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One of the best ways to shrink our eco footprint is to reduce our cost of living. And one of the best ways to reduce our cost of living is to share a house or apartment. Living with roommates: the original “affordable housing”!

Figuring out ways to share space with people can actually get really fun and creative, as well as offering a huge financial advantage over living alone. And an emotional advantage too! In the USA, loneliness and lack of community are causing all sorts of public-health problems.

Nowadays even middle-aged and older people are starting to see the wisdom of sharing housing. In the Craigslist house-share ads you might see reference to “Golden Girls”. And certainly, sharing housing is also a win for young people just starting out.

In my blog I have made various posts over the years offering suggestions such as moving to smaller towns and buying houses together. Sharing housing is a huge leverage point for reducing the stranglehold of consumerist culture.

For the past couple of years, I have had only one housemate. Recently, a second friend moved in. Having two housemates is great! Each of us contributes a unique set of skills and resources to the household.

Now, there are certain factors that make it easier to share housing. The biggest bottlenecks are the kitchen and bathroom. A lot of people in the USA have been conditioned by consumer society to think they need their own personal bathroom and their own kitchen.

At my house, here are some ways that we “stretch” our one kitchen and our one bathroom.

1) Housemate’s little shaving basin in his bedroom. If everyone has one of these, the only time we really need the bathroom is to use the toilet. Also helpful for cutting down on bathroom bottleneck, we added an outdoor shower. Many times, we prefer it to the indoor shower.

2) Housemate’s little dishwashing setup. Also each person has a couple of little appliances in their own room. They each have a little microwave and water kettle in their rooms, for example. They are both welcome to use the kitchen also, but they actually mostly prefer to default to their own little setups in their own rooms. (Myself, I just use the kettle and stovetop in the kitchen.) We share one big fridge.

You can see photos here on my DEEP GREEN Facebook page. And I made a chatty little 1-minute video on YouTube as well.

It’s surprising how simple little things can make all the difference. Creative adaptation of the inside of a house or apartment (which we call Zone Zero in permaculture design) is a major, often overlooked leverage point for increasing our healthy interdependence on each other, while reducing our toxic dependence on hyperfinancialized, centralized, official systems.

Are you sharing housing? If so, what are your favorite tips? If not, what are some of the things stopping you?

Constraint can be the seed for great leaps forward. Constraint can be an engineer’s best friend. Constraint sparks innovation. Whereas abundance often sparks replication and growth of wasteful or otherwise harmful designs and practices.

Constraint can thus be used in a very beneficial way.

Or, constraint can be used in a detrimental way, to shut down new ideas, discourage thinking, and put up roadblocks. The favorite bleat and refuge of bureaucrats is “liability” (we can’t plant fruit trees because of liability; we can’t let citizens manage city-owned empty lots because of liability; etc.)

Constraint: liberator or logjam. We each get to decide.

I found an article that’s a very helpful addition to my “verbal toolkit” for explaining degrowth. Also just hearing degrowth talked about in mainstreamland is a great morale-booster. Hope you will find it helpful as well. It’s a New York Times article by David Marchese, “This Pioneering Economist Says Our Obsession with Growth Must End.”

I particularly like the helicopter analogy, and (as a permaculture designer) also applaud Daly’s reference to design of an economy.

“Our obsession with economic growth

“Growth is the be-all and end-all of mainstream economic and political thinking. But what about the possibility that our current pursuit of growth, rabid as it is and causing such great ecological harm, might be incurring more costs than gains? That possibility, that prioritizing growth is ultimately a losing game, is one that the lauded economist Herman Daly has been exploring for more than 50 years. He spoke with our colleagues at The New York Times Magazine …

“The failure of a growth economy to grow is a disaster. The success of a steady-state economy not to grow is not a disaster. It’s like the difference between an airplane and a helicopter. An airplane is designed for forward motion. If an airplane has to stand still, it’ll crash. A helicopter is designed to stand still, like a hummingbird. So it’s a comparison between two different designs, and the failure of one does not imply the failure or success of the other. But in order to move from our present growth economy to a steady-state economy, that’s going to imply some important design principles — some changes in the fundamental design.”

#Degrowth #HermanDaly

It’s a popular saying among us climate activists. And no matter how you fill in the blank it’s true, because there’s no anything on a dead planet.

And yet, as unthinkable and unacceptable as it is for us humans in the rich industrialized world to keep on this deadly path of killing the physical biosphere, we must also never stop fighting for human rights; basic justice and equity. The erosion of human rights in recent times is only shocking to those of us who have never before really experienced a loss of our rights.

If we kill the biosphere, we lose our physical lives. If we continue to allow human rights to be taken away, we lose our souls. A culture where people have lost their souls is a dead culture. There’s no NOTHING in a dead culture. Colonizer culture is a dead culture.

A candidate for office in my county posted about how fed-up he is with the clearcutting of forests for development: “I stopped at 6 different developments yesterday in our county, and each one was totally Clear Cut, meaning complete devastation of nature that was living and thriving there before … not a single tree or blade of original grass left, no wildlife. So Sad!”

I responded: The clearcutting is bad enough, AND furthermore, the “landscaping” they replace it with is a second assault on the eye and the environment. Turfgrass, waxy cartoonish nonnative plants. Shaved, barren ponds.

I get sick of hearing people who recognize the value of trees being ridiculed as “tree-huggers.” When developers replace trees with gross, out-of-place manicured landscaping, maybe we should call them “GRASS-kissers”!

There’s no reason why developers can’t do more natural landscaping. Native plants & trees double as green infrastructure.

We can encourage the grass-kisser developers to embrace a more natural, beautiful, and less resource-hogging approach.

There are many local resources available to help us with native landscaping, green stormwater infrastructure, edible landscaping (food forests etc.)

“Be really careful” “It’s easy for a car [driver] to miss seeing you” “Glad at least you wear a helmet” — I know that most of you people saying these things probably mean well but please don’t talk down to me or other cyclists or pedestrians. I have not lived to be 60 years old by having my head up my a**.

I am working thru various channels (civic activism etc.) to make the roads safer for ALL users including cyclists, pedestrians, and wheelchair users. If you genuinely care about people’s safety, rather than tell cyclists and pedestrians to “be careful,” I urge you and all other car drivers to focus on being careful yourselves. We cyclists and pedestrians ARE careful, because we know we are often inches from death.

You can kill someone with that large tanklike vessel. Especially an SUV!! (And yes, I have owned cars at different phases of my life, and was always very aware that I was operating potentially deadly machinery.)

Motorists! BE CAREFUL DRIVING. Oh, and any motorist who is having trouble seeing cyclists and pedestrians, please 1) check the speed limit — you might need to slow down; and 2) get your eyes examined regularly; eye health is important and it’s something we should all be doing regardless.

P.S. Yes, mansplainers can be female too. Check into internalized patriarchy; explains a lot!

This YouTube video I did awhile back, on cleaning a Ziploc bag for reuse, actually has multiple purposes:

1) show a way to reuse Ziploc and other sturdy plastic bags, a thing that can be hard to reuse because they are hard to clean if they’ve contained greasy foods;

2) show an economical and eco-friendly method to clean ANY dish or eating utensil in a way that needs minimal water and little or no soap. The second purpose might be most important as water-supply issues are on the rise.

Regarding food containers and dishware, here is a hierarchy of materials, from “harder to clean” to “easier to clean”:

Plastic bags are by far the hardest. Then come plastic plates & silverware, Tupperware containers etc. (The plastics tend to retain grease, for which the conventional cleaning approach uses a lot of hot water and a lot of soap).

Easiest in terms of cleaning are stainless steel and china; it’s easier to get them grease-free. My cleaning method shown in this video makes it easier and less resource-intensive to clean any food container or eating vessel, including a plastic bag.

Note: I do not buy plastic bags. But they often come with the territory of a food purchase even at the farmer’s market. For my own sanity I needed to find a way to reuse them without using tons of dish liquid and needing hot water. The “desert scrub” approach using dried grass, caliche soil (back when I lived in central Texas), or sand (with caution as it will leave scratches which can then harbor grease and dirt), broken-down oak leaves or pine needles, can save a lot of water and soap.