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In my social-media feed today appeared yet another petition begging yet another local government to spare the lives of yet another stand of trees that have been sentenced to death for no apparent reason.

This just so happens to be in my geographic area, but it could just as well be Anytrees, Anywhere, USA.

WHY are they planning to cut down these trees? I didn’t see that info in the petition.

It looks like an already-existing road, with houses already there — so the plan to cut them down doesn’t seem to be motivated by new development.

What is causing us (collectively) to not value shade and beauty, and habitat, in our state?

Trees are also powerful stormwater pumps, and uptakers of nutrients that would otherwise run off into waterways, causing all sorts of trouble. Two benefits that SHOULD give trees high status among public-works departments as “natural solutions to expensive municipal problems.”

It’s painful to me that we even have to ask this, but I think learning the deeper “Why’s” is an essential piece of the puzzle when it comes to trying to salvage what’s left of our biosphere’s life-support system.

I’ll update you when I hear about the “why.” (A fellow activist is looking into it.) In the meantime you can check out the petition here. Please Help Us Save the Oak Trees on Rockledge Drive Rockledge FL.

If I had kids, I would almost certainly choose to unschool them. (I used to think I’d homeschool them, but that was before I heard about the concept of unschooling and realized it’s the approach that best fits my philosophy of learning and life.) Not that school can’t be wonderful; it often was for me since I had a natural tendency to be bookish and relatively compliant. But school can also be very limiting and constricting. And, over the years, it seems like the school systems have gotten more and more rigid and bureaucratic, as well as energy-consuming (both fossil and human).

I’ve written quite a bit about schooling alternatives over the past year. And this past week I ran across a couple of really good articles. Both articles pertain to Black families, but I suspect that they’ll strike a note among other people as well.

• “Why More and More Black Families Are Homeschooling Their Children” (Jessica Huseman, Atlantic.com; February 17, 2015). “African American parents are increasingly taking their kids’ education into their own hands—and in many cases, it’s to protect them from institutional racism and stereotyping. … Black families have become one of the fastest-growing demographics in homeschooling … And while white homeschooling families traditionally cite religious or moral disagreements with public schools in their decision to pull them out of traditional classroom settings, studies indicate black families are more likely to cite the culture of low expectations for African American students or dissatisfaction with how their children—especially boys—are treated in schools.”

• “Unschooling: The Educational Movement More Black Parents Are Joining” (Tomi Akitunde, matermea.com). “There’s another movement happening, often considered as being under the umbrella of homeschooling, that’s caught Black parents’ attention: unschooling. While homeschooling is defined as parent-led home-based education, unschooling (also known as self-directed learning) lets children direct their learning. Rather than following a set curriculum, unschoolers are led by their interests, and those interests inform how and what they learn—with parents and surrounding community members there to provide kids with the resources they need. One of the most visible Black unschoolers is Akilah S. Richards. Along with her husband Kris, the author, entrepreneur, and mother of two daughters—Marley (13) and Sage (11)—has been unschooling for six years, and are currently living in Atlanta. She shares her and other people of color’s experiences with Self-Directed Education on her podcast Fare of the Free Child, and runs a workshop called Raising Free People.”

• My earlier posts on homeschooling: Considering Homeschooling? Go For It! ; More Homeschool/Alt-School Inspiration ; A Year of Shutdown, and Homeschooling (guest post from Dr. Jenny Lloyd Strovas of Nature Matters Academy).

Economic competition is for losers!!!
If you ask me, the G7’s hatching of a new plan for “competing” with China (or any other country) is antiquated, crusty thinking.

Other than selling us megatons of cheap consumer goods (which we typically keep for six months or less before sending them to landfill), China is also building a massive belt of roads around the world — presumably to facilitate exploiting more forests and other natural resources. NONE of that is a competition we want to win.

In December 2020 at the UN climate change dialogues, UN Secretary-General António Guterres stated that making peace with nature will be the defining task of the 21st century. If there’s any competing we should be doing, it’s a healthy competition to find new ways for humans to coexist harmoniously and synergistically with all other life forms. After all, the air, water, trees, and all the other living things and natural materials that make up the biosphere constitute our life-support system. We trash it, we die.

Competing economically is a road to death. It’s eco-cide, and eco-cide is suicide. Let’s take the high road by ditching this mind-set of “competing” with other countries.

Time to update our mindset to the 21st century.

Here are some ways we could compete with China:

We could try to match their massive efforts to re-forest parts of their country.

We could also compete to see who can produce higher volumes of organically grown food, using “low-tech” old techniques.

What other ways of healthy competition can you think of?

Further Exploration:

• The Story of Stuff – referenced & annotated script by Annie Leonard. Some of you have probably seen her famously viral YouTube video by the same title. I first watched the video a few years back; that’s where I first heard the statistic that only about 1% of what we buy is still in our possession after 6 months; the rest we have sent on to landfill. The transcript is an immensely valuable asset, and I’m grateful to Ms. Leonard for making it available.

• Making Peace with Nature: Highlights from the UN Climate Change Dialogues 2020 (iisd.org). “‘Making peace with nature is the defining task of the 21st century. It must be the top, top priority for everyone, everywhere.’ UN Secretary-General António Guterres. While the Climate Dialogues were in their second week, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres spoke about the state of the planet. ‘Apocalyptic fires and floods, cyclones and hurricanes are increasingly the new normal,’ he highlighted. ‘It is time to flick the ‘green switch.””

The days before the opening of the Dialogues were rife with media talk of COVID-19 vaccines but overcoming one crisis does not mean dismissing the other. As Patricia Espinosa, Executive Secretary, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), gravely noted during the opening of the Dialogues, “There is no vaccine for the global climate emergency.” (The International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) is “an award-winning independent think tank working to fulfill a bold commitment: to create a world where people and the planet thrive.”)

For anyone who missed my recent guest appearance on Dr. Jenny Lloyd Strovas’s show — she has now put the recording up on YouTube. Thanks Dr. Jenny, it was a pleasure chatting with you!

Also check out Dr. Jenny’s Facebook page/group, Setting Gifted Kids Up for Success Through Nature & STEM — with Dr. Jenny. She’s a treasure trove of ideas and resources on getting outdoors with your kids, and creating opportunities for the whole family to learn and be creative in Mother Nature’s vast homeschool.

My sentiments exactly:

“We Don’t Need Supersonic Travel—in the ‘New Normal,’ We Should Slow Down.

“An interesting question: Did the pandemic break something in the heedless momentum of human acceleration, or are we really going straight back to normal?

“An interesting test case: United Airlines’ announcement that it will buy fifteen supersonic jets, which would allow business travellers to fly from San Francisco to Tokyo in six hours, and take ‘day trips’ across the Atlantic.

“Surely, we don’t want this. In part, of course, because it’s climate-insane. Supersonic planes, as Kate Aronoff points out, emit five to seven times as much carbon per passenger as conventional jetliners. … But let’s talk about something more than emissions. If we’re going to take climate change seriously, it also needs to come with a new aesthetic. We have to start seeing wind turbines on the horizon as kinetic art, not blight, for instance. And we might want to rethink what travel means, something that our pandemic year should have helped us with. At this point, it’s clear that you can conduct a lot of business remotely. What that means is not that we need to stay at home forever but that we could learn to travel slowly, precisely because we can e-mail the whole way, and because, as Zoom insists, people are learning to use it at thirty thousand feet. (Turn off your mic and use the chat, people.) Also, there’s Slack.”

Along similar lines, I am strongly of the opinion that we don’t need high-speed rail either. It’s already possible, by regular train, to get from DC to New York in four hours; and (to use an example from my own experience) from Orlando to Providence in 19. And a train trip across country is a multi-day adventure. All in all, when rest stops, refueling stops, and other necessities that add time to long-distance car trips are factored in, conventional train is really no slower than driving — but with the advantage of not having to keep your “eye on the road and hands upon the wheel”!

These words are from Bill McKibben, writing in “The Climate Crisis” email newsletter (June 9, 2021, edition). This is a free email newsletter of The New Yorker magazine, and I highly recommend it; go here to subscribe.

High-speed rail infrastructure doesn’t use existing tracks; it requires a whole nother set of tracks, stations, and associated infrastructure, and chews up land and resources accordingly. And for what? To get there a few hours or a couple days faster? And what would we do with that extra time — but try to cram in more travel, more consumption, and thus end up every bit as tired and stretched?

This ties in with Jevons paradox, the topic of my post yesterday. I believe that Jevons paradox holds true for time as well as energy. (Time is money is energy, after all.) J

Just as energy-efficiency increases in automobiles merely end up enabling people to drive farther, and energy-efficiency increases in refrigerators end up “empowering” people to buy bigger fridges (and even entire extra fridges), so time-efficiency increases just end up enabling us to cram more agenda items into our already-hectic lives. Aren’t we already on a fast enough treadmill? I sure think so.

Paradoxically, we can value our time more, and get more out of each moment, by choosing to put the brakes on our Anglo-industrialist-colonialist’s culture’s compulsion to “speed up more.”

I was immensely relieved to read that Vice President Kamala Harris is looking into the root causes of the spike in Mexico-to-U.S. border crossings, rather than focus on control and enforcement at the Mexican border itself as U.S. policy has typically done.

For all I know, past administrations have also tried to work on the root causes. But this is the first I’ve heard of it, and I always thought it was a no-brainer. In permaculture design, one of our basic tenets is to address problems as far “upstream” as possible. This approach is a lot more effective, and less costly, than a “downstream stopgap” approach.

Not that I think immigration is a “problem.” People coming in to a country bring new energy, new ideas. Personally, I think that easing restrictions on cross-border mobility could solve a lot of problems worldwide. But, when large numbers of people are feeling the need to flee their homelands, that’s an indicator of suffering and hardship. War; gang violence; droughts and other natural disasters are among the extreme circumstances that motivate people to risk their lives and, in many cases, endure separation from their families.

I read recently that some parts of Guatemala have had little or no rainfall for five years.

The decision to leave one’s homeland for another country in search of a better chance at life is not a decision people make lightly. I’ve always thought we had a moral obligation to try to ease hardships for people in our neighboring countries, as well as a pragmatic self-interest in doing so.

Someday, the shoe could be on the other foot. Right now, Oregon and parts of California are in extreme drought, and a water fight is heating up between farmers and the federal government. The farmers are only getting a tenth of their usual water allowance. They seem to feel that the government is deliberately cheating them out of water they paid for, but what it looks like to me is just one example of how we humans are actually running up against hard physical realities brought on by decades and decades of overtaxing our ecosystems.

Further Reading:

• “Harris Rebukes Criticism Over Lack of Border Visit” (Alexandra Jaffe, Associated Press; in Daytona Beach News-Journal, June 9, 2021). “As she closed out a two-day visit to Guatemala and Mexico aimed at strengthening diplomatic ties to help deal with migration to the U.S., Harris declared: ‘When I’m in Guatemala dealing with root causes, I think we should have a conversation about what’s going on in Guatemala.’ … the administration announced a range of agreements brokered between the two governments, including a $130 million commitment over the next three years from the U.S. to support labor reforms in Mexico and loans to bolster southern Mexico’s economy. The administration said the meeting produced an agreement to have an economic dialogue in September on trade, telecommunications and supply chains. And the two countries will also partner on human trafficking and economic programs addressing why people leave El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras for the U.S. … the Biden administration announced a number of new commitments to combat trafficking, smuggling, and corruption, as well as investments in economic development in the country.”

• “Support Immigrants Beyond Food” (Andrew Lee; Anti-Racism Daily newsletter — pure synchronicity that this got served up in my email inbox this week). “After a publicized wave of anti-Asian attacks, a catchy phrase popped up on protest signs and social media accounts: ‘Love us like you love our food.’ From anime to K-dramas and from sushi to sesame chicken, non-Asian Americans now love the culture from various East Asian countries – or what they imagine it to be, at least. Many of those who enjoy consuming East Asian food, music, and movies are nowhere to be found when Asian people’s lives are on the line. … LeRon Barton wrote, ‘I have come to the unfortunate realization that Blacks aren’t meant to be people, just vessels of entertainment in our society. We are looked at as hollow and only possessing culture that is meant to be enjoyed, eventually poached, and finally discarded.’ Similarly, immigrant communities and communities of color in general have been forced into precarious or menial jobs by racist and xenophobic attitudes and practices.”

• American OZ: An Astonishing Year in Traveling Carnivals at State Fairs and Fests –& Hitchhiking (book by Michael Sean Comerford). A rich and fascinating read. I’m including it here because of Michael’s touching descriptions of a Mexican carnival crew. It’s common for a bunch of men and sometimes women from a single Mexican village to leave their home for several months out of every year to work in traveling carnivals in the USA. Michael’s description of the simple, cozy, love-filled life back in the village (he visits them there, after carnival season is over) evokes a picture of a place and a way of life that’d be very hard to leave — except under the dire economic or political circumstances which in fact prompt them to seek work outside their homeland.

• Wikipedia article “Immigration“: “…research suggests that migration is beneficial both to the receiving and sending countries. Research, with few exceptions, finds that immigration on average has positive economic effects on the native population, but is mixed as to whether low-skilled immigration adversely affects low-skilled natives. Studies show that the elimination of barriers to migration would have profound effects on world GDP, with estimates of gains ranging between 67 and 147 percent. Development economists argue that reducing barriers to labor mobility between developing countries and developed countries would be one of the most efficient tools of poverty reduction. Positive net immigration can soften the demographic dilemma in the aging global North.”

• “Water Fight Brews Amid Oregon Drought” (Damon Arthur, Redding Record Searchlight USA TODAY NETWORK; in Daytona Beach News-Journal, June 6, 2021). “Federal regulators who shut off water to A Canal have said the decision was forced by extreme drought and the need to balance the water demands of farmers with threatened and endangered fish species in the Upper Klamath Lake and Klamath River … This year, as the drought has tightened its grip on the region, farmers were only allocated 33,000 acre-feet of water by the bureau. In a typical year, a full allocation would be about 350,000 acre-feet … ‘That’s why we’re pissed, because we own the water and it’s deeded to our land, and the federal government is stealing it. People don’t get that part of it,’ Nielsen said. Grant Knoll, who along with Nielsen purchased the lot next to the A Canal, said farmers have exhausted their legal efforts to get the water so they feel they are left with no other choice but to take it by force.”

Wait, what’s not to like about energy-efficiency? Environmental scientist Amory Lovins has referred to energy-efficiency as “the lunch you are paid to eat.” What could possibly be the downside?

Turns out that increases in energy-efficiency just end up enabling people to consume more. (For example, when cars get more miles per gallon, people end up driving more miles. And modern refrigerators are pretty inexpensive and super energy-efficient — but now lots of households have an extra fridge or freezer in the garage! And people have huge fridges nowadays.) This phenomenon is known as the Jevons paradox.

“Jevons paradox is named after William Jevons, who observed in the 19th century that an increase in the efficiency of using coal to produce energy tended to increase consumption, rather than reduce it. Why? Because, Jevons argued, the cheaper price of coal-produced energy encouraged people to find innovative new ways to consume energy.” (Rob McDonald writing in grist.org; see link below.)

Once I heard of Jevons paradox (which wasn’t that long ago — maybe a few months, or a year or so ago), it seemed like examples were all around me, and that I had actually been noticing it for decades. Where it stood out for me was in the realm of human energy: I noticed that with all of our high-efficiency automated appliances such as clothes washers, dryers, and dishwashers, many of my clients and other people I knew were still seeming to spend tons of time and personal energy dealing with laundry and dishes. Were the machines just prompting people do do a higher volume of laundry and dishes? I wondered. There was also the time and worry spent on dealing with these appliances when they malfunctioned. I didn’t have hard data, but I had a sneaking feeling that my volume of laundry and dishes stays lower because I know I’m going to hand-wash them.

A tangent, not exactly the same as Jevons paradox but seems related somehow: Does the availability of cheap air flights prompt us to travel long distances at the drop of a hat? Certainly. (In the paper the other day, one doting grandmother wrote about flying across the country to attend her grandchild’s “elementary school continuation” ceremony. Not even a graduation; just kids completing a year of school and preparing to move up to the next year.)

And along similar lines, mass-market availability of what used to be professional-grade lawn equipment has certainly made people more relentless about barbering their little piece of the earth.

In his excellent talk “How To Enjoy the End of the World,” Sid Smith observed that increases in energy-efficiency do not lead to reductions in consumption, unless those efficiency increases are accompanied by rationing. I gather he was referring to government-imposed rationing. But it occurred to me that the rationing would work just as well if it were voluntary. Self-imposed rationing. This has actually been my goal in promoting a “grassroots green mobilization.”

Governments imposed rationing during World War II. And also imposed a form of rationing during the Covid pandemic (via the stay-home orders). But, more recently, we saw the strict orders fall apart, as public opposition from the anti-mask, open-everything-up faction, including a number of state governments, made it politically impossible to enforce masking, social distance, and other measures in anything resembling a unified nationwide manner.

I doubt the situation would be any different if some government leaders were to try to implement energy rationing to try to put the brakes on the climate crisis and destruction of our planet’s life-support system.

For decades I yearned for the government to “save” us from eco crisis by instituting rationing, World War II style. Now I think that’s not likely to happen. As I’ve said before and will probably say again, I feel that bottom-up cultural shift is our best hope. The more of us get on board, the more corporations and governments will get on board with us.

Note, I’m not attempting to change the minds and hearts of relentlessly air-traveling grannies or mad lawn-barbers. That’d be a foolishly monumental task to try to take on. Rather, I’m out to reach the people who can feel we’ve got a problem, and who want to be part of a consumer downshift.

The most important thing to know about voluntary rationing is that thousands of people are already doing it, and they’re doing it in groups. Where I see it happening is mainly online communities, where people are exchanging tips and offering each other moral support. Facebook groups include Zero Waste, Zero Judgment (32k members at this writing); The Non-Consumer Advocate (82k). Although it is not as active as it once was, and membership in the Facebook group is modest at 153 people, I also have to give a plug for the Riot for Austerity Facebook group. (The Riot for Austerity movement is what inspired me to keep going with my low-footprint living experiment and turn ut into a lifestyle, eventually leading me to write my book and start this blog.)

Also, though we don’t immediately think of it as “rationing,” the 78k members of Pollinator Friendly Yards are certainly self-rationing their use of gasoline and other fossil fuels by rewilding their yards. And there are countless other groups of people who are committed to a conservation lifestyle; voluntary rationing at the grassroots level is a bigger phenomenon than meets the eye.

By the way, grassroots action definitely includes voting and social pressure (such as public shaming of bad behavior by government and corporations), in addition to voting with our feet and our wallets.

Further Exploration:

• “The Efficiency Dilemma: If our machines use less energy, will we just use them more?” (David Owen, The New Yorker, December 12, 2010). “Energy efficiency has been called ‘the fifth fuel’ (after coal, petroleum, nuclear power, and renewables); it is seen as a cost-free tool for accelerating the transition to a green-energy economy. … But the issue may be less straightforward than it seems. The thirty-five-year period during which new refrigerators have plunged in electricity use is also a period during which the global market for refrigeration has burgeoned and the world’s total energy consumption and carbon output, including the parts directly attributable to keeping things cold, have climbed. Similarly, the first fuel-economy regulations for U.S. cars—which were enacted in 1975, in response to the Arab oil embargo—were followed not by a steady decline in total U.S. motor-fuel consumption but by a long-term rise, as well as by increases in horsepower, curb weight, vehicle miles travelled (up a hundred per cent since 1980), and car ownership (America has about fifty million more registered vehicles than licensed drivers). A growing group of economists and others have argued that such correlations aren’t coincidental. Instead, they have said, efforts to improve energy efficiency can more than negate any environmental gains …”

• Jevons paradox: When doing more with less isn’t enough (Rob McDonald; grist.org). “Jevons paradox is named after William Jevons, who observed in the 19th century that an increase in the efficiency of using coal to produce energy tended to increase consumption, rather than reduce it. Why? Because, Jevons argued, the cheaper price of coal-produced energy encouraged people to find innovative new ways to consume energy.”