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Brrrr!! A lot of places are getting super-cold weather this winter. Even here in my mild coastal climate in Florida, we’re seeing some near-freezing temps — and I’m hearing from a lot of people elsewhere in the USA and world where temps are waaaaay below zero (whether Celsius or Fahrenheit)!

In my book and elsewhere on this blog, I share some DIY tips for keeping warm in winter. The overall best advice I can give is that it’s easier and more efficient to try to first warm your own body as much as possible (using hats, sweaters, etc.), and help other household members do the same, than to just try to heat all the air in your dwelling to a super-warm temperature. Another useful strategy, especially if your bills are high, is to just pick one main area of the house or apartment to heat, and close off other rooms if possible.

Also: Make use of electric blankets, heating pads, and other radiant heat sources, which use less energy and therefore tend to cost less than trying to heat all the air in your place. They can also provide a lot more warmth because it’s right there next to your body.

Note for people living in cold climates: At the time I wrote my book, I hadn’t yet learned much about high-efficiency woodstoves. I’ve since read quite a bit, and heard first-hand from people who live in very cold climates and successfully heat with wood. In general, I think wood can be the best option for sustainable heating in cold climates, for people living in houses. And, the growing, harvesting, transport, and sale of firewood can create a whole fleet of local cottage industries, offering steady work year-round to independent local businesses, with minimal capital investment required.

Furthermore, by choosing coppiceable trees, we can have our cake and eat it too: Grow trees for heat mitigation, erosion control, and stormwater uptake, while continuously cutting branches for firewood.

To get some current info regarding energy-efficient woodstoves from actual users, I encourage you to check out some realtime testimonials from this thread I just started on Transformative Adventures, asking people in cold climates to share how they heat their homes. People in this thread are sharing all sorts of great information about the various combinations of methods they use: heat pumps, woodstoves (both regular wood and pellet-fueled type), regular ol’ grid-tied electric, solar, and more. Some people commenting on this thread are including information on the monetary cost and amount of fuel they are using to heat their homes. And, several people have posted pics of some really amazing woodstoves they’re using!

My house, built in 1950, used to have a fireplace but some previous owner converted that space into a closet (the brick chimney is still standing, as are the chimneys of many other houses in my historic neighborhood — some still with working fireplaces intact)!

For milder climates like mine, the first low-hanging fruit is generally to insulate the attic or roof. (This also helps keep a home cooler in summer.) My attic has some insulation but can use more. I might someday get the sprayed-in recycled newspaper stuff, which, as a bonus, is mixed with boric acid (good for keeping termite populations down without spraying a bunch of poison in and around the house).

At some point, especially if global weather-weirding starts sending us super-intense winters, I may bring my chimney back into use — probably with a compact wood-burning stove rather than a fireplace, because the stove could be used for cooking as well as heating.

Further Reading:

• “Extreme Cold.” A post I wrote last winter when my friends in Texas were dealing with that deadly deep freeze and the accompanying power outages. Tips on how to dress for maximum warmth, how to create a “room within a room” that can be heated by your body heat and maybe a small candle, etc.

• Living without heat: I have written a lot about my experiment in living without heat but can’t seem to find the posts. Once I find the links I will post them for you. Nutshell: No one should have to live without heat. And cold can kill. But, I have voluntarily done without fossil-powered heat for I think it’s 15 winters now, and I will say it has made me feel a lot less vulnerable as well as saving me hundreds of dollars a year. I do live in a mild climate, but have read articles about people voluntarily doing without heat in very cold climates (artists living in warehouses in NYC or in an old farmhouse in upstate New York, for example), primarily to save money. And unfortunately, a lot of people are forced to live with inadequate heating, be it because of negligent landlords, leaky old buildings, the high cost of fuel, or what have you. Knowing how to layer clothing to trap air, how to create a room in a room, and so on can make the difference between misery and comfort. If you or anyone you know is stuck in a situation with inadequate heating, some of the tips I’ve shared might be helpful.

One of the groups I often mention in here as one of my “go-to’s” is Deep Adaptation. I visit this Facebook group regularly, get a lot out of the discussions and do my best to contribute.

Several worldwide Zoom events are coming up; visit deepadaptation.info/events to get the links to each event and find out more. As the DA organizers state at the top of the event page, “These events are intended for people who are already ‘collapse-aware’: who recognize the possibility of societal collapse from climate change and environmental degradation.”

Mon. Jan. 24, 6:30 – 8:00 pm UTC: DA Welcoming Circle – you are welcome to come!

Tues. Jan. 25, 10:00 – 11:00 am UTC: Deep Adaptation Q&A with Stephen G Wright

Tues. Jan. 25, 5:30 – 7:30 pm UTC: Well at the End of the World

Tues. Jan. 25, 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm UTC: NVC and Diversity – Experiments in Connecting across Differences

Wed. Jan. 26, 5:00 – 7:00 pm UTC: Deep Relating (Eu/Americas)

Thurs. Jan. 27, 5:00 – 7:00 pm UTC: DA Volunteer Community Call

Fri. Jan. 28, 2:30 – 3:00 pm UTC: Songs of One Breath

Fri. Jan. 28, 5:30 – 7:00 pm UTC: Earth Listening

Sat. Jan. 29, 7:00 – 9:00 pm UTC: DA Education Group Meeting

Sun. Jan. 30, 6:30 – 8:00 pm UTC: Wider Embraces (EU-Americas)

In mainstream society in the wealthy industrialized nations, it can be extremely challenging and sometimes exhausting to choose a lifestyle that goes against the consumerist current. This is my short list of my go-to groups for tips, emotional support, and camaraderie. I hope you find some or all of these groups helpful along with my book and this blog.

As I write this, my local paper is relentlessly publishing articles promoting irresponsible consumerism “to bring back the economy.” Fly fly fly, buy buy buy! If you want an antidote, check out the following groups. Even if some of the discussion can be grim, I find there’s a refreshing quality to facing what’s going on, with similarly minded folks.

Each group has a slightly different focus. Some are more nuts and bolts tips (what to do with so many glass jars you don’t want to throw away) whereas others (like Deep Adaptation) get into deep existential questions and often bring up parallels between facing societal collapse and biospheric collapse and facing our own deaths. And the Transformative Adventures one has a focus on creativity and finding one’s right livelihood amid the dysfunctional mainstream society. Hope you find these as lifesaving as I do! Most of us can’t go it alone. There is power in numbers; these groups link tens of thousands of people around the world. Together we boost our creativity and make a difference.

• Zero Waste, Zero Judgement Facebook group

• The Non-Consumer Advocate Facebook group

• Degrowth – join the revolution Facebook group

• Deep Adaptation Facebook group

• Permaculture in Action: Transformative Adventures! Facebook group

(I wrote the above post this morning after seeing yet another rah-rah consumerist article in my local paper. They run nationwide stuff from the wire services, so the trend might be reaching your local paper too. Here is the rant I wrote in the wee hours this morn when I couldn’t sleep after reading today’s paper on my phone):

(Warning, rant ahead). I can’t believe the consumerist nonsense Daytona Beach News-Journal keeps churning out. Spend, spend, spend! Fly, fly, fly! I guess on some people’s imaginary planet there is no climate crisis. Sorry, I have generally been supportive of our local paper but they are promoting a lot of heavy consumerism these days. We need a new basis for the economy other than people buying mountains of consumer goods and flying all over the place to escape their humdrum and/or rat-race lives. What if the press were to start running articles on how people could build lives they don’t have to escape from.

Oh, and also (general note, not related to anything I’ve seen today or this week, but just a lot in general) — the gardening section of the paper needs to stop promoting ecologically damaging practices like loading our yards with fancy exotics, and instead start running more articles from Florida-based experts. Now more than ever, we need to be promoting native landscaping, food gardening, heat mitigation, and restoration of the water cycle.

Oh, on that note I do always really appreciate “The Darwinian Gardener” column by Mark Lane; one of the most ecologically sound things we can do as everyday people is ease up on the fussbudget landscaping. Mark’s column always makes a good case for common sense, while being very entertaining.

Rant over (for now).

And, for further reading, this absolute gem of a post by David at Raptitude — one of my longtime favorite writers on the various daily aspects of human mind, human existence. As David astutely observes in this latest post on his blog, “Everything Must Be Paid For Twice.”

I get various versions of a question that boils down to: Will electric cars fix everything and give us a clean green future? Short answer: No. A switch from gas-powered to electric might help reduce carbon emissions but it’ll also bring a host of environmental issues, while retaining the social problems associated with a car-dependent society.

It’s not that I’m totally anti electric car; just that they are not a magic fix.

The materials used to make the batteries come with serious environmental consequences.

Also, switching from gas-powered to electric cars doesn’t fix the deeper problems caused by our society’s excessive automobile-dependence. (Obesity and other health problems; social problems such as lack of neighborhood cohesion; traffic congestion; injuries and fatalities from car crashes.)

We still need to diversify our transportation options; make it easier for people to get around without having to own a car. Being stuck with a car payment is still being stuck with a car payment, whether the car is powered by electricity or gas.

Also, it’ll be no more safe for kids to play outside if the traffic speeding down their street is electric-powered than if it’s gas-powered.

And for grownups, sitting in traffic is still sitting in traffic, regardless of how the cars are powered.

Roads and parking infrastructure themselves have a high eco footprint as well as making places hotter and less pleasant. Think about the places in the world that you dream of visiting or retiring to. I bet the places most of us dream about have lots of natural beauty, and charming narrow streets with cute little pubs and shops, and not a lot of roaring traffic and big-box sprawl as we have here in Everytown, USA. What if we could make our own streetscapes more charming and inviting, and our everyday lives less hectic with long-distance commutes and sitting in traffic. Then maybe we wouldn’t feel so much need to “escape” our everyday lives. (I’m lucky; I already live in a beautiful place where I love to be. We still do have a lot of issues related to car-dependency here too though, and I’m trying to promote a shift to make our area more walkable, bikeable, and served by buses and maybe a cute little trolley.)

The easiest and cheapest way to make a car instantly more green is to put more people in it! In other words: carpool, get by with one car for the whole household if you can, and so on.

Further Reading:

• “Developing countries pay environmental cost of electric car batteries” (unctad.org): “Growth in electric car sales is great news for the fight against climate change, but the mining of the minerals used in their batteries poses serious risks for the environment.”

• “The curse of ‘white oil’: Electric vehicles’ dirty secret” (theguardian.com): “The race is on to find a steady source of lithium, a key component in rechargeable electric car batteries. But while the EU focuses on emissions, the lithium gold rush threatens environmental damage on an industrial scale.” But, as they describe in the article, not only the mining companies but also some everyday people are benefiting economically from the boom, so fixing this is not going to be simple. The article mentions a livestock farmer in a mountainous area of northern Portugal, who’s now making good money from mining lithium on his land. People have struggled to live off the land and in fact all of his friends have gone overseas in search of better-paying work. Echoes of the former coal boom in another poor mountainous region, Appalachia, which blew off mountaintops and destroyed rivers but people are still fighting for coal jobs because they put food on the table.

• Some cities are actually looking at reducing large areas of asphalt. For example, Minneapolis is looking at shrinking its segment of interstate to a boulevard.

My actual “official” occupation, listed on my tax forms, is “Sustainability Educator, Self-Employed.” But I like “Climate Educator” and “Climate Communicator” too. Then again, “Zombie Apocalypse Concierge” has a nice fun ring to it, huh? But that one might spark some unwanted extra attention from the IRS.

My approach to my self-defined job is: I wrote a book, and have a blog, and do public speaking, and offer consultations, and have a pretty big presence on social media, to popularize low-footprint living as a deliberate lifestyle choice for privileged people in the consumer countries (starting with my country, USA). I intend to write fiction also. And, I have once or twice done stand-up comedy at an open mic down the street. About biospheric collapse, yes. Sometimes humor and story gets more attention than straight talk.

I feel that if the highest-consuming people can actually make it cool and stylish to live a very small footprint, we’ll shrink down to our fair share, reduce suffering on the planet, and at least maybe soften the worst impacts of climate change.

This to me is the most ethical choice I can make, given that climate change disproportionately affects billions of people around the world who have done little or nothing to cause it.

In addition to advocating voluntary low-footprint living among rich people in the consumer societies, I also teach and promote permaculture design.

I think there are lots of ways to be a climate educator, and if you are interested in having such a job description, let me know if I can help you by answering any of your questions!

If I had a do-over, what would do in my life, that I have not done? Or what would I not do? This reflection is prompted by various threads I’ve appreciated lately in Deep Adaptation, SC-FIRE, Transformative Adventures, and other Facebook groups where I hang out for deep serious conversations about what’s up on the planet and how we face it.

What would I not have done? Well, plenty of things; most of us make mistakes. In my life I have committed some transgressions I consider to be quite grave. And I have made amends to the best of my ability and understanding. Some were sins of commission; many others were more sins of omission (not being there for the people I love most; not giving of my time; hiding my struggles which might have offered my loved ones a useful reference point for weathering hard times and coming out actually better off than if everything had always been easy; shrinking from difficult-but-needed conversations).

There is something I feel I have not finished making amends for, that I am still working on. Since I have done my “bucket list,” I guess I would call my not-yet-atoned-for sins of omission — things I should have done but did not do — to be sort of an “anti-matter bucket-list.”

I love my work (self-employed sustainability educator / climate communicator), and have no regrets about my career path though it has been challenging in many more ways than one. And I have fulfilled any other aspiration I had that might be described as a “bucket list” item.

One item was, crazy as it might sound to most people, to live in a little camper in an RV park. I got to do that starting back in 2000, when I lived in Austin and was getting divorced. I moved from the house I shared with my husband at the time to the coolest little urban RV park. And I lived there for 10 years, loving it the whole time til my Dad’s sudden passing, which prompted me to reflect on things, and in 2010 I moved to Daytona Beach. Dad’s passing made me realize I had been carrying around this intention that I was going to live by the ocean “someday” — and at almost 50 years old, I asked myself when the heck was “someday,” and what better time than now? So, I am now living what was my big main remaining bucket-list item, and I love it every day.

Bucket-list things I got to fulfill as a younger adult: Travel overseas. Live and work overseas. Learn other languages. More recently: Write a book.

My last item on the bucket list was learning to ride a motorcycle, which I have been doing over the past couple of months with a little 2006 Honda Rebel 250! It is so much fun! And is boosting my balance and coordination; and is imparting rich lessons about how joyfully rewarding diligence and persistence can be. A thing I have only caught onto relatively recently in life.

(Eco footprint note: My motorcycle rides have used about 2 gallons of gasoline since October, and I factor it in to my carbon budget.)

Well, I do aspire to write other books, definitely including some fiction, so I guess I still do have a bucket-list after all. So, I’ll just keep writing and painting and building community and trying to help more people navigate their own paths to inner peace and happiness.

What I would NOT do, that I did til it was too late, is put off difficult conversations with family members, mainly my Mom. Really I would have tried so much harder to communicate to her that I was (am) engaged in respectable work, which was and is: raising awareness of urgent planetary issues so we might have time to act before it’s too late for all of humanity; and showing people how they could live abundantly while also doing good in the world. That I was not, contrary to her perception, just bumming around haphazardly; not just following purely recreational whims just because I was out there in various places in the world, and because I was finding it most effective and rewarding to do my work thru a mix of channels (painting, writing, public speaking, teaching — solar cooking; a summer art camp on a farm, etc.) instead of having a “proper office job.”

I would have told her that my choice of career path was (is) a deep calling, had been incubating in me since really quite early childhood, was (is) absolutely non-optional to me, and was directly motivated by my love of fellow humans and our beautiful planet. And, that that love in turn was a direct reflection of the values that she and Dad imbued us kids with growing up. As was my pursuit of art, writing, and other supposedly “not secure” paths. My first art teacher was my own mother! And she was the one who first put into us kids’ heads that we should live our own lives and aim for the stars. I would have reminded her of that, and thanked her so much.

I shirked other difficult conversations with her too. Basically what it all boils down to is that I would NOT have given up trying to communicate how much I loved her and valued her insights. One specific, I would have found a way to convey that I wanted her to please follow her doctors’ advice about self-care so we could have her with us for a much longer time; that I wanted to spend the rest of my life deepening my connection with her; that I wished she and I could talk more about real things and not just the weather.

Building on the lesson of what I would NOT have done, I’m doing my best to break the ice and wade into the waters of beyond-surface conversations with the people I love who are still here, while we are all still sharing this gift of our existence on earth together. And maybe this post will help some of you who might be navigating this kind of stuff too. Ah, how much we hang back in the safe zone when we think we have time!

Further Exploration:

• For having the “difficult conversations” with family members who are in serious, end-of-life-type medical situations: Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End, book by Atul Gawande. Dr. Gawande has written some excellent articles on this subject as well. I loved this book and encountered it at just the right time to have potentially helped my Mom live longer or have more peace or both, but I didn’t feel confident enough to bring things up to my Mom by myself. I tried enlisting another family member to help me by reading the book, but they were not receptive because I presented the book in a timid manner without enough explanation for why I wanted them to read it, and I gave up way too easily. It came down to not really feeling my opinion was valid. Don’t give up! If you feel something could really be for the good, go ahead and speak up; risk being thought of as offensive or crazy or flaky. What’s the worst that could happen?

• On holding your own, taking yourself seriously, not losing sight of the fact that your work is honorable and useful, your viewpoint is valid, etc.: I had studied and practiced all this stuff for decades, in countless hours of therapy, books, courses, etc., but maybe for some of us it’s a task that requires ongoing maintenance. I probably needed to just keep a notebook handy or something with a reminder of good stuff I had done, ways I was helping to make the world a better place. Ironically, even throughout this time I was out there doing things in my professional life: teaching classes, giving public talks, being asked to serve on boards, writing and self-publishing my book, and stuff. But deep down I think I still bought into some assessment of myself as “kooky” and not a real professional and not worth taking seriously. What can I say: Do as I say, my friends, not as I did! Here’s a short video I posted on my YouTube channel a couple weeks ago: Beware of Labels — Don’t Sell Yourself Short.

The following I wrote in response to a post by someone who’s exploring what their future travel might look like and seeking other people’s take on this topic. Some of this I have said before on this blog, so it may be repetitive for some of you. FWIW though in case some of you might find this helpful:

I traveled a lot for work from about 1995-2010, including a few international flights. At one point I took 11 cross-country flights in one year! (I live in USA.)

Other than my parents’ funerals I have not flown since 2010, and have taken a pledge not to. A few years ago I retroactively purchased carbon offsets (Gold Standard) to offset every flight I could remember taking in my adult life. I don’t delude myself into thinking I could literally zero-out every negative impact of my travel, but I wanted to do what I could.

Now I travel by train or bus to see family or friends once or twice a year. It’s enough; I savor every moment and take nothing for granted.

I love “traveling” on foot or by bicycle in my own city and region. Always new discoveries.

Probably if I lived in Europe I would have walked or bicycled and taken trains all over the Eurasian continent, and might never have set foot in a plane, but who knows.

I still might walk or bicycle around the USA someday.

I wouldn’t want to deny anyone the joys and learning experiences of travel, especially people who have never gotten to travel. (I grew up in a military family so travel was woven into our lives as we moved to a different place every couple of years, and drove across the country to get from one assigned place to the next.)

Back when I was in my 20s (I’m 60 now), I flew to the UK and stayed there five wonderful weeks, traveling around by train and bus and foot. At one point in my planning I was tempted to do the “American thing” and cram every European country into my itinerary, and rush around, but I realized that held no joy for me.

Also as a young woman I got to live in Japan for five years (teaching English). During that time I was able to travel all around Japan by train, bus, and foot.

In retrospect, there were a number of trips I took (by plane and also by car) that probably did not significantly enrich my life or anyone else’s. If I had a time machine I would choose differently. Carbon offsets, and choosing differently from now on, are the next best thing.

I do love experiencing other countries and cultures but have been able to satisfy that by exploring images and reading online. And also, believe it or not, by participating in groups like this one where there are people from all over the world. The main appeal of travel for me has really mainly always been talking to different people and seeing how they live, what everyday life is like in different places. And I don’t have to leave my place to experience that.

On New Year’s Eve, I immensely enjoyed the Deep Adaptation Zoom gathering, which was worldwide and lasted 24 hours. You could wander in and out all day as your time and sleep schedule permitted, and that’s what I did! It was lovely talking with so many people from various countries in realtime. And I love seeing what the insides of people’s homes look like also. Each person’s Zoom screen is like a really wonderful animated postcard.

One choice I have made in my life was to decide to move to a place that offered the type of physical setting I loved most and would be happiest to wake up to every day. For me, that is a city by the beach. I moved here at age 50 and have built close ties here with my immediate neighbors and throughout the city and region. Honestly I rarely feel the urge to leave, except to visit my family. My favorite trip is the 3-minute walk to the ocean, over the small rise of the dunes at the end of my street.

Every place is prone to one kind of disaster or other, and I have emergency evac plans in place, and have friends in other cities I could make a life with if I need to leave here (and they know they have the same offer from me if they need to leave their places).

In October I bought a small used Honda motorcycle which I ride around on short trips for pleasure. I’ve used about two gallons of gasoline so far and I account for it in my carbon budget.

Someday I might get a wild urge to ride all the way to Miami (about 500 km). If I do that, I’m sure it’ll feel like an epic adventure. Then again, I could walk or bicycle there, which would be even more of an adventure!