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In a frequent sequence of events, a developer is applying for a zoning variance to build a residential development on their land. This piece of land is located within an area that has been defined by the city and state as a “Wildlife Corridor” or “Conservation Corridor.” This allows the public to ward off development by purchasing conservation easements rather than have to buy the land outright. And it means the owner gets to keep their land rather than feel forced by development pressure to sell. Which all sounds great to me!

At the same time, as I wrote in my local eco Facebook group just now (and will also be emailing local government officials):

More and more, my thoughts are turning to how we need to get beyond the “nature OR housing” struggle … it is a zero-sum game. What we need is new modes of development in which nature is more fully preserved/integrated IN the housing development or shopping plaza or whatever.

The two perennial worst things I notice about the mainstream approach to development are:

1) the so-called “landscaping” (causing wildlife habitat loss, vastly increased water consumption, pollinator deaths, water pollution, death of aquatic/marine life, and a host of other woes), increased car traffic;
and

2) the car-dependent design (causing traffic congestion, chronic illnesses from sedentary lifestyles, disempowerment of kids and nondriving elderly folks and others who don’t drive, water pollution and intensified heat from asphalt runoff, and many more woes).

We need to start insisting that all new developments really get beyond these toxic and destructive patterns. Eco-minded folk can and should be offering creative suggestions to developers. People and wildlife can and do live side by side, if the humans are required to learn about and respect the plants and animals.

I’m not expressing myself in a manner that anywhere near adequately encompasses the expert perspectives I’ve been tuning into over the past couple of years. A conference called The Nature of Cities in particular was a huge turning point for me. 2000 people from 70 countries — connected by Zoom in a multi-day conference. There are so many examples of human settlements all over the world that don’t wreck the landscape or kill wildlife.

Nature needs to be (re)integrated into human settlements, for our benefit as well as that of other species.

What might a housing development along a wildlife corridor look like? Tiny houses closely clustered along a walk/bike path and transit route to reduce car-dependency and encourage people to get outdoors and enjoy nature? Covenant restrictions to minimize private yard space and maximize preservation of large areas of trees and other native vegetation? “Strong Towns”-y emphasis on compact street layouts, eliminating sprawl? What else?

We have lots of local expertise and I have a feeling that if a bunch of the local environmental experts I most admire were to all get together, they could design a gorgeous “Wildlife Corridor Neighborhood”. [Tagged list of local eco folk] and anyone else who would want to be involved — how bout it? Creative eco housing complex design collab, anyone?

PS. AND i bet people would be lining up to live there even with the restrictions! Maybe even BECAUSE of the restrictions!! (Oh – how about no herbicides, pesticides, etc.)

A lot of people these days are “re-wilding” their yards, or parts of their yards. Many of the popular methods require a lot of work, time (cardboard layering, I’m looking at you!), money, or all the above. Here’s my method of choice, which minimizes time, labor, footprint, and financial cost:

Assuming you have not been spraying your yard, you can probably get a nice meadow just by letting the grass grow. The ground (in areas not drenched by poison) is a local seed-bank of native wildflowers, tall meadow grasses, and forbs. Some unwanted grass will grow along w the natives but you can pull that out bit by bit. Much faster, less expensive, and less work than other popular approaches. And good for you, those of you who are facing fussbudget lawn-lackey neighbors and refusing to back down!!

In some places, there might be rules on how tall the grass is allowed to be. (Other than tall native/prairie/coastal grasses.) Eight inches, a foot, etc.

Fortunately it takes a long time for grass to get that tall. You’ll have a time-window in which you can get some wild plants growing.

Some things that can help ensure a “deliberate, not abandoned” look:

• Make or buy a little sign saying pollinator meadow, wildflower meadow, etc.
• Mow a border maybe a foot wide around just the perimeter of the yard.
• Make a border with whatever free materials you have available: rocks, logs, old railroad ties
• Mow a walking path thru the yard.

Much appreciation to Brian Stout (citizenstout.substack.com) for this excellent piece, “Belonging beyond borders: Citizenship in the world beyond the nation-state.” This lengthy, chewy piece includes quotes and links to many other thinkers on the subject.

Brian offers this TL;DR at the beginning of his post: “TL;DR: Our global system of governance — and the nation-state model it is based on — is no longer fit for purpose. Any effort to imagine and create a new system of global governance must be based on the inalienable right to belong… which of necessity includes the freedom to move. I believe bioregionalism offers the most promising vision for a system of global governance; a promise that returns us into right relationship with land, and a pathway to heal from the trauma and violence of a bordered world.”

But go read the whole article! Brian has great insights, and further offers a portal to creative compassionate wisdom from many other thinkers as well.

I particularly love Brian’s quote from teacher/blogger/activist Zellie Imani: “The crisis is not at the border, the crisis is the border. Borders are not only created through violence but also maintained through violence. Violence isn’t happening at the border, the border is violence.”

I myself have been thinking a lot lately on the topic of borders, particularly as applies to climate refugees. As I see it, the wealthy nations (mainly my country, the USA), have a moral obligation to become extremely welcoming, dare I say porous, to refugees who are fleeing drought, famine, and other manifestations of the climate disaster that we have caused. In that sense I find great value in de-emphasizing nation-states and national borders. Also, connection with one’s bioregion encourages right relationship with nature. Disconnect from nature lies at the root of our (industrial/consumerist/colonialist “culture”‘s) destruction of the biosphere; therefore reconnection must be part of our path forward.

Extending the concept of porous borders into my own home, I have been doing thought-experiments in how to share more fully while keeping it a safe home for all of its current residents (human and all other species). I like the concept of “radical hospitality,” though I have not yet succeeded in implementing this ideal beyond a few bits here and there. Sometimes my borders are too closed; other times they have been too open and created difficulties.

Recently I have been feeling called to get back into making art. Particularly, I have been feeling called to use my art as a vehicle to wake more people up to the urgency of our biospheric crisis. For a few years now I’ve mainly been focused on nonfiction writing, communication on social media, and speaking/writing directly to elected officials and other influencers. Now I’m feeling nudged to add creative art into my activism.

Since I am very much of a social-media critter, this art-deployment will also include sharing the work of other artist-activists who are on a similar path of using their art as a vehicle for waking folks up to the reality of biospheric collapse.

In that vein, today I want to share with you a post by a fellow artist and Deep Adaptation group member named Jessie Ngaio. They shared this in the Deep Adaptation group but also posted it publicly on their own page (along with a beautiful visual). I’m quoting just some of it here, and am including links to their pages so you can read the full post, check out more of their art, and support their work if you choose.

“Last night, after reading about the IPCC report on the climate crisis, my heart was racing and I felt sick and dizzy with fear. Rather than become paralysed, I felt I needed to do something so I painted myself with shaking hands and then I wrote this. …”

“The world is ending. This is a fact that I am no longer going to deny. …”

“Our world is ending and if we don’t act quickly, we will not survive that ending. Some people say this is for the best, that we humans have had our time and we have ruined everything but personally, my heart is full of love for us; we’re baby monkeys who only recently became conscious and so I hope that we do survive and I hope that we evolve. …”

“How do I combat the climate despair which plagues me on a daily basis? I focus on the beauty that exists now, I focus on the actions myself and others are taking but most of all, I dream. In my dreams, I see a world that has changed beyond recognition to the one that we are in now. So many of the countries that exist are underwater, massive cities have been swallowed by rising oceans and are gone, populated now only by ghosts and sea creatures. And the land that is above sea is covered in strange new forests that are thrumming with the hum of insects and echoing with the songs of birds. The land has been rewilded, healed through the efforts and dreams and love of a new type of human.

“These new people have learned from the mistakes of their ancestors and so they are not conquerors or narcissists because the only people who survive an apocalypse are people who are able to work together, work communally. And the only people who are able to heal the world after an apocalypse are the people who are able to work with the laws of nature in a mutually beneficial symbiosis… and so these people have become connected to the land they are on, like Indigenous people always have been.”

And if you are like me, which I suspect many people are, your heart aches with the desire for this world to exist. And if your heart aches as mine does, perhaps this indicates something about a beautiful truth of our human nature; we don’t want to destroy life on this planet. We don’t. We’ve lost our way, we’re confused and scared and far from home but our heart knows what we want most: we want to live, we want to love and we want to thrive.

“So let’s awaken to the truth in our hearts and start doing what we need to do to prepare for the hard road ahead. We are an incredible species, we have art, we have science, we have social justice, we have music, poetry, medicine, philosophy, psychology, ecology… we have so much. Let’s put it all to use and together, we are powerful.”

This post (which I originally saw because Jessie shared it to the Deep Adaptation group) is so beautifully expressive and so describes the direction in which I am being called recently. Hope you enjoy this as much as I did. Bringing art and joy and beauty and creativity to the task of waking up ourselves and others to the realities of the biospheric collapse we are experiencing. I suspect a lot of us have been finding that this is our path. The ultimate Transformative Adventure includes facing-up to where we have gone off-course. I feel a sweet spot that is not false hope and is not gloom and doom either. For me, this sweet spot is enabled/expressed/conveyed/activated largely by art and creativity.

• Here is Jessie Ngaio’s Facebook page; here is the entire post which I have excerpted from above; and here is their website (website is for viewers aged 18 & older)

I live in a state where the governor has imposed sweeping punitive measures on any local governments, school districts, or businesses who are trying to exercise their choice to follow the federal guidelines on protecting the public health. The governor of my state is staging huge rallies to fight any local efforts to mandate vaccines and masks.

I live in a country where the president and some legislators are engaged in good efforts to address climate change by transitioning from fossil fuels, but where these efforts are being stamped out by a coal-state legislator and others who apparently would rather see humans go extinct than make the effort to change our ways. This while people in less-privileged countries are facing forced migration and perishing in heat waves, droughts, floods, and other disasters fueled by human-induced climate change.

When you live in a place where some people’s efforts to do the right thing, in accordance with scientific findings and basic human decency and global consensus and the ever-stronger nudgings of Mother Earth, are steamrollered by other so-called “government leaders” who are abusing their power, you are living in a rogue state.

In a rogue state, building community cohesion and household resilience is the best form of resistance. One often-overlooked way to build self-reliance and resilience is to constructively disengage, to the greatest extent you are able, from feeding the institutions that are leading us to death and destruction.

If my state’s governor succeeds in preventing schools from exercising local choice to protect the health of students and parents in accordance with CDC guidelines, I would love to see a massive school strike by parents and teachers (though that isn’t my call to make since I’m not a teacher or parent).

I would love to see more people walk off their jobs if their employers are forbidden to require masks or vaccines. And I will help anyone who wants guidance in how to radically cut their expenses and boost their options so they have the economic leverage to walk away from their treadmill job — and pursue a livelihood that truly calls to their heart and is on their own terms.

As a resident of a country that in many ways has gone rogue despite the best efforts of its president and other climate-aware individuals in its administration … Right now and for as long as it takes, I would love to see people become ruthlessly thrifty about their use of electricity and gasoline, and I’m working on doing that myself and helping others do so.

Energy goes into everything we use. Since most energy being used to produce our stuff is nonrenewable, every bit of stuff we do without is part of an energy boycott.

“Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”

One great way to do without is to stay home. I’m not saying hide in our houses and never go anywhere; I’m saying be really selective about the energy we expend and the institutions we feed.

The revolution is decentralized and on a micro level. Every little act of conservation and non-consumption we do is an act of resistance to the rogue states we are living in. What can I not buy new today? NextDoor and Craigslist and thrift shops are packed with great stuff for sale in your local area, in many cases barely used. The waste stream is full of expensive furniture, near-new clothing, unopened jars of gourmet food. Even if I didn’t already have most all the stuff I need, it’d be easy to get it from the free curbside department store.

I take my marching orders from Mother Earth. She rules over all of us, even the most thuggish rogue states.

There’s a climate sign-waving rally in my area today (part of the global ClimateStrike organized by Fridays for Future). It’s 17 miles away and I’m getting there by bicycle. There are getting to be more and more of us; we’re not stray isolated weirdoes; we are part of a growing worldwide movement.

Here’s the Climate Strike website where you can look for a march/rally in your area.

Long live the Grassroots Green Mobilization!

In the environmental movement (or in any movement for social good), we will inevitably have our differences in how best to proceed. Sometimes, interactions with eco allies who see things differently than we do can leave us feeling beat-up, drained, demoralized, worthless, “less than” some other person or people or group.

But if we keep reminding ourselves we are on the same team, we can minimize conflict and bitterness between ourselves, and mazimize the amount of energy we spend working on the problems we all want to fix.

This can be harder than it sounds. Sometimes you might need to take a break, unhook from groups, step down from adminning a group, make it so you can’t see certain people’s posts, etc. You might also be called to do some work on yourself to get free of your own unhelpful patterns. I know I have had to do all of that at times. You might even realize you need to leave a place and move somewhere else. (I’ve come close to doing that too and may have to actually do it someday, though I hope not.) Do not feel guilty if you need to do any of this. It’s not a failure; it’s just wise use of your finite energy and attention.

Thank you to my permie colleague Mike Hoag, of Transformative Adventures, for this meme cartoon which gets the feeling across so well. A humorous yet deep reminder that at the end of the day, especially when it comes to the issues affecting our very biosphere, we are all trying to move in the same direction. And thanks Mike for your deep wise insights accompanying this graphic. We can transcend the “narcissism of small differences.”

P.S. If you haven’t already done so, please check out the Transformative Adventures group. (“Permaculture Landscape Transformation via Transformative Adventures” on Facebook.) It’s an incredibly nurturing and nourishing space.

Living without a car is something I’ve talked about a lot on this blog, and I’ve shared articles by people living without cars in all different circumstances. But the other day when a friend of mine asked why I don’t have a car, I figured it was time to post again.

Actually she didn’t ask me directly; she asked another friend of mine. Maybe she was embarrassed to ask me directly in case the reason I don’t have a car was that I have some sort of health issue or got a DUI or something. (But for the record, if I got a DUI, I would want to tell people about it, to help convince them not to drink and drive!)

But no. I have my license and have a clean driving record and everything, and I don’t have any issues that prevent me from driving. I just don’t have a car, because … I don’t want a car.

Of course, environmental reasons figure strongly in my choice. But even if there were some perfectly eco-friendly car (which electric cars are not, by the way), I still wouldn’t want to own a car. I have owned cars at times in the past, enough to know!

• A car is a hole in my wallet. I have way better uses for several thousand dollars a year. I actually can’t afford to own a car because it would cut into too many other things I value. What would you do if you suddenly had several thousand extra dollars per year?

• Cars take up a ton of space, and are a pain to park.

• I hate seeing people’s lives ruled by cars. Their car breaks down and they’re totally stranded — can’t get to work, can’t get their errands done. I want to set an example that there’s another way.

• I hate that car ownership is still a status symbol. It seems so yesterday. A dinosaur relic of the petroleum era. We need better status symbols, like how many shade-trees we can plant, or how many pollinators we can attract to our yards, or how much food we can grow in our neighborhoods. Or how much fossil fuel consumption we can reduce by taking public transport, walking, or riding bicycles. You know what’s a status symbol to me? The fact that I have worked as a pedicab driver! And I once pedaled four adults a distance of about two miles! And our pedicabs did not have assistive motors! (Having a motor would have totally ruined the status-symbol aspect for me!)

• When I want a car (which I do on occasion, like once a year), I can rent one. So much easier; the maintenance is someone else’s problem; and it’s not taking up space at my house in the meantime! (Driveways and garages are far too valuable to be taken up by cars. My garage is a she-shed which I could very happily live in, and my driveway is an outdoor livingroom with landscaping!)

• When I’m in a car, I lose touch with how harsh the landscape is for people who aren’t in cars. There’s too much noise, not enough shade. Vast expanses of treeless sidewalk. Loud, heavy mechanized landscaping equipment, belching fumes and scalping Mother Nature’s luscious green curvy beauty into sterile flatness. Multi-lane roads that are hazardous and unbelievably unpleasant to even be near, let alone try to cross. I don’t want to lose touch with the ugly streetscapes we have created by prioritizing the car-driving people over all other people; if I lose touch with the ugliness I can’t help to change it to beauty! If you’ve never spent a day getting around by human-powered transport, I highly recommend you try it. You’ll be shocked at what looks fine from behind a car window but is so not fine in reality.

• Despite the ugliness of many USAmerican streetscapes, something struck me the other day as I rode my bicycle about 15 miles to do various errands: An ugly day on my bike is better than a beautiful day in a car! Because amid the large-scale ugliness there are always pockets of beauty, which can’t be seen or touched from behind a car window. Mini forests, random friendly people, tiny forgotten wildflowers growing at the sidewalk edge.

• By not owning a car, I gather useful information which I can then share with other car-free people, such as which roads should be avoided because they have no shoulders, no sidewalks, no shade, etc. And, which businesses will deliver! (Thank you Edgewater Yard Shop, my favorite source of pine-straw mulch!)

• Even though getting around by foot and bicycle takes me more time than getting around by car would, it’s worth it. Time walking or bicycling is time well spent, and offers benefits not available from a car. For example, I learn all sorts of cool shortcuts and alternate routes, and feel like I really get to know my city on a deep, fine-grained level. And, the overall tempo of life feels much less rushed, hectic, and stressed when I’m walking or cycling than when I’m trying to run errands in a car.

• In my younger days I used to be a gym-rat. Now, I’d rather get my exercise and my transportation from the same source, and eliminate the time and expense of “working out.” As bad as the outdoors smells from gasoline fumes sometimes, it still smells better than a gym! And I just prefer to sweat outdoors rather than indoors! (Of course, some people simply enjoy the gym environment for the camaraderie, professional trainers, and many other benefits it offers.)

Living car-free is fun and exhilarating, and brings out more creativity and strength and resiliency than I thought I had. But don’t take my word for it; try a car-free day sometime! And if you do, I’d love to hear about your experience.

And a final note: This post is to offer encouragement & support to people who are interested in learning about car-free living and maybe trying it out. It is not to shame people who feel they have to own a car because the design of our streets & cities, and our whole mainstream culture, makes it difficult to live without a car!

Further Exploration:

• Check out “Selling My Car … Bought My Freedom” by Rob Greenfield. You think I have a low footprint? This young man is an entertaining inspiration!