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(Say so many spam emails, social-media ad feed, etc.)

To which I say, No thanks, I prefer to tone & tighten my internalized misogyny! (Actually I prefer to dissolve it entirely; I was just being humorous there.)

How about this too: Tone-police & frighten the heck out of your internalized misogyny! Oh, and by the way, misogyny hurts men too.

Just came across a really interesting article in The New Yorker: Africa’s Cold Rush and the Promise of refrigeration.

I hope you are able to access the whole article, but here are a few snippets that particularly grabbed me:

• “The International Institute of Refrigeration estimates that, globally, 1.6 billion tons of food are wasted every year, and that thirty per cent of this could be saved by refrigeration—a lost harvest of sufficient abundance to feed nine hundred and fifty million people annually. In a country like Rwanda, where fewer than one in five infants and toddlers eat what the World Health Organization classifies as the minimum acceptable diet, such wastage is a matter of life and death.” (And the whole first part of the article gives a detailed portrait of what everyday life involves for small-scale farmers and fishers who eke out a livelihood in the food-supply chain that has essentially no refrigeration.)

• “In Kigali, I met the world’s first professor of cold economy, Toby Peters, from the University of Birmingham, who has spent much of the past three years working to launch aces. When I told him about my journeys alongside Rwanda’s slowly broiling milk, fish, meat, and vegetables, he defined the problem in systemic terms. ‘There is no cold chain in Rwanda,’ he said. ‘It just doesn’t exist.”

• “In the developed world, the domestic refrigerator is only the final link in the ‘cold chain’ — a series of thermally controlled spaces through which your food moves from farm to table. The cold chain is the invisible backbone of our food system, a perpetual mechanical winter that we have built for our food to live in. Artificial refrigeration was introduced in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, but the term ‘cold chain’ gained currency only in the late nineteen-forties, when European bureaucrats rebuilding a continent shattered by war studied and copied American methods.”

• “Cold chains present a double bind; both their absence and their presence have huge ecological costs. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that if global food waste were a country its greenhouse-gas emissions would be the third largest in the world, right behind China and the U.S. On the other hand, the chemical refrigerants and the fossil-fuel energy used to produce cooling already account for more than seven per cent of global emissions — just one per cent less than food loss. As countries like Rwanda refrigerate, those emissions are increasing rapidly. Toby Peters, the aces co-founder, has done the calculations and arrived at a terrifying conclusion: if every country were to have a cold chain similar to the ones the developed world relies on, these emissions would increase fivefold. Seen from that perspective, helping Rwanda develop an energy-efficient cold chain looks less like altruistic development aid and more like enlightened self-interest.”

• “In development literature, much has been made of Africa’s ability to ‘leapfrog’ richer countries. In Rwanda, a country in which a national network of telephone cables was never laid, cell phones became central to daily life far more quickly than in the U.S. The same is true for mobile banking and electronic payments. The hope, then, is that Rwanda and its neighbors can do something similar with refrigeration, bypassing inefficient and polluting technologies in favor of more sustainable solutions and leading the way for supposedly developed countries.”

• “Not only is the way food is refrigerated in the developed world not sustainable; the resulting supply chain isn’t even particularly resilient, as the sight of empty supermarket shelves during the past couple of years has revealed. Meanwhile, the food losses that plague the developing world occur at almost the same rate in the developed world. In the United States, where maintaining the cold chain is the domain of private enterprise, between thirty and forty per cent of the country’s food supply goes to waste in supermarkets, at restaurants, and at home. Leapfrogging in refrigeration will require more than adopting new technology; the cold chain needs to be reinvented from the ground up.”

• “Meanwhile, in Rwanda, as Alice Mukamugema, an analyst at the country’s Ministry of Agriculture, pointed out to me, consumers believe that refrigerated food isn’t fresh. (Americans in the early twentieth century expressed similar fears.) ‘Traders who sell the rejects from the National Agricultural Export Development Board packhouse on the local market even have to put them in the sun for a while, so that they don’t feel cold,’ she said.”

Lots of us in collapse-aware groups have been sharing feelings of mourning and despair. And helping each other experience those feelings rather than hide from them.

A thought though! Maybe it’s just white colonizer culture that’s reaching its collapse point of singularity. Maybe indigenous cultures, which are based on cooperation, connection, and sharing, are going to survive and thrive. Also possibly any subcultures out there that are truly doing the work to reach a point where they are based on cooperation, connection, and sharing. Just a thought.

Here’s an interesting article someone shared in the Deep Adaptation group: “Planetary scientists suggest a solution to the Fermi paradox: Superlinear scaling leading to a singularity” (phys.org). “Several years ago, physicist Enrico Fermi asked a colleague why aliens from outer space have not visited Earth. The two noted that due to the huge size of the universe, it seemed unlikely that Earth alone would harbor intelligent life. … They developed a hypothesis that suggested such rising and falling by alien space civilizations would lead to one of two scenarios. In the first, the civilization would come to realize they were growing too large and would cease traveling to or colonizing other worlds. In the second, they would not recognize their folly and would therefore collapse. From our perspective, both scenarios would have the same outcome–the aliens would not visit us, or even demonstrate evidence of their existence. The distance from them to us would be too far.”

I pay about $160 a year to have this website (including both hosting and domain) (the prices went up this year a bit).

For awhile, I was questioning whether I should continue to pay for it or not, since people mostly don’t seem to be following my “broadcasts” on this “channel.”

But, I realized it’s worth keeping for now, even just as a storage-tank for my ideas. I could download & print it all out and then shut down the website to avoid paying that annual bill, but then I’d have this big, messy, non-“copy/pasteable” stack of paper.

I could just store it on my computer harddrive but no. I could just store my ideas on the social-media cloud but that is a bit precarious and sometimes unwieldy to search.

So, for now, I decide this website is worth the price even just as a word-storage unit. And really, it always serves another purpose as well: it’s my longtime “permanent address” where people who are looking for my help & support can find me.

To any of you who are actually here reading this post … I love you and am here to support your growth and thrival!

Seen often in permaculture, gardening, and also urbanism groups are various versions of the “but fruit trees are messy” comment:

This [idea of planting fruit trees along sidewalks and in other public spaces] floats around… but sadly fruit trees are very messy and attract vermin.

Unkempt fruit trees harbor pests that can damage commercial crops (if there are any in the vicinity).

That said, if cities were willing to care for them it would sure be cool.

There’s a website to share excess produce you’ve grown. Ripe Near Me

My response:

1) Every human settlement attracts vermin. Even if we had no fruit trees, restaurants alone are enough to attract vermin.

2) When more people realize the value of good fresh food, they won’t see a fruit-smudged car windshield, fruit-strewn sidewalk etc. as such a terrible thing. The minor “messiness” will be far overridden by the appeal of nutrition and a full stomach for all.

Extra benefits from public fruit trees, as with any other public trees, include enhanced public safety, heat mitigation, drought-flood regulator.

Right now, in USA at least, the most vocal people are relatively affluent so to them, “it’s easy to just buy fruit at the grocery store; why plant messy trees?”. But as time goes on, more people will be getting a higher awareness about this.

3) Thank you to this particular commenter for sharing “Ripe Near Me”! I had heard of it before but never checked it out. I will go check it out.

P.S. Regarding the title I chose for this blog post: Bonus points and fabulous prizes to the first person who writes me with a correct ID of the little slice of heaven that this title is a call-out to. (If a certain individual, among the people I hold most dear, is still reading my blog as they used to back in the early 2000s unbeknownst to me at the time, they will get this reference right away!)

I’m starting an email newsletter. Aiming to have a readership of about 100 subscribers who are goofball-passionate about low-footprint living, and might want more support and guidance. It will land in your inbox a couple times a month. Bite-sized digest, and special treats for subscribers only. It’s free but it’s only for people who will really be happy to see me in your email inbox. You know who you are! To subscribe, email jnazak at yahoo dot com with “deep green newsletter” in the subject line.

From Solar Cookers International:

SCI’s Side Event presentation at the United Nations High-Level Political Forum (HLPF) is now available for you to watch. SCI discussed solar cooking as a cross-cutting solution in the recovery from COVID-19 and a path to achieving the 2030 Agenda of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Speakers include:

Joshua Murray, Director of Food & Beverage at the Conrad Washington, DC a Hilton property (click here to watch a video of Chef Murray solar cooking on the rooftop of the Conrad Washington, DC)

Caitlyn Hughes, SCI Executive Director

Alan Bigelow, Ph.D., SCI Science Director and United Nations Representative

Mindy Fox, SCI Special Projects Manager

Lynne Slightom, MPA, CFRE, SCI Development Director

Lourdie Racine, Directrice of the Community Center, Marion, Haiti

Fedno Lubin, Photographer, Haiti

Rose Bazile MSN RN, SCI Global Advisor

David Stillman, Ph.D., Executive Director, Public-Private Alliance Foundation

Topics include successful examples from all around the world, including Haiti and Kenya, with tools and resources to scale the solar cooking movement. You can also participate in HLPF by visiting SCI’s virtual exhibit booth here.”

You can watch the recorded video here https://youtu.be/m3Ot_wxDTts ; it’s about an hour and a half.

Solar Cookers International
2400 22nd St, Suite 210 | Sacramento, California 95818
+1 916.455.4499 | info@solarcookers.org