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When green intersects with thrift, it’s a happy day, both for people and for the planet. Yesterday in an online local community group I belong to, someone posted a flyer for a community school-uniform exchange. People are asked to donate their kids’ school uniforms that no longer fit, so that another child can use them. Uniforms are going to be collected all summer, and people with kids needing uniforms can register to get the sizes they need.

The uniform exchange was motivated by a wish to help people through hard times.

The fact that it also helps the environment (by cutting out the eco-footprint associated with manufacture, transport, retail of new uniforms) is just the icing on the cake.

I love when this happens! What examples have you noticed lately, of green intersecting with thrift?

Starting a list of unsustainable attitudes/values/social norms that are contributing to eco degradation, economic hardship, and other suffering throughout the world. As you may have noticed, I sometimes post “open-ended” posts, which are often lists. (I call such posts open-ended because I start with what I’ve got, and revisit the post to add other items as they occur to me. Sometimes I’m still adding items months later!) 

obsessive symmetry

obsessive neatness

giving exalted status to college, so-called “higher ed”; denigrating other forms of learning; not acknowledging that there are other, possibly better, paths to success and good citizenship

exalting youth; devaluing age

anti-sensitivity: branding sensitive people as lunatics needing meds

obsessive need for “order” and security

anti-visionary: calling young people with imagination and vision “impractical” or “naive”; anyone who manages to make it to adulthood with this sensitivity & imagination intact is dubbed eccentric, naive, not worth listening to

extreme risk-aversion

fear/intolerance of nature

me-first

On the whole, my local paper Daytona Beach News-Journal offers pretty good coverage of gardening topics. Correspondent Lynette Walther is a good writer. 

This article about plants NOT to plant because they “take over” is good advice from a conventional gardening perspective, and also from a native-habitat perspective. We don’t want invasive plants choking out our vegetable patch or crowding out native plants. 

That said – speaking from a PERMACULTURE design perspective, with patterns and the long view in mind, I don’t think it’s a bad thing that we have some plants that are this tenacious. Human activity, including excessive pavement, factory agriculture, and destructive residential and commercial landscaping practices, has seriously degraded the land.

There may come a time, if soil depletion continues and we have an extended drought, that ANY vegetation will be needed to help check erosion and stave off desertification. (Maybe it’s just me, but overall I’m more worried about desertification than I am about sea-level rise or extreme wet weather. A Facebook friend in Ohio said a 6-mile square which includes him has gotten 0.5 inches of rain since May! Normal would be 8-10 inches. Even my friends in Ireland experienced a major drought this year. )

Super tenacious plants may one day help screen our food/medicine gardens and our homes from a merciless sun in a treeless landscape. Furthermore, photosynthesis is an endothermic (heat-absorbing) reaction, and as humanity’s bad habits continue to heat up the planet, super-tenacious plants may one day be the only thing that stands between us and literally being cooked alive. I pray things never reach that point, and I am doing everything I can think of to reduce that likelihood. But as eco-minded folk, we need to be prepared to design for all possibilities. And today’s “pesky” tenacious plants might be tomorrow’s essential allies.

In my opinion, the best thing we can do with most invasive plants is cut them back; either “chop and drop” for mulch, or harvest as material for basketweaving, papermaking, and such. Cogon grass, considered highly invasive here in Florida, is used to make sleeping-mats in one region of China (according to a book I found online by doing a search “cogon grass basketweaving.”)

And extending the conversation to invasive animals and insects, I read the other day that Sudan and neighboring countries are having their worst locust plague in 70 years. Awhile back, I saw an article about restaurants in Israel capitalizing on the bounty. The writer pointed out that humans can only eat so many locusts. But this morning, as I was walking on the beach (where many ideas come to me), it occurred to me that maybe the bugs could be used as an ingredient in pet food as well.

Further Reading: I am currently rereading Beyond the War on Invasive Species: A Permaculture Approach to Ecosystems Restoration, by Tao Orion; published by Chelsea Green. From the publisher’s site: “Concerns that invasive species represent significant threats to global biodiversity and ecological integrity permeate conversations from schoolrooms to board rooms, and concerned citizens grapple with how to rapidly and efficiently manage their populations. These worries have culminated in an ongoing “war on invasive species,” where the arsenal is stocked with bulldozers, chainsaws, and herbicides put to the task of their immediate eradication. In Hawaii, mangrove trees (Avicennia spp.) are sprayed with glyphosate and left to decompose on the sandy shorelines where they grow, and in Washington, helicopters apply the herbicide Imazapyr to smooth cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora) growing in estuaries. The “war on invasive species” is in full swing, but given the scope of such potentially dangerous and ecologically degrading eradication practices, it is necessary to question the very nature of the battle.”

In a recent post on this blog, I talked about the importance of knowing what we have, having it in appropriate quantity, and remembering where it is stored. (In permaculture design, this principle is called “Stocking.”) In an affluent society, where people readily accumulate “stuff” even without trying, even in fact when outright RESISTING, that becomes a challenging task.

My inheritance of thread, needles, fabric now spans four generations of women. We were a long line of seamstresses, quilters, knitters, crocheters.

Of course, even if we remember what we have, we may possess it in excess quantity such that it succumbs to damage or decay before getting used up. That’s what seems to have happened to the 10 little spools of silk darning-thread in this tiny slim cardboard box that I discovered within a large Container Store box of thread I inherited from my Mom. The thread breaks readily with a tug of the hand. It can be hard to know in advance how much of something we’ll need, and erring on the side of excess may be human nature, especially if you’ve known times of scarcity or carry them in your ancestral memory. (Which, hey, is probably all of us to a degree.)

I have captured its beauty just now in photos (which you can see in this post on my Deep Green Facebook page ), and also have honored its creation by looking up the name of the mill on the box. The Heminway & Bartlett Silk Mfg. Co., Watertown, Connecticut.

And, although it might seem sad, I am now going to compost the box of thread. The entire box and its contents are returnable to Mother Earth without harm, and there’s actually great dignity and beauty to that. I wish we would be quick to return to old packaging methods like this. (Update: The little box of old silk thread fits into my newly organized thread-box without a squeeze, so I’m keeping it for now; it is just so charming.)

My online search yielded a website dedicated to old mills in Connecticut! For each mill, it gives historic information as well as any current purposes the old mill building is being used for. Apparently part of “my” mill is now being used as a day spa!

H&B was a silk-thread mill founded in the 1880s. And apparently it did not close til the early 2000s. Here is the “old mills” website, open to H&B’s page.

Many times (in this blog, and out and about in the world) I get started on a topic, only to find it doesn’t tie up neatly. I keep finding other threads of connection.

My maternal grandfather owned a knitting mill in Fall River, Massachusetts. (He also had a career as an efficiency consultant for factories and other companies. He was an engineer, educated at MIT.)

My maternal grandmother could knit and read at the same time, she was that good. My maternal grandparents were of English and Scottish descent and I believe though don’t know for sure that the ancestors from that side came over in the 1700s. There were some French Huguenots in the mix also.

On my Dad’s side, both my grandmother and my grandfather worked at a sewing factory. GenTex Corp., in Carbondale, Pennsylvania. (Grandpa was also the teacher at the one-room schoolhouse in the hamlet of Simpson PA.) The ancestors on that side of my family came over from Eastern Europe in the early 1900s. They spoke a language that wasn’t pure Polish but I believe most of them identified as Polish. The women on that side of the family were geniuses with a needle and thread; the men were virtuoso carpenters.

Some of this information might be wrong. Pretty much everyone in the generation before ours is gone now though, so things are hard to check. It’s one thing I regret: not having been more of a student of my ancestry. Not that it’s easy in this modern bleached-white culture, but many people do have knowledge of those ancestral threads. Losing our ancestral connections is an extremely unmooring sensation.

In school, my favorite-favorite subjects were Art and Home Ec. But I had a hard time admitting that to myself because, in “book-smart” circles, those were considered classes for “dumb people,” and if you were book-smart you were expected to aim higher, go to college. Quite honestly, I struggled with most academic subjects, once they expected you to get your nose out of the book and actually put pen to paper; dissect and analyze; make pronouncements. But I was raised in a privileged environment (where I was led to believe I was “academically gifted,” despite the fact that my work in academic subjects was only ever mediocre at best, aside from a seemingly natural affinity for learning languages), so not only did I get into college; I actually made it through college (by the skin of my teeth, though I’m not sure anyone, even my own parents, knew how thin a skin that was). I didn’t even know being a seamstress could be a serious thing.

No regrets about my path; it’s a rich tapestry of many colors and textures. My only regret would be that I may have taken someone else’s spot in college (or later, in office jobs) who deserved it more. Anyway, whether or not that actually happened, I am privileged, and as such I owe it to my ancestors, to my living family members, to my community, and to society as a whole to use my privilege in service of the greater good.

The box of thread I’m sorting and organizing now is a clear plastic rectangle-cube about a foot wide, a foot and a half long, and six inches deep. It contains countless spools of thread, still good, in a full range of colors. The contents of this box are only a tiny fraction of my thread stash (let alone my stash of embroidery flosses). Somehow even just sitting still in the box, the spools have become unspooled, and threads tangled. Just now I wound them all up. A satisfying outcome if you’re obsessive like me.

I’m thinking of putting a post on NextDoor just to let people know they should talk to me before even thinking about buying thread. Or seam-binding. Or — great gods and little fishhooks (a favorite expression of my grandfather’s who owned the knitting mill) — zippers. So many zippers, of all possible colors and I mean all possible colors, still in their original packaging.

For some years now, my general policy on travel has been: Minimize unnecessary trips. Avoid flying. Don’t accept car rides that are out of someone’s way. Get around in town mainly by bicycle, foot, or bus. Get around long-distance mainly by Greyhound or Amtrak.

I did travel a lot when I was younger, including long-distance car trips and airplane travel. Awhile back I actually purchased carbon offsets to mitigate every flight I could remember taking in my adult life. And air travel post-9/11 has become such an unpleasant experience that I have little trouble resisting it. (And that was before Covid!) Unless one of my siblings (brother, sister, brother-in-law) or nieces needed me for something, you couldn’t pay me to get on a plane right now. I have on a couple of occasions rented cars to get to my family who live several states away.

Now, with Covid continuing, but some people wanting to get back to normal social gatherings, I started formulating some updates to my travel policy: No long-distance travel except for emergencies. If I want to visit my family, I might have to rent a van and quarantine in their yard. I will travel by bus or train again when buses and trains become open-air! (You know, like that Durango-to-Silverton excursion train.) Get around town only by bicycle or foot.

I may have to bend these guidelines at some point but for now they feel good. I’ve actually been doing a lot more walking since the pandemic hit.

Oh and here’s my ideal travel method: foot or bicycle, long-distance, by paved interstate paths dotted with camping oases. THAT is some travel I could really get excited about! It would take me about 6 days to reach my siblings by bicycle, but it’d be a fun journey. Can you imagine? Sort of like an interstate highway with truck stops, but for cyclists and pedestrians.

By the way, in a previous post I referred to myself as a “Doomer Lite.” One example: Not enough of a doomer to stockpile generators and MREs, but enough of a doomer to be aware of how many days it would take me to walk to my family if TSHTF and the world were to, like, suddenly run out of gasoline. I could cover the distance on foot in 30 days or less. Which is better than when I lived in Texas; that trip would’ve taken a good two months or more on foot.

But this train of thought is too Doomer-ish for me. Really I just want paved interstate hike/bikeways dotted with campsites right now, because it would make travel ever so much more fun, convenient, and rich.

Back in 2007, I took a solo bicycle ride from Austin to New Mexico. I rode for six days, camping just by the roadside wherever. It was a great experience but would have been even better if there were dedicated walk/bike lanes, and officially permitted campsites.

“Food justice activist Karen Washington wants us to move away from the term ‘food desert’, which doesn’t take into account the systemic racism permeating America’s food system,” and instead use the term food apartheid, “‘which brings us to the more important question: what are some of the social inequalities that you see, and what are you doing to erase some of the injustices?'” Food apartheid: the root of the problem with America’s groceries, by Anna Brones in The Guardian. “In my neighborhood, there is a fast-food restaurant on every block, from Wendy’s to Kentucky Fried Chicken to Popeye’s to Little Caesar’s Pizza. Now drugstores are popping up on every corner, too. So you have the fast-food restaurants that of course cause the diet-related diseases, and you have the pharmaceutical companies there to fix it. They go hand in hand. The fact is, if you do prevention, someone is going to lose money. If you give people access to really good food and a living-wage job, someone is going to lose money.” “Why don’t people with capital come into my neighborhood and think about investing in the people who already live here? Give them the capital, give them the means of financial literacy, teach them how to invest, teach them how to own homes, teach them how to own businesses.” (Visit the link to read the full interview with Ms. Washington.)

How To Fight Food Apartheid — How To Grow Change through Black-led Agriculture: An Interview with Leah Penniman, by Adina Steiman in Food & Wine. “It’s so powerful, and this is something I had to learn as an adult because it certainly wasn’t taught, but pretty much anything you can think of that we cherish in organic and regenerative agriculture from raised beds to compost to polycultures, you can trace back to African and African American innovation. So Cleopatra is the first person in history to have been recorded as a vermi-composter. The Obambo people of Namibia had the first raised beds. We have the 26 different polycultures in Nigeria, and that’s the basis of what a lot of people call permaculture today—these mixtures of different plants in a mutually supportive ecosystem and on and on and on.”

Farming While Black (Leah Penniman’s website and also the title of her book). “Soul Fire Farm, cofounded by author, activist, and farmer Leah Penniman, is committed to ending racism and injustice in our food system. Through innovative programs such as the Black-Latinx Farmers Immersion, a sliding-scale farmshare CSA, and Youth Food Justice leadership training, Penniman is part of a global network of farmers working to increase farmland stewardship by people of color, restore Afro-indigenous farming practices, and end food apartheid.”

… Is the same as not having it at all. Worse, actually. Because you or I paid the money and expended the time to acquire the item. And now can’t remember where we put it.

I have just now done that with a big Tupperware container. Can’t find it for the life of me, and it’s the perfect thing to store leftover 4th of July cake. Oh well!

One of the permaculture design principles is “Stocking.” It means having the stuff you need on hand in appropriate quantities, neither too much nor too little. And remembering where it is stored.

You might find this hard to believe, but even when I was living in a 19-foot travel trailer (with all my possessions under that one roof; none in storage), I still managed to forget where I kept things. And forget entirely that I owned certain things!

Sometimes I would find an item years later, spoiled by heat or time, never having been used.

One thing I’ve found that helps is to periodically go through each cabinet or closet. Pick a different room or space each week, say, and take a couple of hours. And come to think of it, I haven’t done that lately with the kitchen cabinet where I store plastic containers for reuse. That cabinet is packed to the gills, and could be hiding an entire small family, let alone a tupperware container!

Update: I did end up finding that nice tupperware container, and that yummy leftover cake is now safely stored for maximum shelf-life. (Now to tackle my boxes of sewing supplies to see if I can find a certain piece of fabric I’ve been looking for …)