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“Uncle Sam expects you to keep and raise chickens,” says a charmingly illustrated poster from 1918 (which I saw on Facebook). “Two hens in the backyard for each person in the house will keep a family in fresh eggs.”

1918 goes down in history as the last year of World War I, and as the first year of the so-called “Spanish Flu” pandemic. Now, a century later, our “war” is on multiple fronts including obesity, hypertension, diabetes, malnutrition, topsoil depletion, declining biodiversity, food deserts, mental-health issues, addiction, and household economic stress. Add to that the recent disruption of essential supply lines by Covid-19, and we’ve got a perfect storm motivating us to learn “old-fashioned” skills such as growing a garden and raising small livestock.

Many people now are growing vegetables, learning to sew and bake, keeping bees, raising poultry. Many many other people are interested in doing these things but aren’t sure how to get started.

One way is good old YouTube; you can find detailed how-to videos for any skill you can possibly think of, from pickling to bicycle repair to natural building. But there’s so much content out there that it can be overwhelming. And the quality of the instruction varies.

That’s where attending a curated event comes in handy. Yesterday I took the plunge and signed up for the Mother Earth News Fair. This fair has been held in person in different locations around the USA since 2010, but this year it’s happening online. (Hooray!) Turns out the organizers had decided to try an online option this year anyway, and the pandemic just accelerated their plans.

The Fair offers eight courses: 1) DIY Skills (encompassing such skills as solar electricity, humanure composting, and DIY farm tools); 2) Food Independence (including edible yard, yogurt-making, and such), 3) Livestock (poultry, cows, goats, rabbits…); 4) Modern Homesteading (including honeybee husbandry, wildcrafting, mushroom survival skills); 5) Natural Health; 6) Organic Gardening; 7) Practical Skills (vermicomposting, mycoremediation, sheet mulching, etc.); 8) Real Food.

If you register by June 20, you get all eight courses for $20, comprising a total of 50+ videos. (After June 20, the price goes up to $20 per course, which is still a good deal, but I sure like being able to get the whole kitten caboodle for $20!)

Each vid is only 20-30 minutes long, which should be just right to get an overview and enough pointers to embolden you to go ahead and get started with some basic carpentry, herbal tinctures, or whatever the topic is. If you’ve ever watched instructional videos that are hours long and super detailed, you might have noticed that you run the risk of getting bogged down and never getting started. (At least, that’s what I tend to do!) And really when it comes down to it, the best way to learn is by doing.

Mother Earth News is a mag I’ve been reading for awhile. Their articles tend to be thorough, yet easy to follow. So I expect the online fair will be similarly high-quality. (Oh, and unlike an in-person fair, where you have to choose from among concurrent sessions and cannot attend them all, the online fair will offer the videos pre-recorded, and they’ll remain available for you to watch and re-watch anytime in the coming year.)

This also solves the problem I’ve sometimes had in the past, when I’ve attended a super packed conference and gotten all charged up and inspired, only to return home and not remember this or that info; not feel able to get started on my own. I don’t think I’m the only one: I’ve seen people attend a class on composting or solar cooking, and years later they still haven’t done anything with it. I’m thinking that the format of the Mother Earth News Online Fair might just be the “secret sauce” that helps people navigate past the usual blocks.

To see the full list of video topics, and to register for the fair, go here. I hope lots of you will sign up! Let me know if you do. If there’s enough interest, we could even form a mutual support and encouragement group. The course videos will be released on June 20.

Remember that 1918 chicken poster I mentioned at the beginning of this post? It says at the bottom: “In time of peace a profitable recreation; in time of war a patriotic duty.” Amen to that! We are now in a time of war on multiple fronts, but we can increase our peace by building household resilience skills — and sharing them with our communities.

Speaking of peace, the 1918 poster has a special note for parents: “An interested child, old enough to take a little responsibility, can care for a few fowls as well as a grown person.” There’s a world of freedom, empowerment, education, and even behavioral therapy packed into that simple little sentence! I’ve seen very young kids on farms be very skilled and very loving at taking care of animals, when they knew it was their responsibility. If schools end up having to close again, it could be that part of the secret to keeping kids engaged, busy, and learning at home is as simple as a few backyard chickens or veggies.

As the pandemic shutdown has eased, invitations to in-person meetings have predictably begun arriving with greater frequency. And, I’m generally not accepting them.

This is zero about fear for my own health. It is somewhat about concern for public health, still. But even more, it’s about not being willing to go backwards, environmentally speaking and in terms of my own time and energy. Not just my time and energy either; everyone’s! Now that we’ve seen how much can be accomplished online, my tolerance for in-person meetings inside of air-conditioned buildings, and/or held in locations such that most or all participants have to use motor vehicles to get there, is approaching zero.

I do not miss riding my bicycle on unsafe roads (or rustling up fossil-fueled vehicle rides) to get to meetings. I do not miss all the plastic cups and other senseless trash produced by humans physically getting together in public spaces. And I do not miss the sheer amount of time it takes out of all of our days to travel to and from meetings.

Meetings that could be accomplished online just as well, or even better. Do I miss human face-to-face contact? No: I see my neighbors, essential merchants, and a steady parade of strangers in (social-distance) passing every day. I talk with geo-distant friends and family by phone; Zoom. I interact with clients by tele-technology as well.

I am just not willing to go back, now that I see it is possible to do things a different way. I am casting my vote for a new normal. My vote does not carry particular weight, and I do not flatter myself that I alone am going to precipitate some sort of shift. But I have one person’s worth of vote, and it feels good to know for sure where I stand.

I once read that in England, the electric company has to plan for a surge in demand during the halftimes of televised football games (or “soccer games” as we say in the USA). Why? Because of all those millions of viewers getting up during halftime to make themselves a cup of tea! No one organizes or plans this; rather, millions of individuals each decide to do it. And it adds up to a difference so big that even the power company has to plan for it.

This is how I see personal action. I’m only one person, but I get to choose. And who knows how many millions of other people may independently make the same choice. And it could even be that this blog entry will embolden you to cast your vote for a new normal as well. Be it deciding not to give so much money to big chain retailers, deciding to use a bidet bottle so you’re not at the mercy of toilet-paper hoarders, or putting your foot down about attending in-person gatherings needlessly.

During the pandemic I have attended multiple churches and lunch discussion groups; taken hours of webinars on stormwater management, promoting acceptance of native-plant yards in HOAs, and other topics related to my work as an eco educator; gotten to the root of my chronic back issues by taking a super effective core exercise class; caught up with old friends; done consulting sessions; and more … all online (or by phone). If I ever had any patience for the very limited viewpoint that “we just have to do this in person,” that patience is pretty much erased by the evidence of the past few months! (Particularly when it comes to environmental conferences, eco-minded organizations. Stop it stop it stop it, I say!!!!!)

As it happens, my neighborhood watch group is meeting this week — outdoors, in a park! This is partly because the building we use is undergoing renovations, and probably also a nod to lingering concerns over germ transmission. But an outdoor meeting is something I like from an eco-footprint standpoint as well. No lights or air-conditioning! Who knows, maybe enough people will accept meeting outdoors that we’ll end up making a habit of it.

I would love to hear your thoughts and experiences on this topic!

In the looming retirement-income crisis, I also see a silver lining. The economics of aging is forcing millions of us to live more frugally and to redefine what is enough. We’re cutting back, downsizing, and rethinking how we live, work, and play. But the problem right now is that, to most of us, downsizing looks like deprivation and loss. And we hate it. Small is not beautiful. It’s living in a shoe box without windows or Wi-Fi and paying $1,800 per month for the privilege.

Nobody wants that.

But what if we could flip the script? What if we could take the economic turmoil of forced downsizing and come out better—not because we accommodated the chaos but because we used the chaos to go where we needed to go in the first place? I call this idea “smalling up,” and it’s where the retirement-income crisis and the sustainability movement intersect. …

In other words, if we’re going to have to downsize, why can’t we “small up” and do more with less as a path to a more sustainable way of living? Why can’t we have more beautifully designed, space-saving homes and furniture made of eco-friendly materials? And why can’t they be affordable and available in the mass market?

The economics of aging may well force us in this direction. But isn’t this where we should be heading anyway to secure our futures and those of our children and grandchildren?

— Elizabeth White, in 55, Underemployed, and Faking Normal: Your Guide To a Better Life (Simon & Schuster).

I stumbled upon this quote today, in Ms. White’s book, which I just today started reading. Stumbling on the book was itself a serendipity; I had never heard of this bestselling title til today.

My home state, Florida, has a “sales tax holiday” period for people to purchase hurricane-preparedness supplies. Goods qualifying for the tax exemption include tarps, bungee cords, radios (powered by battery, solar, or hand crank), and portable generators. Besides those commonsense items, the tax holiday also inevitably includes one of my top pet peeves, bottled water. (I won’t go into yet another tirade about how I hate seeing people waste money on this stuff when they could just fill up reusable containers in advance from their faucets.)

One item not listed as a tax-exempt good is rain barrels. That is a shame, since sky-water is great for plants and for the skin (as well as for the wallet, seeing as how it falls from the sky for free). Tax-exempt or no, rainbarrels are an investment that pays dividends throughout the year, and I encourage everyone, regardless of whether you live in a dry or a wet climate, to get rainbarrels if you don’t have them already. Even just a barrel or two is a great start, giving you 50 to 100 gallons of rainwater storage capacity.

I’ve been collecting and using rainwater for years. My favorite uses for it, besides watering plants, are clothes-washing, bathing, and cooking/drinking. (You may need or want to filter your rainwater before using it for drinking or cooking. It makes tasty coffee, by the way. I boiled some up in the kettle just this morning.)

To me, the difference between stocking up on bottled water and collecting rainwater is the difference between household preparedness (on a very superficial level) and household resilience. Collecting and using rainwater gives you options; makes you less dependent on modern conveniences. And that feeling of reduced dependence carries over into a general can-do state of mind that helps you get through hard times and come out stronger.

Suggested homework: 1) Calculate your monthly water consumption if you don’t know it already. 2) Look up the average monthly rainfall in your area and the average annual total, if you don’t know those figures already. I used weather-us.com, and input my city (Daytona Beach). 3) Calculate how much water can potentially be captured off your roof in any given month, and for the year. (Here is my favorite rainwater-catchment calculator. This website, watercache.com, has a lot of other valuable info as well.) 4) Notice any differences between your household water consumption and the amount of rain you could potentially capture. In most cases, if you were able to capture it all, the amount of rain that falls would be far more than you could ever use!* (Do not rush out and buy a huge cistern though. I really recommend just starting with one 40- to 50-gallon barrel, maybe two. Or even just line up a bunch of buckets or other containers–whatever you have handy–under your roofline the next time it rains, and enjoy the experience of collecting and using free water from the sky.) Let me know how it goes for you!

Example: Where I live, April is our driest month; we get 2.2 inches of rain on average. Using the rain-catchment calculator, I find that my 1,000-square-foot roof has a total rainwater collection potential of 1,370 gallons from that amount of rainfall. My water usage is 300 to 450 gallons per month (10-15 gallons per day). So if I needed to, I could meet my water needs entirely with rainwater! (I’ve only got 450 gallons of storage capacity in barrels right now, but that’s OK, because my yard itself is a “sponge” that collects most of the water it needs without my help. So most of the water I collect in barrels can be used for human needs as opposed to plant needs.)

Rainbarrels are like a bank account for water. You can catch the surplus during abundant times, and use it to get you through sparse times. (An even bigger, more capacious bank account for water is the ground itself; I write elsewhere on this blog and in my book about how you can engineer your landscape to capture and store rainwater, making it less vulnerable to both drought and flooding. As the folks at the Watercache site put it, “Some people install urban rainwater harvesting systems because they have found that rain barrels just don’t hold enough water. As an added benefit to having free water to irrigate your landscape with, you can solve some drainage problems that you may be having on your property.”

*According to rainwater-harvesting expert Brad Lancaster (who I often cite on this blog and in my book), even in a super dry place like his hometown Tucson, enough rain falls to meet the needs of every resident, if people were capturing it and using it wisely. Which Brad teaches people how to do! Check out his YouTube channel; I particularly recommend his 18-minute TED talk Planting the Rain to Grow Abundance.

One of the simplest ways to shrink your eco footprint (and reduce your financial overhead) in a hurry is to add people to your household. Even before the pandemic hit, a lot of households were going in this direction anyway. Student-loan-burdened young people making a U turn, aged parents moving in with their adult kids, and so on.

And of course, people who don’t live with their families often choose to live with housemates rather than alone. Not only young people, but seniors as well, are forming group households. Personally, I choose to have housemates not only to reduce my eco-footprint and save 60 to 80 percent on housing costs, but also because I enjoy the company.

Elsewhere on this blog, I’ve written tips on how to get along with housemates/roommates. (I’ll dig up the link and post it here for you later.) This post today is focused on the “hardware” aspects, so to speak. How to functionally expand your space to accommodate more people.

The other day I was reading an article about how family members who’ve been living apart are coping with being thrown together under one roof. Some are loving it; others are stressed. The article mentioned something about a family of four being stressed about suddenly being “crammed” into a 2,200-square-foot house. My first reaction was along the lines of “Jeez! We Americans are so disgustingly spoiled!” But then it occurred to me that a lot of houses, particularly newer ones with those “open plan” layouts, make it awkward for more than 1-2 people to share living quarters. A lot of times, when people think they don’t have enough space, what they actually have is a poorly designed space. Fortunately a lot of design issues can be addressed easily and inexpensively, with DIY improv solutions as opposed to expensive, high-footprint home renovations.

My house is one-story, 988 square feet. Because of its old-school, non-open floor plan, and how I’ve tweaked it, the house feels spacious and can comfortably accommodate 2-3 fulltime residents (plus a guest or two in a pinch). Actually I’ve had up to 11 friends staying here during special-event weeks. Before buying this house, I lived in a 1-bedroom apartment that I turned into a 2-bedroom in order to be able to have a roommate. Here are some of my tips:

• Eliminate special-purpose rooms, other than the kitchen and bathroom, and turn all other rooms into sleeping quarters. (Well, I still have a living room, but it doubles as a guest sleeping area.) By deploying a folding table, I can also use the living room as a dining room on those rare occasions when people eat together indoors here. What had been the laundry room is now my bedroom/office/studio. The room dimensions are 6 by 7 feet! By evicting the washer/dryer to create my micro headquarters (it’s like my own tiny house within my house!), I freed up the two big “official” bedrooms for fulltime housemates. (Where do we do laundry, you ask? I wash mine by hand in a small tub; housemates generally wash theirs at the laundromat. Everyone line-dries their stuff on the house clothesline.) And I created a third, tiny, “emergency guest bedroom” by evicting the table and chairs from what had been a very tiny dining room.

• Turn your garage into a cabana. A garage is way too good to be taken up by a car! Right now I have the luxury of getting to use my garage as my craft haven and “she shed,” but for a different household, the garage could just as easily serve as an in-law apartment, or as a sweet cabana for teenage or tween household members, or returning college students. Heck, when I’m a little old lady, I (and my husband, if I have one) will probably move into the garage ourselves and rent the main house out to another family.

• The more doors the better. My house has three exterior doors, making it easy for multiple occupants to have their own entrances. If I had not been so blessed, additional doors are one actual official reno project I might have considered.

• Creative room division. Not only folding screens, but tall bookcases or other tall furniture, can serve as privacy walls. In my old one-bedroom apartment, roommates always occupied the real bedroom, while my “bedroom” was a 4-by-6-foot “roomette” carved out of the living room. Bookcases served as its walls. Super cozy, and all my stuff was at my fingertips.

• Avoid storing huge amounts of food. Food for multiple people’s dietary preferences takes up huge amounts of space in the kitchen cabinets. Either do communal meals, or everyone get their own takeout meals, or each person has a tiny microwave or toaster oven in their room, and keeps their nonperishable food in their own room. Sharing a fridge is perfectly do-able as long as no one tries to store large amounts of refrigerated goods. One thing I’ve sometimes done is give each occupant a cooler to use. They can decide whether or not to use it, and they have to buy their own ice.

• Just say no to large clunky furniture unless it is multi-functional (i.e. can serve as a wall).

• Go vertical!! Shelves, closets, hangers make all the difference between a place seeming totally cluttered, “not enough space” — and being plenty of space.

• Screen a porch or balcony to add a funky rustic sleeping area to your place.

• Knock out part of a ceiling, and use the resulting upper “shelf” as additional sleeping nooks. Or if you have high ceilings, build lofts or bunks.

• Common courtesy: Use headphones when listening to electronic entertainment, unless you are listening to something together. Keep common areas free of personal stuff (each occupant takes their stuff back to their bedroom when leaving the common area).

• Minimize number of cars. OK here I go harping on cars again. But really, the thing that sticks out like a sore thumb when multiple people share a house or apartment is All. The. Damn. CARS. Cluttering the yard, squeezed into the driveway, or vying for parking space on the street. For some households, juggling cars around like puzzle pieces so this or that person can get in or out is practically a fulltime occupation. As well as being car-free myself, I actually seek out car-free housemates; it makes life so much easier. True fact: When houses with multiple occupants get labeled “undesirable” by neighbors, what usually sets them off is the number of cars (assuming the occupants are otherwise unobtrusive — don’t have loud parties, etc.).

Well, in this post I set out to offer you 7 ways to comfortably fit more people into your home, thus radically reducing your eco-footprint and your living costs. Looks like I came up with 11 ways. And I might think of more, in which case I’ll add them later. (My blog is sneaky timed-release like that.)

Can you think of any other tips to add? Drop me a line, and let’s help folks save money and boost their green quotient!

Further Reading:

Average House Size By Country: Inspiring & informative article from ShrinkThatFootprint.com

We teach people how to treat us, by how we present ourselves; how we carry ourselves. It’s true of people, and it’s also true of cities.

I love that my city is welcoming to large numbers of visitors. (It’s one of the things that drew me here: that spirit of acceptance and hospitality; that tolerant urban vibe as opposed to provincial snooty beach-hamlet vibe.) What I don’t like is that we have made ourselves dependent on mass crowds and large special events. It makes for a fragile economy. And it makes for a community that’ll put up with anything (be it a sprawl development or a noxious crowd) in exchange for the almighty dollar it (supposedly) brings.

A young people’s “invade Daytona” event yesterday started out seeming like just a fun party, but ended up with multiple shootings! And a whole lot of garbage on the beach.

By presenting ourselves as a wide-open place where anything goes, and by conveying our neediness, we invite things like this. If we raise our expectations, people will feel it.

On an individual level … “We teach people how to treat us” also translates into our employers, and the businesses we buy goods and services from. We teach them how to treat us, by what we are willing to put up with in exchange for that almighty thing we feel we can’t do without, be it a dollar or a gadget or what have you.

Reducing our dependency on people and institutions that treat us and/or the planet with disregard, is something any of us can do. And it’s an ongoing process.

In a few minutes, I’ll walk down the street to the Daytona Beach Boardwalk, where super-stellar community activist Rell Black of the Community Healing Project has called all interested folks to meet for a cleanup. Rell was born and raised in Daytona Beach, and he never stops working to make it better. I swear he works in his sleep!

If you want to teach the world how to treat you and your community better, my advice is: Find people like Rell, and support their efforts! Oh, and you can also connect with the Community Healing Project on Facebook.

If you happen to be reading this before 1pm EST Sunday May 24, and are in the area and want to join the cleanup, bring your mask, gloves, and trash bags to the Boardwalk at 1!

By coming together as a community, we teach the world that we respect our place and each other. We say, “Visitors, we welcome you, but you need to show respect. Our place is too good to be a raucous party dump! Anyway, we would rather be your friends than be your maids.”

Further Reading:

In Zadar, Croatia, an organ-like structure built into concrete seaside steps turns the waves of the ocean into music. I hear it’s attracting a lot of tourists. Though I can’t say for sure, I bet the site inspires so much reverence that nobody there throws trash or otherwise behaves badly.

The Kerrville Folk Festival is going virtual this year, with headliner concerts, late-night campfires, and brunch get-togethers all being streamed online. This is a beautiful effort to keep a festival going that started way back in 1974.

“During the live broadcast of this concert all donations will be split between the artists. This concert will continue to be streamed from our Facebook page, YouTube Channel, as well as our Website thereafter, wherein all further donations will support the Kerrville Folk Festival Foundation.”

If you are familiar with Burningman, KFF may be sort of the acoustic, folk, hippie-ish version of that. Or, maybe Burningman and other burner events are a techie version of a folk music festival. (On that note, I once remarked to a friend that Burningman seemed like the dot-com intelligentsia’s version of an Aggie bonfire. To which he responded, maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe the Aggie bonfire is a redneck version of Burningman.)