeting the basic everyday needs of customers.

I actually think the Strong Towns movement is very much doing permaculture, though they don’t officially call it that. (I saw a great article on their blog awhile back that summarizes how Strong Towns principles overlap with the permaculture design principles.)

Permaculture sites can come in every imaginable variety, to meet an array of human needs. What kinds of permaculture sites would you like to see or build in your neighborhood?

In closing, a quote from Bill Mollison, co-originator of the permaculture design principles, ethics, and movement: “You can read 1000 books on organic gardening. Permaculture is about where you bank your money and how you spend it.”

Further Exploration:

• List of articles at Strong Towns that reference permaculture: https://actionlab.strongtowns.org/hc/en-us/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&query=permaculture (Thanks so much Sandy K!)

Thank you to all who listened and called in with great questions! For those who wanted to tune in but could not make it, here is the recording.

My guest appearance on CODB radio show today, talking about the importance of trees & how we can address flooding by working with nature. On the show, I shared about my “Green Daytona 2027” fiction piece that I circulated by email a couple of months ago.

If you missed it and want to hear it, here is the recording of the Facebook Live.

Thank you always to City of Daytona Beach Community Relations Director L Ronald Durham for being such an outstanding host, and tireless supporter of environmental awareness, respecting & cherishing our planet and all of Her creatures!!