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For people feeling anxiety about climate change & social/economic chaos:

I highly recommend reading fellow Deep Adaptation member Terry LePage’s excellent book “Eye of the Storm: Facing Climate and Social Chaos with Calm and Courage.”

The author points out that fear, calm, and courage are all contagious. And that we can be in service by cultivating calm & courage. She shares some unhelpful stories we’ve been clinging to; and offers some more meaningful, compassionate, authentic stories.

And please join the book discussion group on Zoom; details below.

From the author:

Hi all. You are welcome to join a book group starting next Sat. Jan. 13, 10am Pacific time. No charge. Facilitated by the author! I love the feedback I’m getting that this book gives people comfort and practical tools for coping and living well.

Free audiobook at https://soundcloud.com/michael-dowd-grace-limits/sets/eye-of-the-storm-by-terry-lepage-audiobook; paper and electronic editions available from all your usual sources including internationally. Let me know if you need a PDF.

Register here. https://www.tickettailor.com/events/opendoorcommunication1/1018746.
(Eye of the Storm book group)

A fellow author posted that question on their timeline.

My answer:

I’m doing it!
I wanted to be an environmentalist and now I teach people how to restore ecosystems.
I wanted to be a fashion designer and now I make my own clothes and accessories out of old clothing & scraps that were otherwise destined for landfill.
I wanted to be a psychologist/therapist, and now I help people explore their consciousness and liberate their minds.
I wanted to make art and now I do what I want.
I wanted to be a book author, and now I am.
One thing I might want to do next is secure ownership of a vacant duplex or fourplex in my neighborhood, and let the tenants become the owners, and I would be a Permaculture property manager.
Having a little community coffee shop / bookstore wouldn’t be awful either! In the meantime, I have a little free library out front of my place.

What a great post, thank you fellow author Ajay Howarth – Author!

Things just got a little bit easier for people like you and me who might want to invest in developing “missing middle” housing in our neighborhoods.

The following post is from Eric Brown, one of my co-authors of the FREE book. (You can visit his Facebook page Growingfree SimpleLife here.)

This is a HUGE Deal,……Can’t Afford a Single Family Home? Buying a 2-4 Plex Got Easier in 2023!

Important #missingmiddlehousing milestone: In 2023 Fannie Mae Made Missing Middle Easier to Finance, Requiring Only 5% down on 2-4 Plex Mortgages

Article Highlights:

This new option presents a great opportunity for individuals looking to invest in multifamily homes while also enjoying the benefits of homeownership.

Fannie Mae has announced that, starting from the weekend after November 18, 2023, it will accept 5% down payments for owner-occupied 2-, 3-, and 4-unit homes. This marks a departure from the previous multifamily financing requirement of 15-25% down payments for duplexes, triplexes, and four-plexes.

The maximum loan amount allowed for these 2-4 unit properties is set at $1,396,800….

Additionally, the elimination of the FHA self-sufficiency test for 3-4 unit properties means that buyers will face fewer hurdles when seeking pre-approval for these types of multifamily homes.

For owner-occupant landlords, this policy shift represents a significant opportunity to reduce mortgage payments by leveraging rental income. The ability to make a smaller down payment not only makes multifamily homes more accessible, but it also allows home buyers to gain valuable landlord experience, as they have the opportunity to collect rent from other units while simultaneously building equity in their own property.

Here’s the full article Eric was describing: https://themortgagereports.com/107690/fannie-mae-introduces-5-down-payment-option-for-multifamily-homes

Someone in a different Permaculture group where I shared Eric’s post made a comment that sounded like they were questioning the relevance of this post to Permaculture. They typed “Relevance? Admin.”

Not sure what they meant by this question. I suspect they are questioning its relevance to permaculture because they think Permaculture is just about gardening? (That’s a very widespread and persistent misconception.)

BUT! One of the most important aspects of Permaculture is where we bank, how we invest, how we spend our money.

Also, housing is one of the core aspects of permaculture. It’s one of the basic human needs.

I immensely appreciate this post. Housing is a really serious issue, and the missing middle is a big part of the solution.

Another really serious issue is how much of everyday people’s money is parked on wall street (in the form of 401ks etc). Regenerative, community-building Investment options such as “missing middle” housing can help solve this draining of money from communities as well.

BTW one thing notable about this policy change making it easier to get loans for missing middle housing, is that it applies to owner-occupied missing middle housing. There is a great qualitative difference, in terms of communiy cohesion, between owner occupied rental housing, and not owner occupied.

A friend/fellow activist posted on her feed, asking fellow Floridians where are we thinking of moving when our state turns full fascist — because it’s happening before our very eyes.

My answer:

Staying here to be a part of helping to fix things. Unlike a lot of people, I don’t have much to lose. In that I am not in a vulnerable population. So I figure my best contribution is to stick around.

In any case, assuming it gets worse here it will definitely spread elsewhere. So I figure what better place to be to try to contain it than here, at the worst spot, before it spreads more than it already has.

Also, Florida is a hotbed of climate disaster in the USA. For someone like me who has relatively little to fear, I figure what better place for me as a permaculture activist to be to try to help people adapt & soften the suffering, than on one of the front lines.

Using the principles of permaculture design, we can pack innumerable useful functions onto even a very small residential yard, such as are commonly found in suburban and urban areas. A couple of excerpts from Mollison and Slay’s Intro to Permaculture book:

“Contrast the large cleared areas of Australia and North America with the small, intensively-farmed areas in the Philippines, where the total land around the house is usually only twelve square meters” (=less than 130 square feet!): “out of this comes most of the food for the family. The house is often on stilts, with animals penned beneath. Garden surrounds the house. Scraps and trimmings are fed to the animals; manures are used on the garden. Trellis, holding passionfruit, gourds, beans, and other climbing vegetables, shelters the house from extreme heat and provides food for the family. Fast growing trees … are coppiced for fuelwood. So stay close to the house, and work towards developing small, intensive systems. We can plant 10 critical trees, and look after them, whereas we plant 100 we can lose up to 60% of them from lack of site preparation and care.” …

And similarly, garden/orchard plantings grouped around houses in Central America:

“Close to the house and more or less surrounding it is a compact garden and orchard some 20 square meters” (=less than 216 square feet!) “in extent. No two of these are exactly alike. There are neat plantations more or less grouped together. There are various fruit trees … And a thicket of coffee bushes in the shade of the larger trees. There are tapioca (cassava) plants of one or two species, grown more or less in rows at the edge of the trees. Frequently there are patches of banana; corn and beans are here and there in rows or patches. Climbing and scrambling all over all are vines of various squashes and their relatives: the chayote (choko) grown for its squashes, as well as its big starchy root; and the luffa gourd, its skeleton used for dishrags and sponges. The cucurbits clamber over the eaves of the house and run along the ridgepole, climb high in the trees, or festoon the fence. Setting off the whole garden are flowers and various useful weeds (dahlias, rosemary, gladioli, climbing roses, asparagus fern, cannas and grain amaranth).”

Meanwhile:
“… European gardens, often extraordinarily tidy, result in functional disorder and low yield. Creativity is seldom tidy. Perhaps we could say that tidiness is something that happens when compulsive activity replaces thoughtful creativity.”

(From Introduction to Permaculture; by Bill Mollison with Reny Mia Slay.)

And one of my favorite quotes from the book:

“Permaculture is not energy- or capital-intensive, rather it is information-intensive. It is the quality of thought and the information we use that determines yield, not the size or quality of the site. We are using not only our physical resources, but our ability to access information and to process it. Information is the most portable and flexible investment we can make in our lives; it represents the knowledge, experience, ideas, and experimentation of thousands of people before us.”

#PermacultureDesignPrinciples #SmallScaleIntensiveSystems

Someone in the DA forum asked what are people doing about retirement savings, pension funds, college funds for kids, etc.; and asked what alternatives people are investing in.

As this person so eloquently pointed out: “It’s one thing to believe in the impending collapse of our financial system, and it’s quite another to voluntary divest of that system in preparation for its demise …”

My response:

I have voluntarily divested. No Wall Street funds or things of that kind. I keep a few thousand dollars in a bank as an emergency repair fund for my house, but may end up investing even that in some sort of local business.

I am an investor in a permaculture education farm, a grassroots indie film, and a small café that’s a learning space. But I haven’t earned any money from those, and if the money I invested were to disappear, I wouldn’t be much troubled (though I do have great regard for these organizations/projects and I’m hoping they succeed).

I own my home outright. Love it and have turned it into a learning space and community asset. It is my workplace: office and studio. But would sell it if I had to. Understanding that there’s no guarantee I would get what I put into it, let alone more.

Part of Deep Adaptation for me is emphasizing social capital over money capital. Social capital is much more durable and flexible than financial capital.

Also intellectual and experiential capital, such as skills learned.

In my book and on this blog I emphasize the power of voting with our wallets.

When I say voting with our wallets, though, I am referring to NOT buying stuff, as much as (or even more than) I am referring to buying stuff. What we don’t buy probably matters even more than what we do buy (other than local farm produce, possibly).

In one of the forums, someone commented that they want good, reliable public transport. And they asked how do we vote with our wallets for this?

I answered:

An excellent question! I have similar goals for public transport as you do. And here are some ways I have voted with my wallet:

— I keep to an absolute bare minimum as possible the amount of money that I give to private car transportation. Mainly I get around by foot, bus, train, and bicycle. When I absolutely must use private car, I pay a friend/neighbor of mine, a young single mom, to be my “taxi”.

— I have reduced my overhead living expenses so as to never have to work at a full-time office type job with strict hours. Instead, I am self-employed and can make my own hours. Furthermore my occupation is eco-educator, permaculture designer. As part of my work, I am able to devote time to attend local government meetings.

There, I speak to advocate:

• FOR expanded public transport hours/routes;
• FOR sidewalks; urban shade trees
• FOR dense multifamily housing near shops and bus lines
• AGAINST road expansions and car-dependent residential development.

Other things I do to vote with my wallet for sustainable transportation include:

• Keep as little money in the bank as possible (a lot of bank loans go to developers, oil projects, etc.)

• No investments on Wall Street.