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People often want to know (rightly) if this or that category of stuff gets recycled. And people often get upset (again, rightly) when they find out their city or county is no longer recycling this or that category. These questions come up all the time in the neighborhood and in local online groups.

For me, it is all too complicated to keep track of. And anyway, the information can change at a moment’s notice. As with so many things in life, I find it easiest and most eco-friendly to adopt an across-the-board approach.

Myself, I always operate as if NOTHING gets recycled. No plastic, no glass, no metal. (Though in fact I know we can recycle metals by bringing them to the plant in Holly Hill. I have done that some years back on occasion. I heard recently that the current amount they are paying for aluminum is 55 cents a pound; YMMV.)

But in my everyday life, I have always acted as if NOTHING gets recycled. And I make my choices accordingly. Refuse, Reduce, Reuse.

And when I end up with plastic containers, glass bottles, or other stuff I cannot manage to refuse or reuse or repurpose, I just try not to beat myself up. And I do put it in the recycling bin anyway just in case someone, somewhere in the convoluted chain, might be still out there recycling it.

Housecleaning is a major leverage point for reducing one’s footprint while also conserving our precious time, money, and personal energy.

To put it another way, obsessive cleanliness standards (led by the industrial neat-fanatic fussbudget culture of my country, the USA) generate a huge eco footprint, even just for the plastic from all those containers of cleaning products — let alone the various machines and appliances; and the environmental impact of the chemicals themselves.

A few years back, I realized I didn’t need to buy any cleaning products if I didn’t want to. Water, elbow-grease, baking soda, vinegar go a long way. A couple of drops of your favorite essential oil can add a nice touch and even help repel bugs. Personally I favor menthol-y or citrus-y scents.

When you clean your house, do it for yourself and your family, not for other people. (And if you have a nitpicky person under your own roof, feel free to hand THEM the broom or the sponge or the laundry basket!)

What I realized at some point is that many of the so-called “reasonable standards” of cleanliness are being imposed on us by TV, movies, cleaning product advertisers, and manufacturers themselves. Oh, and sometimes, people in your life (either past or present) who just like to nitpick and criticize. One piece of reassurance I always give people is to look inward and decide for yourself what your own standards of cleanliness are. Don’t let anyone else dictate them. Don’t let other people’s critical tapes play in your head!!

My main cleaning tools are a broom, a mop, and a toilet brush. I have rugs on tile floor, rather than carpet, so I don’t ever need to vacuum; just take the rugs outside and shake ’em out. I did inherit a mini handheld vacuum cleaner which I have used a time or two to suck up crumbs or other dry spills from tight spaces, but I could have gotten those with the plain ol’ broom and dustpan if I had had to.

What are your cleaning challenges, if any? Might there be an opportunity to reduce your workload?

PS. We can actually damage our immune systems by striving to make our living environments perfectly clean and germ-free!

PPS. Just because you like or even love someone doesn’t mean you have to invite them inside your house. Covid showed us that!

As someone who does a lot of public speaking, I find that writing my thoughts down is very valuable. Do I therefore always take the time to do it? No. I should though, and am currently trying to do it more.

In my experience, writing can be helpful to my speaking (including conversations with people) in three main ways:

• For those times when I’m feeling hesitant or anxious about speaking my thoughts out loud (or anxious about being heard and taken seriously if I do speak them out loud), writing helps me strengthen my voice, articulate my thoughts.

• For those times when I know what I want to say, and am pretty sure people will listen, but I just can’t seem to boil my thoughts down to an organized and concise, listener-friendly package, writing helps me get focused and increases the likelihood that I will remember all the points I want to cover, and also be respectful of other people’s time. (I do sometimes read from a prepared piece of writing, but I only do that if I really feel I absolutely have to. Reading from a page isn’t usually as engaging as just speaking naturally.)

• For those times when I’m in an agitated emotional state, or just feeling like my brain is an overstuffed, jumbled attic, writing helps me “get my words out” so I’m less likely to inflict that emotional state or jumbled attic on fellow humans, whether in meetings or informal conversations or what have you.

Lately, I’m feeling I need to kick my speaking up a notch. I need to get a lot more organized, less rambly. Some of my most important speaking opportunities are the citizens’ comment times in local government meetings. At City Commission we actually have a time limit; it’s 3 minutes. I think this is a very appropriate time limit, and unlike some of my fellow citizens I don’t mind it at all. It is a challenge though!

At other public meetings, citizens don’t have a time limit. But I want to engage people, respect everyone’s time, and be fair to others who are waiting to speak. Yesterday in several different public forums I felt that I talked way too long and rambly! People generally consider me a good, engaging speaker but I know I have room for improvement in the areas of conciseness and organization.

To others who might be in the same boat, I would say please keep on showing up and making your voice heard! If you notice things about your public speaking that you want to improve, great — go for it! But also, don’t beat yourself up, and don’t use whatever flaws you think you have as a speaker to keep you from sharing your voice with your community.

And for those of you who just hate speaking out loud in front of people, writing is also a great way to talk to people. Writing is really an amazing human invention, come to think of it. Writing allows us to reach people all around the world and across time.

Some of the people who’ve made the biggest impact on my life are people I will never meet because they live on the other side of the world or because they died centuries ago. If they hadn’t put their words in writing, I’d never have gotten the benefit of their wisdom and encouragement.

From an eco-footprint standpoint, what I love about the written word is that it’s a low-tech, low-bandwidth means of transmission.

Write your words down; they might really help someone. They might even help make the change you want to see in the world.

Even if fossil fuels were clean, or even if electric cars came with zero environmental problems from mining the materials for the batteries and so on … do you like the landscapes we have built around cars? I find these landscapes desolate, alienating … and ugly.

Even if we could engineer some way to survive without flowers and bees and birds … would you want to live in a world where all the flowers and bees and birds were gone? Even if we could engineer a way for humans to keep cool without needing any shade, would you want to live in a world without trees? I find our endless acres of scalped, edged, and vacuumed turfgrass hot, desolate … and ugly.

I am staggered sometimes at our culture’s tolerance for ugliness in the name of “practicality” or profit or convenience.

My parents used to love traveling to Italy. My Mom said she loved how the culture seemed to put beauty first in all things, or at least seemed to have zero tolerance for ugliness.

Sometimes I wonder if I would care about the environment as much if my deep need for beauty were not a factor. I don’t have a quick answer for that.

One thing I do know is that the city-owned empty lot next to me is constantly being mowed, to the point that it’s usually brown with huge bare patches of sand. It also gets straight-edged and (until recently, when I succeeded in my efforts to get the city to at least stop the chemicals) drenched with pesticides and herbicides. That lot is being turned into a desert; the mowing and edging is causing unnecessary financial expense, unnecessary noise pollution and air pollution. And it has an unacceptable opportunity cost in terms of the ecologically valuable plants we could be growing in that space. Native plants for wildlife; edible plants for humans. And, it is ugly. And this is supposed to be our mainstream standard of a properly cared-for landscape: the straight-edged buzzcut grass rectangle.

Another thing I do know is that the best fuel for eco activism (or any other kind of activism) is love of something. My something just happens to be beauty. At least it’s my main something. And I don’t want a beautiful world for just me (I can easily create that, and often have); I want a beautiful world for everyone.

On a related note, some categories of ugly that I find particularly vexing: unnecessary noise; unnecessary and destructive labor (such as removal of Spanish moss from the oaks in the historic cemetery diwn the street from me); fancy gadgets that are not intuitively easy to understand, and make the users feel stupid; casual everyday violence from ripping out “weeds” (plants that one has not bothered to learn the value of) and scraping up leaves and grinding stumps — to gentrification and “urban renewal” and HOA landscaping standards; to unkindness on social media.

That’s all for the moment; I think about this subject a lot and may have more to say later.

In my book, I talk about the power of “finding your ‘why’.” My main “why” seems to be beauty. (And, for me, the sounds of nature unspoiled by mechanized noise are a subset of beauty, as is the natural darkness of night.) What’s yours?

In several of the groups I co-admin, laugh emoji in response to a serious post is considered a form of bullying, and is against the rules of the group.

Sometimes we find out that a person has hit the laugh emoji by mistake. But sometimes we find out the person is a troll or just not a fit for the group.

As I see it: Our groups need to be safe spaces as we navigate fear, grief, and other difficult emotions; and as we get vulnerable sharing our deepest concerns like underpreparedness and collapse. Mockery makes a space unsafe.

Some well-intentioned eco-minded opinion leaders are coming out saying that any efforts to reduce our own footprint are just “micro consumerist bollocks.” That — as long as refineries and factories and banks and lobbyists and such are belching out bajillions of tons of evil every second — what is the damn point of any of us little people doing anything?

My response:

I consider this line of thinking extremely seductive and deadly. Trading our personal agency for the false comfort of feeling righteous and let-off-the-hook from any kind of responsibility for the mess on this planet is a really, really bad trade. Bye-bye to any personal power we might have! And this trade has a somnolent effect. It’s like a personal drip-feed of soma! You are getting verrey, verrrrry sleeeeepy …

NOOOOOOO!!! Stay awake!!! Don’t go down that sleepytime path!!!

I think all of our efforts on all fronts are valuable! Thank you all for whatever high-level, big-picture efforts you are making to pressure governments; and to shut down the refineries, and the extractive colonialist-consumerist system in general.

And, quite honestly, a BIG part of my motivation for choosing a low-footprint path (besides the wish to do my part though it be but a drop in the ocean) is to simply get used to living with less. It’s an incredibly rewarding feeling to just not be so dependent and vulnerable as I used to feel before I got on this path.

Thoreau got it right when he said that “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” (Obviously this applies to people of all other genders as well.)

The amount of money I save by living a life of hardcore thrift reduces my cost of living by a huge amount, thus liberating me from having to spend most of my waking hours running around chasing money just to barely survive. I get to spend most of my time doing creative pursuits, running my little micro businesses, and helping my community instead.

Here’s another important point that may not have entered the conversation yet: Quietly changing our consumption patterns is an action that is immediately accessible to just about all of us. Whereas blocking a coal train, chaining oneself to a giant redwood, vandalizing drilling equipment, trespassing on private property to document abuses, and so on are just not things the average run-of-the-mill person is going to be able or willing to do.

At the same time as I admire the courage of the coal-train blockers and others who put their lives on the line, I’m also adamantly opposed to needless death and suffering. Would I be willing to risk my life to defend the planet for future generations? Maybe, possibly. But I would rather choose a path that will allow me to stay alive and keep making a difference through other kinds of actions that might be just as effective, without triggering some authoritarian crackdown.

Do I admire people who are willing to risk imprisonment or death for pushing for the right thing? Yes, I admire their courage and dedication. I’ve always thought it wrong that society lauds people as heroes for enlisting in the military and invading other people’s homelands at the order of their government, whereas the same society condemns people as terrorists for trying to protect the forests and rivers and air and wildlife of their own home bioregions — and ultimately the entire biosphere, on which all of our lives depend.

I’m not kidding myself; authoritarian crackdown of some kind is going to be almost inevitable as the fatcats see their easy profits and docile labor supply dry up. The crackdown would be more likely to take the form of protective legislation that reshuffles the economic deck in the favor of the powers-that-be.

That’s my interpretation of what happened a few years back when a huge percentage of the USAmerican population had fallen out of health insurance coverage. Instead of addressing the problem at the roots, the government made it mandatory for people to buy health insurance! Voilà, the corporate fatcats get their gravy train running again.* So basically, the fatcats will always keep finding ways to stack the deck in their favor. If too many people stop buying too much stuff, they might find a way to punish us for it! Already out in the media there’s an implication that we are hindering the economic recovery by being thrifty.

* (Later the penalty for not having health insurance was repealed, much to the relief of people who would have had to choose between buying food and buying health insurance.) (Note: I am aware that many people at the lower end of the income range have been helped by being able to get insurance through the Affordable Care Act.)

So it’s not that I assume there will be zero consequences for a quiet de-growth, de-consumerist revolution. But, for most of us, who may just not be Joan of Arc but are just average humans trying to put food on the table and keep our families together and repair the tattered fabric of our communities, “wallet action” is probably going to be our best bet.

I think everything we do matters! I think that dismissing household thrift and conservation as “microconsumerist bollocks” is self-defeating, and undermines our own best chances at self-reliance, creative and occupational freedom, and real happiness. Living an ethical life is one of the surest paths to genuine happiness even amid hard times. And doing our part, however small that part might be, to try to avert biospheric collapse is an ethical way to live.

Grassroots green revolution is real! Deep-green troops, mobilize! (like a herd of bioregionally hip feral cats)!

PS. Speaking of wallets, and “the economy” as defined by various overlords: An article that popped up in my feed the other day asserted that Americans are hoarding too much money and it’s hurting the economic recovery.

To which I say: Our individualistic, industrial-consumerist-colonialist society and economy actually encourages hoarding, be it in the form of cash or Wall Street stocks or bitcoins or what have you. These storage vehicles have become a (poor) substitute for mutual aid and community cohesion. And it’s all rooted in a disconnect from nature and from our fellow beings including fellow humans.

That said – this doesn’t mean we should be spending on consumer goods instead of saving. We owe “the economic recovery” nothing!! We need to make a whole new kind of economic recovery where we spend our money investing in family, community, local farms, local cottage industries, rainforest conservation etc etc.

Someone in one of my favorite green groups asked how we each felt about voluntarily reducing our personal/household consumption activity by 90%. The questioner wondered: Has anyone already chosen to do this? Do you or don’t you consider it necessary? Does the prospect of such a dramatic loss of lifestyle seem too distressing?

Oh wow, I thought: An opportunity to bring up the Riot for Austerity to a new audience! And, an opportunity to make a quick “Riot re-introduction” for readers who may be new to this blog.

I answered: I am super into it!! — am actually a participant in a longtime grassroots movement focused on reducing per capita consumption by 90% of the USA average. (People in many countries are of course already living way way below that and do not need to make any reductions).

The movement is called the Riot for Austerity, it started sometime back around 2007(?), and its name was inspired by a term used by George Monbiot in his book HEAT.

The RIOT metrics are easy to understand, and do NOT require a person to be able to grow their own food! The emphasis in the food footprint category is on how local one’s food is, how much of it is fresh rather than processed etc.

Other categories include water, gasoline, electricity, consumer goods purchases.

The group has not been super active online lately but I’m pretty sure most of the people are still at it!! Feel free to ask me if you have any questions not answered in the group’s files. I’ll look for you in the group!!!

Other great groups, tho not specifically dedicated to reducing consumption by 90%, are very active and full of great conversations & practical tips about reduction in every imaginable facet of daily life. Check out: • Zero Waste, Zero Judgement; • The Non-Consumer Advocate; • Degrowth – join the revolution; • Deep Adaptation.

Here is Post on my Deep Green book page with screenshots of the Riot rules (the web link on the Riot page, which worked for years, is dead and I was not able to copy-paste the text).

You can also see the Riot rules by reading my book DEEP GREEN, which is available in print by ordering direct from me; or free to read online on this blog.