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Over the course of recent decades, we (rich-world industrial capitalist humanity) have had repeated opportunities to shrink our staggering consumption of resources. Oil shocks; pandemics; recessions; weather disasters bringing infrastructure downages and economic hardship. All have offered an opportunity to cut back and to reap not only planetary benefits but personal benefits as well.

So now, with the endless wars way ramped-up, we have yet another incentive and opportunity. Will we take it or not?

I know a lot of you really care about the destruction we are wreaking on our planet. And yet, it can be hard to get motivated to change our own daily habits. A lot of people fall into the error of putting thrift in the same category as going on a starvation diet. That’s the wrong way to look at it. Cutting back (in whatever categories you are able, to the extent that you are able) doesn’t only take the pressure off ecosystems and reduce demand for war and genocide, and reduce the financial “fuel” for war and genocide. As if that were not enough.. But aside from all that, it offers immediate personal benefits to you as well.

Consumer spending is something like 70% of the economy. We are the backbone. We can use it for the good, or not.

The good thing is that the benefits are immediate. Back in the early 2000s, when I got started with this low-footprint-living experiment and demonstration, most people seemed to be too wealthy to care about cutting $50 or $100 from their monthly expenses, Back then, I could understand people not being very interested in conservation. It was hard (since I myself was punching every penny in the fight to continue my work), but I could understand. But now? The motives have ramped up.

And additionally, of course, the other reward besides money in your wallet is simplification. A reduction of stuff that you have to pay attention to and worry about is phenomenal for one’s peace of mind. For many of us, that even exceeds the monetary reward. Simply not having to repair all sorts of appliances and systems, for example. Simply not needing electricity very much except for a few small things. i’ve said this repeatedly in my book, on this blog, and in a bunch of my talks that are probably still out there in the ether. So I’m not going to belabor the point more here. Except to remind you that fabulous prize is await you to the extent that you choose to reduce and simplify.

If you would like moral support, my top recommendation is a Facebook group called THE NON-CONSUMER ADVOCATE. You can also, of course, check out the Riot for Austerity categories and get started with your benchmarks. They are posted right here on this blog. If you search and don’t find them, get in touch with me and I’ll help you dig up the link. (Yes, a blog that’s been going on for seven years and counting can get pretty voluminous, and search results don’t always pop up as expected.)

I’ve shared The non-consumer advocate repeatedly on this blog because it’s quite simply the best community I know. Well over 100,000 people from all over the world. Maybe it’s even close to 200,000 by now.

Even if you can’t (or don’t want to) get on Facebook, you can also start something with your circle of friends, your neighborhood watch group, your stitching circle (now there’s a hotbed of thrift tip sharing!), and so on.

And the riot for austerity benchmarks are a super useful framework. But there are other frameworks as well. Mix and match whatever works for you.

And, in closing, a fun terminology note, for those of you who may have never had the pleasure of riding on a sweet oldtimey carousel, and thus might not be familiar with the phrase “brass ring”:

“A brass ring is a small, grabbable ring that a dispenser presents to a carousel rider during the course of a ride. These dispensers are filled with a large number of iron or steel rings and a single or a few brass rings. The rings can then be tossed at a target as the carousel rotates. Typically, a brass ring can be traded for a prize, which is often a free repeat ride. Although they were standard features for carousels during their heyday in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, brass ring dispensers are now rare. The figurative phrase to grab the brass ring is derived from this device.”

(With gratitude to Wikipedia. And BTW please consider making a donation to Wikipedia especially if you have never done so. Supposedly there are only like a couple percent of us who donate ever! Even a few dollars is welcomed.)

(Also just found this marvelous, eye-opening overview of Wikipedia’s fundraising and what it goes to. Small-dollar donations are the majority, and these donations fund a staggering volume of freely available knowledge. Wikipedia is an valuable resource. Another plus I see from a footprint-minimization standpoint is that it’s in text form.)

Love you guys and thank you for the following this obscure little microblog! And deepest gratitude to my golden-hearted “Florida sister” Roseanna (SeaRo’s Designs) for prodding me to start this blog way back around 2018 or whenever it was! Much to my surprise, this labor has become one of my longterm loves!

“Trashtastic” wallet made of potato-crisp bag, staples, clamp-style binder clip.

Shown “à la carte,” and as part of a lightweight “urban utility belt” ensemble which also contains metal cup with hand-stitched koozy-style jacket, + titanium spoon and fork.

#PlanetaryCitizen open-source fashion brand & crafting tips from DEEP GREEN book & blog by jenny nazak. Photos here.

The title of this post is inspired by the stubborn insistence of various government municipalities on commissioning expensive “flood studies” again and again (which invariably seem to lead to huge, high-dollar “solutions” centered on concrete and steel; which “solutions” tragically tend to end up monolithic, rigid, and fragile) … when all we need to know is the PATTERN of how it works.

And that pattern, we already know. The broken water cycle. Leading to the “drought, flooding, wildfire” go-round, lather rinse repeat ad nauseam.

For many years, experts from a widespread range of disciplines — from farming to arboriculture to hydrology to horticulture to environmental sciences, to history and social sciences and the arts and more — have been pointing out the patterns.

And not only subject experts / professionals, but also everyday lay-people, have been pointing out the patterns that they have observed even over the slice of history that is their own lives.

Green Dreamer Kamea (Kaméa Chayne) on substack is someone I have shared extensively on this blog — as well as on my DEEP GREEN socials pages, person-to-person with colleagues, and elsewhere.

She, together with her podcast guests, routinely articulates things in a way that uses just the right words but not too many words. She is poetic and scientific. She seems to strike just the right note, engaging our rationality AND our heart (something that many of us ecosocial activists, however well-meaning and long-toiling, have failed to do).

Again this is just my opinion. But don’t take my word for it; check out her latest entry. Along with sharing the link, I’m going to quote her on here too. As much for my “clip and save” reference as anything else.

PS. Tech note for fellow ecosocial content creators who are struggling to get traction for their messages: Creators who offer capsule summaries of quotable points, and do so in PLAIN TEXT, make their work much easier to share. And, this inclusion of “bullet points” is one of the less exhausting ways to add value to our labor.

Furthermore, in this age of concern about the horrifying ecological impacts and community burdens of giant data-centers, we do want to be as low-bandwidth as possible, and you can’t get a whole lot lower-bandwidth than plain text.

And now without further ado, the link and the quote.

BTW her guest on this installment is Zach Weiss of Water Stories. Water Stories is another organization I have referenced extensively on this blog and elsewhere. If you need visual talking-points for your HOA, local government, neighborhood tree-hater, etc., visit the Water Stories page on YouTube and grab a couple of links to their beautiful and easy-to-understand 2-minute animations of the water cycle.

The substack post with the link to the podcast:

https://kamea.substack.com/p/green-dreamer-zach-weiss Restoring watersheds, revitalizing community, ft. Zach Weiss
Podcast Ep470 | Green Dreamer w/ Kaméa Chayne

And my favorite text quote (I have added boldface to some text for emphasis):

“Highlights I’m still reflecting on…

“This part on the watershed death spiral…

“Green Dreamer Kaméa: This GRIST article reads, ‘Total water storage losses on land, of which groundwater is the largest component, account for 44% of global mean sea level rise, compared to about 37% from Greenland, and roughly 19% from melting in Antarctica.’ This means almost half of sea level rise can be attributed to the loss of water that is being held or at least slowed down in the pores of the land.

“So I want to just start here and invite you to share about this watershed death spiral. And I know the specifics look different in every context, but broadly speaking, how would you introduce people to this picture of how more water is being lost than replenished on land?

“Zach Weiss: It’s like a bank account. If you’re always taking out from the bank account and never putting back in, we all know how that goes. […] The way this manifests itself is what we call the watershed death spiral.

“We’ve lost 87% of the world’s wetlands, deliberately drained and dredged. So we’ve removed the storage capacity of the landscape. We’ve hardened the landscape. We’ve heated the landscape through its exposure to the sun. All of these things make the land reject the rain when it does arrive.

“So that rain comes in, it falls, it runs quickly downstream, leading to a flood somewhere downstream, and then also leading to drought in that area because the water that used to soak into that landscape and slowly flow is just quickly running downstream.

“In some places, the landscape then gets so dry that you start to have big, massive wildfires… because we’ve desertified the landscape, sent all the rainwater away, caused the drought, dried all the organic material into tinder for fire, then the landscape burns and you get these cycles of flood, drought, and fire that we’re seeing increasingly everywhere around the world.

“What’s really disastrous is then as all that open exposed earth absorbs more temperature, absorbs more heat, its ability to hold heat increases exponentially. And so it starts heating up more and more, faster and faster, making these high pressure heat domes that resist the incoming precipitation. So now you get longer periods of drought, the pressure in the system building, and bigger flooding events and hurricanes than ever before.

“I’m fortunate to work all around the world. No matter where you are on the planet, almost, if you have a disturbed ecosystem in your backyard, you are experiencing bigger rain events than normal with longer dry times in between with all the issues that result from both of those things.”

— And, Green Dreamer / Kaméa Chayne goes on to bring up another important and all-too-rarely addressed aspect of things: The necessity to move climate discourses beyond the fixation on carbon. All well worth a read (and a listen if you choose), so I hope you will visit the link.

Please utilize these resources in your ongoing efforts to save the planet from crazy disconnected murderous industrialist capitalist colonialism! And thank you for being part of the solution, the real solutions. Back to nature (no matter how urban you are, which I am very very urban and always will be).

Yours with solidarity and love, jenny

Reminder to self: remember Marta Beckett. When the going gets tough and you feel like you’re toiling in obscurity and not even accomplishing anything. I have a lot of trouble with motivation, but fortunately I have various tips and tricks. And also, a whole bunch of role models.

I first read about Marta Becket back in the 80s or 90s, and her story really captured my heart. I ended up carrying it around with me for years in a binder notebook full of other inspiring people’s stories clipped from newspapers and magazines.

Marta Becket was born in 1924 and died in 2017 at the age of 92. She was a ballerina and a visual artist and a lot more.

She got a flat tire while driving way out west in the desert, and she ended up buying a decrepit old building and turning it into a theater. In her later years she attracted large audiences, but before she had audiences, she just painted an audience on the wall and performed for them. She never gave up sharing her art and passion.

Our work is our work, and the way you know your work is your work is that you just have to do it, regardless of whether anyone seems to be paying attention. It’s what you just have to do. It’s easier to keep going when we remind ourselves that it doesn’t matter if anyone’s paying attention right then.

On that note, I have come to treasure this blog. I never know who is reading or listening, except one or two very special friends who I am so appreciative of. You guys know who you are! But it doesn’t matter. Somehow writing these posts and putting them out into the world, they’re getting out somewhere. Independent and irrespective of any kind of social-media sharing.

It really only takes one person to hear something good and share it with the next person. One person in my community back in Austin heard about permaculture, and he went on to become an expert practitioner, and beloved teacher/mentor of hundreds or even thousands of students. The way he heard about it was on some radio show that happened to be broadcast on a fishing boat he was working aboard in Alaska. NPR interviewing Bill Mollison or something. I’m sure it was filled with crackly static, at least that’s how I picture it, being broadcast across that much land and water. Very distant connection reaching across the airwaves but it found the Motherlode!

What does this and my many other posts about art and creativity have to do with sustainability?

Well, for one thing, the arts give us a doorway into our hearts and reduce our tolerance for wasted time and meaningless drudgery. I have a suspicion that a lot of mindless consumerism is motivated by restlessness: Many people have never had a chance to awaken into their essential human creativity. If you’re out there making the arts a cornerstone of your life, please encourage as many other people as you can to do the same. It’s a service to them and to the planet.

Sustainability about a lot more than green toilet paper, eco-friendly lawn equipment, choosing the right carbon offsets for your weekend flight to Prague for your seventh grand-nephew’s gender reveal, selecting low-VOC paint from the big box store, etc.

Every time i get bogged down in hopelessness, feeling like im toiling in obscurity and pathetic in my flimsy efforts to build and nurture community, Marta Becket is on my short list of people i try to remind myself to remember.

Further exploration:

• “Marta Becket’s Amargosa Opera House” (by Kim Stringfellow; mojaveproject.org, January 2016). https://mojaveproject.org/dispatches-item/marta-beckets-amargosa-opera-house/ “A fortune teller’s prophecy and a fortuitous flat tire led the multitalented doyenne Marta Becket to resurrect and transform Death Valley Junction’s decaying community meeting hall into a gloriously muraled theater where for four decades she has performed her own choreographed ballet and vaudeville acts for an international audience. Her legendary story is not only the subject of the Emmy-winning documentary Amargosa (2000) but one that has captured the imagination of fans from across the globe.”

• “Marta Becket, dancer who built a theater in the desert, dies at 92.” https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/03/arts/dance/marta-becket-dead.html

Today and yesterday I’ve been having so much fun arranging the community art space here at Starshine House / Trailhead 501.

A few days ago when I was sorting through beads and fabric for just a personal project, it occurred to me I think for the first time that straightening and arranging supplies isn’t just a necessary thing for order. I actually think it might be part of the creative process. In other words: In the process of straightening and ordering and categorizing, we come into physical tactile contact with our creative supplies, and this contact generates seeds for different projects.

Also on a somewhat related note, it makes sense to me why raking sand, stringing beads, etc. can be so beneficial for the mind calming and also for creativity.

In today’s rushed world, a lot of people tend to keep their creative supplies (if they even allow themselves to have such supplies), tucked away and not looked at for months or years.

Then when a tiny window opens up in the hectic schedule, we try to get the supplies out to do one specific project, but we get annoyed and frustrated with ourselves because things don’t turn out looking or functioning in a way that we feel happy with. So then we put away the supplies again in their cramped, opaque boxes or cabinets until months or years later …

I’m realizing that, at least for me, I need to just allow myself to sort and categorize without actually “doing a project.”

Just having fun having tactile contact with beads and fabric and all that. Oh, these guys are all the same color, let’s put them in this container, and these fabric pieces which I don’t have an immediate urge to use can go in this big box at the back of the craft shelf, whereas these things that are calling me and I might want to use this week should stay in the clear container front and center etc. etc.

And it seems to be something a little bit more than what I had always assumed it was, which is that if I haven’t gotten my creative things out for a while, I’m “out of practice” and that’s why the project effort falls short.

But the other day it occurred to me differently: Instead of it just being a matter of being out of practice with my tools and materials, I actually think it’s an insufficiency of tactile interaction.

This is a very liberating realization. It takes a lot of pressure off. There’s no pressure to create some perfect item each time. Or even to create any kind of item.

Which is a good thing, because we’re living in a world that’s pretty chock-full of items.

On a related note, I feel like in days of yore, a lot of people’s art urges got channeled into basic daily everyday household items. And I find a lot of beauty and reverence in that. I really enjoy creating or embellishing ordinary household items as opposed to creating something that is “only” a piece of art.

In the generalized ye olden days of yore, I feel like putting a touch of beauty into ordinary objects enabled people to channel the creative urges we all have. And, not incidentally, it brought much-needed beauty into what otherwise would’ve been a pure drudgery life.

Nowadays people go out and make a bunch of money so they don’t have to do old fashion toil and drudgery. And yet, hasn’t it ended up just becoming a different flavor of drudgery, and we often don’t even have every day handmade beauty to draw on, unless we can manage to carve out the time and space to create a bit of beauty. The embroidered flower or initial on a towel; the handmade stencil images on a wall; the handstitched koozies made out of the beer- and soft-drink-company gimme koozies that litter the streets after a festival.

(That said, I love art and always will, even if it’s not functional art. Actually, maybe all art is functional, in that it wakes us up and helps us access our hearts and recharge from the grind. Not only the making of art, but also looking at art made by other people, including both contemporary people and people in other times.)

Looking up from this typing, I see a beautiful jar of beads. They’re already strung, they’re part of basically the whole inventory of a small bead-shop. (A treat that I purchased a few years ago after coming into the life-changing sum of money that I used mainly to buy this house.) A nice local lady was selling them on Facebook or craigslist or something.

I’ve had as much fun using the beads and findings for decorations around the house and outdoor trellis-rooms and such, as I have had making necklaces and earrings and so on.

Same with my fabrics and threads.

Art supplies actually make kind of a pretty decoration in themselves. I clump little groupings of things. Oh hey, there is a still-life waiting to happen! Maybe I’ll make a painting of my jars of beads, sitting just so in the afternoon light.

You can see some pics of one tiny minuscule scintilla of my bead collection over here.

Whether or not it turns into a necklace or a scarf or whatever at that moment, just the process of touching the supplies is it self a valid and joyful activity.

By the way, speaking of another one of my favorite arts — not long ago I found out that a relatively high proportion of ecological landscapers come from a background of arts and literature and humanities, as opposed to, say, “official” landscape architecture or botanical sciences. It’s almost like beauty and ecological consciousness are connected … <wink>

Story coming up; stay tuned. In the meantime, you can see pix here on my deep green Facebook page. (Extra bonus points if you can guess why I was so pleased to find these particular plastic items!)

So, I’m sitting in my kitchen.

Stay tuned for the story; in the meantime check out photos here on my DEEP GREEN fb page.

OK I’m back. So, I was sitting in my kitchen. What’s the big deal, right? Well, until today, my kitchen had just not had any chairs in it. There wasn’t really any reason to have chairs. There are many other rooms in the house, and places outside of the house, for people to sit. And yet, I felt like trying something new in the kitchen. So I put a little wheelie table between two chairs. And I sat in one of the chairs.

Probably sounds silly or trivial, but it felt like I was more fully inhabiting my house than I ever had. That’s a theme of this week in general, as I create the community art space in one of the big rooms. I’m sitting in all of the rooms and using them in the way that I mean for the community to use them.

It struck me that many of us might go through a lot of our lives without ever fully inhabiting even our own bodies, let alone our whole houses.

I might have other things to say about this but I’ll stop for now, and hope you can get a flavor by looking at the photos. There’s just something about a yellow kitchen that has a little nook with chairs. One wonders why I hadn’t thought of it before. But sometimes it takes a little bit of clearing out to generate something new coming in. Not that the chairs or the table were new, they were just in different rooms of the house being used in other ways. Oh, and all of them were old stuff: The rolling table from the curbside luck-tide; and the chairs came from my own childhood home and are full of memories. Cheery shiny red with checkered upholstery seats, they were part of our informal dinner-table setup.