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I love to assemble 3-D “collages” of old tins and bottles and such. 3-D art in my everyday surroundings. They evoke, in my mind, “collages” of memory and imagination.

See the post with photos here.

Third photo shows the position of the “collage” relative to my workspace. I love walking into my workspace and looking up and seeing the tins and the bottles and the old map and the old calendar etc.

Sharon Astyk just posted a great piece. “On Staying.”

Sharon’s whole post is great, but her point #4 is my favorite:

“THIS IS MY COUNTRY. THIS IS MY HOME. There is nothing wrong with leaving when things are unsafe, but there is also every reason to try and protect your home, your neighbors, your community and the wealth of mutual support. My ancestors helped colonize this place, helped take land and resources from people who deserved to have them.”

This. Me too. I’m staying. Not only because no country would want me nor would I qualify, but also because I simply do not want to leave. My work is here. I’ve talked about this extensively on this blog, on my social pages, and in my talks.

Love this post on Facebook. Basically it’s about moving the Overton window by redefining what’s centrist versus radical left.

“Going to start calling myself a centrist and then listing my leftist views as proof …” the post from Maura Quint on BlueSky starts out.

(I’m not actually on blue sky, but a lot of people on Facebook are cross-sharing across platforms these days. It’s a great thing. Amplifying wholesome ideas.)

My version for example: “I’m just into those centrist ideas such as healthcare for all, abolishing prisons, ICE, and wars, guaranteeing food and basic housing for everyone…”

Great idea! And this is also giving me ideas regarding my environmental/climate action communication.

“I’m just a very mild, middle-of-the-road when it comes to practicing water conservation, household thrift, retrofitting a basic urban dwelling to be free of dependency on electricity and city water (while still being fully on grid and supporting the grid), mutual aid, and basic Degrowth principles, land back, decolonization, & all that basic middle-of-the road stuff …”

Too many people tell me I’m the most radical environmentalist they know. They need to meet lots more people! I keep sharing the pages of those “lots more people”!

I guess I also need to publicly promote myself as a very mild centrist sort of eco-social activist.

On a similar note, I have taken to speaking to my fellow Boomers in an age-focused way — I’ll say things like “Well, you know, me being in my 60s, I just didn’t grow up with all this single-use plastic.”

Or me being the age I am, we just didn’t grow up with air conditioning.

Or, we just didn’t have this concept of water being sold in plastic bottles when I was growing up; we drank tapwater.

We didn’t have straws unless we were in the hospital.

Or, we just didn’t have these huge houses with more bathrooms than people, I never got comfortable with that. Etc.

Since I’m on the young end of the Boomer generation, most of the people I’m saying this to are older than I am, so my words might have some potential to prompt reflection. I’ve seen a few times where that seemed to happen.

Very very important! This is something I see a lot of in the doomer/collapse groups. Having a small communication device, particularly when we’re not constantly buying the new model, is not being a hypocrite. These tools have actually helped promote beneficial movements.

There’s no contradiction between striving to minimize unnecessary consumption, and having a phone. In fact, if we really use the technology in the many & diverse great ways it offers, we can avoid burning a lot of fuel and money by making best use of phones, telecommunication, teleconferencing, electronic documents.

I agree 100% with what UPP US has to say about this. Having a smartphone doesn’t make us capitalist sellouts.

No, I am not one of these hard-core “zero population growth” people who believe that we will solve all the human problems by ceasing to have children. And I don’t get mad at people who have children. Some people in the various eco circles think that nobody should have any children, which is not a viable plan.

In any society, there are some people who naturally want to have children, and some who do not.

That said …

We don’t need to go out of our way to make more babies. We don’t need the government to incentivize people to have more babies in order to shore up the consumer economy, Social Security, and so on.

In case I haven’t made it clear here and on my other channels, as an eco activist I am in favor of Global North countries allowing a steady flow of immigration to maintain a vibrant population while supporting climate refugees.

As opposed to each Global North country trying to maintain a vibrant population by prodding its existing citizens to make more babies. The planet doesn’t need for countries to be thinking individualistically like this.

If you haven’t heard about the “pro-natalist” movement and policy proposals, it’s something we need to keep an eye on and speak up about.

A big part of restoring ecological health to this planet is changing the public perception of manicured landscaping as the gold standard.

Really there’s no more reason to prefer it than there is to prefer a certain haircut. It’s just a very deeply socially conditioned preference.

And, according to everything I’ve read and studied — and witnessed firsthand in my practice — a preference that we must override. For many reasons, our very lives depend on our ability to accept a new aesthetic standard.

If the photos in this post I’ve shared from Milk the Weed, and similar ones going around, look messy and unkempt to you, and speak to you of neglect, recognize that that is our social conditioning.

And also, there are ways to introduce touches of neatness which can please your aesthetics without having disastrous consequences for life on earth.

Please follow my page if you want to see more posts like this, and practical action steps. Yes there are a lot of political posts on here too, but you can scroll past whatever you don’t like / need.

And also definitely follow Benjamin Vogt /MILK the WEED if you are not already! They give excellent webinars BTW.

One fun and simple way to promote wildflowers as legitimately beautiful flowers is to put them in a vase. Generally, I do not prefer to cut flowers. I prefer to let them grow. However, if they are encroaching on the sidewalk etc., I cut them back.

Blanket flower is my favorite flower. They are gorgeous, salt tolerant, drought tolerant, and to me they totally symbolize feral beauty and resilience.

I have brought them up often in my discussions with our city public works department, planning board, citizen input boards and so on. Because they’re so pretty, they are almost like an ambassador for natural low maintenance approach to landscaping.

But it never occurred to me till yesterday, that by putting them in a vase after I needed to cut some back, I was actually helping to legitimize them. In the mainstream public eye. This may or may not be true, but it’s just a thought that occurred to me. Your input and experiences welcome as always.

(Note, nobody — person, plant, animal, insect, microbe etc. — should have to be “legitimized.” They are all part of our world and we owe them respect and we need to let them live.)

But, in a society where a multi-billion-dollar industry is dedicated to defining some plants as “weeds” that need to be eradicated, sometimes a bit of social boost might be helpful. I like this example because it’s on social media, and it’s also right next to a sidewalk that gets a lot of foot traffic. Including tourists as well as residents.

celebrating wildflowers; natural dune beauty; respecting the ecology

pix here