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Someone in the Non-Consumer Advocate group posted about how bath towels always cause their washing machine to make violent banging noises. (And, I have seen towels make washing machines do all kinds of other naughty things as well. The machine stops working and sounds a really piercing alarm; it chokes and stalls out; the Tilt light goes on and can’t be placated.) This laundry woe prompted me to share the following comment …

Awhile back*, when I was living in Tokyo, I copied the local custom and switched to small towels that are lightweight, and that dry really quickly. I never looked back!

I don’t have a washer or dryer; I just wash by hand and line-dry. But either way, whether doing laundry by hand or washer/dryer, small lightweight towels are a godsend!! (For a convenient body-wrap, instead of the giant thick towels I used to think were necessary, I just use a lightweight cotton sarong.)

I have written lots of other laundry tips on this blog; just type “laundry” in the search field and it should bring up several posts. Laundry habits in the USA (and in nations that have succumbed to the USA’s industrial-consumerist influence) are a huge topic, and a giant squishy target for optimizing energy use … not only fossil energy but human energy too!!!

*1990 through 1994

Meta Tip: My comment in the group has gotten quite a few Likes. I almost didn’t even bother to post the comment; now I’m glad I did. Takeaway: You never know which of your posts or comments might really be useful or inspiring to someone. Go ahead and share that tip or other info you have to share!

So, turns out that my country, the USA, is the world’s top producer of plastic waste. Knock me over with a feather.

ARE YOU ALL AS FED-UP AS I AM?
What can we all do to refuse plastics today?
Post your pledges and successes!
And when the plastic-refusal going gets tough, consider this fact reported in the above-linked article: “If the current rise in plastics pollution continues, the world by 2030 will be putting 58.4 million tons into the oceans each year, or about half the weight of the fish caught in seas“.

My pledge:

• I’m not getting any more takeout food unless it’s packaged in cardboard or other backyard-compostable packaging; or they let me use my own container. (I already refuse paper napkins and plastic utensils, have been doing that for years.) I enjoy takeout and supporting local restaurants, so this will take a lot of willpower on my part, but I am totally up for it!!! Enough is enough!
• I’m not ordering any more mail-order anything, unless it is shipped directly from the maker of the product, and I can talk directly with the maker/shipper to ascertain they don’t use plastic in shipping. (A little bit of tape is ok.)
• I will look into ways to pressure the manufacturers and other originators of this disgusting mountain of plastic.
• I will find ways to make my neighbors more aware of what a crisis our thoughtless acceptance of plastic bags, bottles, etc., is causing.

From the article linked above:

“America needs to rethink and reduce the way it generates plastics because so much of the material is littering the oceans and other waters, the National Academy of Sciences says in a new report.

“The United States, the world’s top plastics waste producer, generates more than 46 million tons yearly, and about 2.2 billion pounds ends up in the world’s oceans, according to the academy’s report.

“If the current rise in plastics pollution continues, the world by 2030 will be putting 58.4 million tons into the oceans each year, or about half the weight of the fish caught in seas, the report said.

“Recycling and proper disposal alone aren’t enough and can’t handle the problem …

““One of the major barriers for recycling is the economics of virgin plastic and subsidization of the fossil fuel industry,” Spring said. The American Chemistry Council, which represents plastics manufacturers, lauded most of the academy’s report, but it blasted the idea of limiting plastics production.”

— My comments:

Actually one thing I really think we need to do is a full-on boycott! It may be impossible to boycott SUP packaging entirely but we can boycott bottled water, for example. Plastic bottles were the biggest single source of trash in a recent WaterGoat trash-catching net’s count!

We could post about our plastic-refusal successes and encourage each other, post the stores & restaurants that are good about letting customers avoid SUP, etc.

Killing the oceans with plastic junk is not a thing that I want our country to be known for!

Refuse junk plastic! Hit the manufacturers in their wallets!

Another thought: Ask governments to heavily tax single-use plastics. (Thanks for that idea Rebecca!) It would be more than appropriate to tax this junk, given the true costs, which are not only environmental but economic as well!

USA – plastic nation — is this who we want to be?

CREDIT: “Go Drastic On Plastic” is a campaign phrase and general rallying cry that was coined awhile back by DREAM GREEN VOLUSIA, an environmental organization in my bioregion that has worked tirelessly to raise public awareness, clean up the disgusting evidence of our plastic addiction that litters the beaches and waterways, preserve local ecosystems, and more. You can visit their website here (stand by, I’m checking to see if they have a website); and their Facebook group’s page here.

Following is a letter I sent yesterday to some officials & citizens of our city & county. If any of this is helpful to you in communicating with your local officials, HOA, neighborhood group, etc., please feel free to copy-paste and adapt according to your needs.

Subject: Opportunity To Save Money and Fuel While Helping the Environment: “Cut Back” on Excess Mowing!

Esteemed Leaders and Citizens who care about our environment and our local natural beauty:

The other night in the Mayor’s Beachside Advisory Committee (a monthly Zoom meeting), some of us brought up the topic of excess mowing. These photos of the City-owned empty lot next to my house show what I mean.

Grass that was already very short and scalped-looking got mowed again today. So did the City-owned lot next to __‘s house.

They are on a 2-week schedule — it should be once a MONTH (or maybe even less) at this time of year, and once every 2 weeks only in summer wet season. We are wasting money, burning fossil fuels needlessly, and creating a desert. It is also very unsightly.

Meanwhile, community gardens, fruit trees, and native plant gardens have to depend on grants. This is the opposite of resilience!

Excess mowing, and lack of shrubs and trees, makes the ground very prone to erosion and stormwater runoff (dry sand is water-repellent to a large degree).

All over the USA and the world,
landscaping norms are shifting, as scientists, activists, and others have come to recognize the undesirable impact of our excessive preoccupation with neatness in the great outdoors. The news about the relationship between landscaping and pollinators, water quality, and so on has gotten widespread coverage in the mainstream press.

We here in Daytona Beach need to move with the times, and ease up on excess mowing and other outdated landscaping practices. Mother Nature is soft and curvy! And those “curves” serve many essential functions, such as stormwater mitigation, drought buffer, pollinator support … and not incidentally BEAUTY!

We need beautification not “tidy-fication”!

This letter is part of what I hope will be an ongoing conversation and actions to shift our landscaping emphasis from tidy-fication to heat mitigation, food-growing, biodiversity, soil-building, and other essential functions upon which human life on earth depends.

Thank you all for listening. Share your questions and thoughts anytime, and let’s make our bioregion great!!!

Jenny Nazak
Daytona Beach Permaculture Guild (Permaculture Daytona on Facebook)

Starting a list of broken things that still work.

Category 1: Thanks that are broken but can still serve for their original intended purpose, even if in diminished capacity

Carabiner-style clips. Even if the spring mechanism goes kaput, the clips can still be used in many cases. I have one such clip that lives on a strap of my best canvas shopping bag; I use it to clip my reusable cup to the bag when going out to the minimart to get my coffee etc. I wouldn’t trust the “floppy” clip to secure my cup onto the back of a backpack if I were hiking long-distance, but it serves just fine where I can keep an eye on it and am not walking far.

Reusable water bottles. Even sturdy bottles (or their lids) can break. I’ve had a stainless-steel bottle rust through at one of the top seams. But that bottle is still fine for scooping water out of a rainbarrel. And, when the plastic lid of my very sturdy stainless-steel waterbottle split, I realized I could still use the bottle in situations where I could make sure it stayed upright. So, I can’t use it in my bicycle’s bottle-cage anymore, but I can still use it to carry water on train trips etc. (as long as I make sure the bottle is upright in my little suitcase, and my suitcase itself stays upright). My steadfast adherence to the old hitchhiker’s maxim of “keep luggage in view at all times” comes in handy here.

Our planet’s biosphere. Yeah, but let’s not keep testing that, and let’s not push it any further.

Category 2: Things that are broken but can serve a useful function other than their original intended purpose

Bicycle-tire innertubes. When a tube goes bad, I cut it into strips to make handy stretchy ties of whatever length and width I need. They are incredibly useful, right up there with duct-tape and baling-wire as a cohesive force in the universe.

As you can see, this is a very short list! If you’ve got any items you’d like to add to this list, please text or email me! And I wish you a fun thrifty creative day of not having to spend money or send things to landfill.

It’s just one silly person’s banana story, and not the whole reality. But, it would be wise to see the writing on the wall. I always think that, not just for bananas but for everything else as well.

This morning I walked down the street to the minimart to get my coffee (which I could brew at home but I get my little morning fix of news and convivial human company at the minimart), and my bananas (which they sell 2 for a buck, which is probably more expensive than the supermarket but the supermarket is a hard bicycle ride away, or a harder walk).

The coffee machine in the minimart was working, which is awesome because it is not always. My favorite goodhearted employee was there, and we talked about compassion and how to circumvent the political divides that are killing us all.

And, I went to grab my customary two bananas … only to find that the banana shelves were empty!

“What’s up, are you guys not selling bananas anymore?”

“We are, but for the past few days we haven’t had any shipments. There’s some bug that’s killing the bananas.”

When I got home from my beach walk I googled. Come to find out the worldwide banana crop is threatened. Actually I had heard this before, for some years, but never really had to pay attention. Now it has washed up to my shores.

I was surprised, but not. Supply-line things are happening all around us. And no matter what the supposed reason is, I think it all pretty much boils down to one thing: Our cushy reality is running out.

From the article: “At the moment the Cavendish bananas are grown on a vast monoculture, meaning not just TR4 but all diseases spread fast. During one growing season, bananas can be sprayed with fungicides from 40 to 80 times.”

In Ireland, a potato famine wreaked havoc and prompted a lot of Irish people to immigrate here in the early part of the last century. Supposedly they had started only growing one kind of potato.

Meanwhile in Peru and elsewhere, sensible people were growing thousands of different varieties of potato. They still are.

And so I say … Hey Florida Permies!!! What kind of bananas are you growing and how much would you sell them for? Or how much would you charge people and cities for classes in how to grow bananas in a sustainable way?

A couple of banana trees in my yard are putting out fruit for the first time ever. Two bunches of bananas. Green still. We’ll see what happens.

Cities have no trouble finding money in their budgets to grow ornamental turfgrass, and mow it and spray poisons. Fruit trees and other edible plants should be a solid item in the budget also — not something we have to beg grants for.

#WeGrowFood #FoodResilience

On a related note, I’ve been meaning to share with you this article by Umair Haque at Eudaemonia & Co: “It’s Not a Supply Chain Crisis — It’s a Failing Economy.” “One way of life — artificially cheap, easy, thoughtless, mindless consumption — is coming to an end. Maybe, though, you think I exaggerate. Let’s go through a small list of goods for which supply is now crashing. …”

And a final thought: Low-footprint living is a gift we give ourselves. A gift that keeps on giving. And it doesn’t get stuck on cargo ships!

“Overshoot occurs when people use energy and biological resources faster than ecosystems can regenerate and pollute beyond nature’s assimilative capacity. It’s a meta-problem, the cause of most so-called ‘environmental problems’ including climate change. Overshoot means that we modern humans are consuming, polluting and destroying the biophysical basis of our own existence. …

“Climate change/global warming is merely one important symptom of overshoot. (Climate change is a massive waste management problem – carbon dioxide is the largest entropic waste by weight of industrial economies.) …

“We cannot solve climate change or other major symptoms of overshoot – biodiversity loss, tropical deforestation, overfishing, land and soil degradation, pollution of everything, the possibility of pandemics, etc., in isolation from the others. However, if we reverse overshoot, all its symptoms would be alleviated simultaneously.”

(Bill Rees: A Note on Climate Change and Cultural Denial; populationmatters.org)

I agree with pretty much everything he has to say. Except that I can’t imagine what “a global population strategy to enable a smooth, socially just descent to the one to two billion people that could live comfortably indefinitely without destroying the ecosphere” would be. How could that happen in an ethical, socially just way? If I find out more, I’ll let you know.

NASA is soliciting ideas for a nuclear reactor on the moon. To power space stuff. Oh my God, NO. Does human invasiveness and arrogance know no bounds???!! In a soulless colonizer culture, nothing is sacred.

In other capitalist-industrialist-colonizer culture news, hopium-dispensing green-tech pundits seeking a way to power civilization without any of us in the rich countries having to change our hoggish ways plan on poking lots of holes in the earth, and fracturing rocks, to tap into geothermal heat that is WAY below the earth’s surface. (It’s one of the ideas presented by one of the speakers in TED Countdown at COP26, Session 1. An hour and 20 minute video well worth watching in its entirety, and you know my fidgety self who has trouble sitting through vids doesn’t say that lightly!)

I’m not talking basic low-tech homescale tunnels-a-few-feet-deep-in-the-ground kind of geothermal. I’m talking miles-deep, earthquake-causing geothermal. Now I’m no engineer, but poking a bunch of deep holes into a molten-cored planet just doesn’t sound like a safe idea at all.

Bad news and bad ideas aside, I feel deeply grateful and privileged to be part of a group and movement that’s pursuing radical creativity; deep cultural restructuring; looking in the mirror and getting ruthlessly honest; learning and practicing the old good eco-centric ways; exploring what aspects of modernity might be genuinely worth carrying into the future and what is best consigned to the compost bin of history. Much love and gratitude to all my fellow permaculturists, Deep Adaptation folks, and Transformative Adventurers!

Following is a list of Facebook groups where most or all of the people agree that there is no “magical green energy” we can just switch over to and carry on with our hoggish, depraved ways. Groups where the focus is voluntary self-restraint.

Riot for Austerity group; Transformative Adventures group (Permaculture Landscape Transformation via Transformative Adventures); Deep Adaptation group; Degrowth – join the revolution group; The Non-Consumer Advocate group; Zero Waste, Zero Judgment group.

In the thread I started in the TA group to voice my disgust about the idea of nukes on the moon, and my wariness about geothermal, a guy commented that geothermal is much better than coal.

We (inhabitants/inmates of colonialist industrialist culture) totally lose touch with how violent our whole culture is. Every aspect from how we grow our food to how we extract our energy to how we treat fellow human beings and other species. We act like the only way to get our needs met is to destroy land and communities. It’s not.

Permaculture helps us see more clearly and build alternative, ethical, abundant paths.

Destroying land and ecosystems “less” is not enough. We have to regenerate ecosystems and reform our disconnect from nature including fellow humans and all other species. Mountaintop removal should never have happened, nuclear on the moon should never happen, disturbing the ground to the extent of causing earthquakes should never happen. I realize some people think the destruction is necessary or at least worth the trade-off; I’m just not one of them.

If we radically reduced our demand for fuel, water, etc., our whole landscape (physical, economic, social) would shift.

We keep acting as if voluntarily curbing our sick, morally bankrupt, energy-hoggish ways is not a real option.

And, miles into the earth sounds miles too far to me.

What would indigenous cultures do? is what I ask myself more and more these days.

I am just one person, and a nobody in the grand scheme of things. But I put my opinions out there in case others might feel as I do. Many of us do, and we need to help and support each other to keep up the movement.

Many people would not be willing to sacrifice the trappings of a typical USAmerican middle-class lifestyle to avoid continuing to desecrate the Earth, ecosystems, the communities of fellow humans. But, there are also many of us who would be more than willing … and, more and more of us are talking with each other and getting organized.

People who worship techno-hopium, and hate hearing about radical reduction and conservation, tend to take an all-or-nothing stance. That’s a trap that many humans keep falling into. “Oh, what, you want to force everyone to live in caves with no light and no medicine yadda yadda?”

Nope.

Contrary to popular belief, living at a small fraction of the average USAmerican’s footprint is rather nondramatically easy. Almost anticlimactically easy — though for sure there are challenges, most coming from poor, wasteful top-down design, hypercentralized systems, and anti-eco social norms that ridicule reverence for nature, and shame humble thrift.

A movement called the Riot for Austerity (90 percent reduction challenge) has been going on for years. Lots of us have voluntarily reduced our footprint to 20 percent or even sometimes 5-10 percent of the USA average resident’s.

And it’s voluntary. We are out to make radical conservation cool.

Besides this movement, there are other movements/groups such as Degrowth, Anti-consumerism, and Deep Adaptation — all brimming with people sharing their voluntary reduction wins and encouraging each other on.

Will it work? I don’t know, but I am putting my heart and my “vote” into it. We’ve all gotta make a stand for something, if we want things to change. So this is what I’m betting on.

I’m just one person but there are many others.

In this talk, Sid Smith gives a great overview of EROI and how it’s dropped over the past decades. He also summarizes some “energy savior” technologies and why each one won’t save us. And, he presents a sketch of what a powered-down world might look like and how our lives could be much richer for it.

Sid Smith how to enjoy end of world