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I second the sentiments of a dear friend/fellow activist who wrote:

This is a conversation that’s happening frequently in my circles. So many people leaving. I find myself repeating “everyone can’t leave.” “Everyone can’t run.” “Somebody’s got to stay behind and save Florida.” Not just for Florida, but for the nation.

I just said “everyone” can’t leave, and by that I mean if they do we lose the fight because there are no fighters. I do know there are circumstances which make it impossible and dangerous for so many to live in Florida now and I do know that it’s a personal choice. I would never impose my personal choices on anyone. Nor can I my own children who are having that same conversation. I respect the gravity of the decision that must be made. Just making an observation really. Hopeful that we don’t lose our best fighters.

And to this I added:

Exactly! Because the whole country is affected. Where Florida goes the rest will eventually follow, so those of us who feel able & willing do so need to stay here and stop the creeping fascism. There is no “away.”

This question came after I had commented in response to an ad on Facebook. The advertiser was some “international retirement living” promotion company, touting some quaint rural French village where the culture is supposedly unspoiled, the restaurants are cheap and authentic, the locals haven’t sold out to tourism or the super-wealthy, etc.

I commented: “Hey fellow Americans, retire to France and spoil the unspoiled culture!”

And then: “First thing, we need to widen these streets. And let’s get all these grimy old buildings pressure-washed. And what about these village stores, the selection is really limited and the hours are terrible. We need a 24-hour CostcoSamsWalmart. …”

Then someone asked in response to my comment: “What if I want to get away from U.S. culture?”

To which I replied:

I mean… Without knowing you, I’m not qualified to say what kind of influence you’d be.

All I can say is that many many fellow Americans I know have had the same sentiment about wanting to get away from American culture, and yet we go to these other places with our norms of giant houses and big cars and roads and so on and we end up buying huge amounts of land, using more than our share of resources and spoiling those places physically and culturally. We end up jacking up land prices for the native residents, displacing people who were born there. Why should we get to go trash someone else’s country instead of fixing up our own?

There is a lot about our culture that I don’t like, but I’m hoping there are enough of us who care, that we can be a beneficial influence and turn things around.

A final thought: if there’s anything USA culture needs right now it’s elders. Our wisdom, stabilizing influence, experience, perspective. Even though our culture treats elders like crap, the fact is that we are needed.

And actually we have an obligation! Those of us who are of a certain age grew up in cushy times. If we think life is hard for us, think how very much harder it is for pretty much everybody else.

In my mind we have an obligation to stick around and fix the mess that has been largely caused by our own complacency.

Also, haven’t we Anglo/Euro’s done enough damage already by colonizing the entire planet? Are we going to re-colonize it now?

I have friends who were crowing about how cheap land is in Mexico. We have to think about why the land is so cheap. What farmers got driven off their land? What misery is underwriting our cheap retirement aspirations?

Further Exploration:

• Get on TikTok and search for Native Hawaiian, Puerto Rico, Mexico, other countries where people from the global north like to “escape” to for their retirement. And search gentrification. Lots of people talking about this.

• Read The Divide, book by Jason Hickel (who is also author of one of the most popular books on Degrowth). I’m still in the middle of reading the book. It’s horrifying how much misery the policies of “developed” nations have wrought worldwide.

From Sierra Club: Two excellent articles. Read and save for reference!

1) Summing up the connection between white supremacy culture and the destruction of our biosphere. “Racism Is Killing the Planet — The ideology of white supremacy leads the way toward disposable people and a disposable natural world,” by Hop Hopkins (who is Director of Organizational Transformation for the Sierra Club).

“You can’t have climate change without sacrifice zones, and you can’t have sacrifice zones without disposable people, and you can’t have disposable people without racism.
We’re in this global environmental mess because we have declared parts of our planet to be disposable. …”

2) And also by Hopkins: “Putting the Cart Before the Horse: Diversity in the Environmental Movement.”

“… Is the Sierra Club trying to expand our base to include more BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) to validate the work we’re already doing? Or is the Sierra Club attempting to transform our culture and share power in such a way that BIPOC folks would want to join our organization?”

Sierra Club, systemic racism, white supremacy culture, DEI, talking points

#housingsecurity #activism #stablecommunity #YIMBY

An article I just read in NY Times — “Imagine a renters utopia; It might look like Vienna” — is fascinating. See link below for whole article; I have included some quotes here.

One very interesting aspect of public housing in Vienna is that anyone can live there even if their income becomes quite high after they move in. This has the effect of avoiding concentrations of poverty. It also maintains a wider base of support for public housing.

By the way, the studio apartments they show in the article are gorgeous and I would totally live there. (And I really love the apartment building shown in the photo that I screenshot below.)

As someone who lived as a renter at apartments, duplexes, trailer park, etc., for almost all of her adult life before coming into sudden money which I used to purchase a home five years ago, I am very often keenly aware of the trade-off of owning a free-standing house. It affords stability (not just for me but for my two housemates), and at the same time, ownership ties up a lot of one’s time and energy.

Puts me in mind of that quote from the 1950s regarding Levittown etc., to the effect that “If a man has his own house and yard he won’t have time to think about being a communist blah blah blah.”

The public housing the way they’ve done it in Vienna creates a huge amount of stability for renters and this has a very positive impact on their well-being, including their occupational freedom. Not just a benefit to individuals; society benefits as a whole when people can become doctors, artists, or whatever their calling is, instead of just having to take whatever job just to pay the bills.

“Soaring real estate markets have created a worldwide housing crisis. What can we learn from a city that has largely avoided it?”

Many quotable quotes in this nice lengthy article; here are a few that particularly struck me:

• ” … This constituency of middle-class homeowners is what the Dartmouth emeritus economist William A. Fischel calls “homevoters”: a coalition of Americans who — consciously or not — vote to protect the value of their property. They tend to oppose local development and favor exclusionary zoning — which ensures maximum appreciation and prevents their tax dollars from extending to poorer neighborhoods. This tendency, alongside stagnant wages, has transformed the nation’s housing stock into an ever-scarcer and ever-more-expensive class of speculative asset.”
• “When Karl-Marx-Hof opened, it housed 5,000 people in 1,400 apartments. These apartments were coveted. “It had two central laundries, two communal bathing facilities with tubs and showers, a dental clinic, maternity clinic, a health-insurance office, library, youth hostel, post office, and a pharmacy and 25 other commercial premises, including a restaurant and the offices and showroom of the BEST, the city-run furnishing and interior-design advice center,” Blau writes.”
• “Today limited-profit housing accounts for half the city’s social housing. Limited-profit housing associations are restricted to charging rents that reflect costs. Investors — banks, insurance funds — may buy shares of the limited-profit housing associations, generally to help fund initial construction. They are paid a low rate of annual interest on their shares. Any profits beyond that must be reinvested in the construction of new social housing. “It creates a revolving flow of financing for social housing,” said Justin Kadi, a professor in planning and housing at the University of Cambridge. Vienna’s main outlay toward housing is now providing low-cost financing for construction — and the government gets that money back.”
• “The spiral of overvaluation in housing, which makes the housing-haves rich and the have-nots desperately poor, has brought us to a point where only something radical can solve it. The problem with housing in the United States is that it has been locked in as a means of building wealth, and building wealth is irreconcilable with affordability.”
• “…I asked him, as I asked every Viennese tenant of social housing, what he did with all the money he saved thanks to his cheap rent. ‘I haven’t invested a single penny in the stock market,’ he told me. ‘I would consider it an enormous waste of time to sit in front of my computer and study what the stock market is doing. I prefer to use my time writing, editing an online newspaper supporting interesting initiatives and having fun. … If people don’t have to struggle all day long to survive — if your life is made safe, at least in social conditions — you can use your energy for much more important things.'”

NY Times
Imagine a renters utopia
It might look like Vienna

There’s been a lot on Twitter TikTok and elsewhere regarding bathing. It started when some of us white permie / hippie types started talking publicly about our relaxed approach to bathing. A number of “earthy-minded” actors and other celebrities went viral doing this, and it has caused quite a backlash.

Me, I am all in favor and think that a natural approach is great. If you have access to a swimmable body of water, I personally think that can totally count as a bath. For years when I lived in Austin my main bath was swimming in Barton Springs. (I used to take a shower after but then realized it didn’t feel necessary.) And in general, I actually don’t use soap on all areas of my skin all of the time. And I’m a big fan of selectively scrubbing just the areas such as my feet, every day or more often than every day, depending on what gets dirty and what the weather is like and so on.

Now a lot of people would disagree and say that if you’re not scrubbing your whole body with soap every day, and not taking a full bath or shower every day (or even more often), you’re not clean. That’s all fine and good; everybody needs to decide for themselves.

What we don’t need to do is allow ourselves to be ruled by advertisers and social norms regarding shame about cleanliness.

So in that regard I think it’s great when people share that they don’t necessarily bathe or shower every day. And I love hearing that some parents just let their kids swim and let that count as a bath. (Note though, if we are going into a public swimming pool as opposed to a natural, open body of water such as the ocean or stream or lake, we absolutely have to shower and scrub before we get into the confined space of that public pool, I’m sorry. Respect and consideration for others are a must.)

A relaxed approach to bathing can have many benefits. It helps us get in tune with our own bodies and decide what kind of bathing schedule and practices are good for our own skin, as opposed to us being ruled by advertisers or shame-based social norms. It can significantly reduce household expenses on possibly unnecessary skin products. It reduces the amount of chemicals going into our water. And can significantly conserve water.

We (I’m talking to fellow white people) do need to recognize that some of the things we’re promoting in the name of reducing our footprint, saving time, reducing household expenses on things like soap, keeping chemicals out of the waterways — and allowing our kids to rewild / reconnect with nature — are things that we can get away with because of white privilege. If a parent who is Black, indigenous, or other person of color were saying things like this publicly — that they allow their kids to just run around bathing in streams all summer and not have to take showers etc. — those parents would be likely to have Child Protective Services called on them. Accordingly, we need to go the extra mile. For example if we see the authorities cracking down on a family for the kind of thing that we ourselves are getting away with, then we need to speak up.

(Important update October 26, 2024: We additionally need to recognize that whatever our bathing habits are, we have absolutely no place pushing them on Black people, indigenous people, or other people of color. I’m saying this because there are a lot of us going on Black people’s pages and making idiots of ourselves. We don’t even need to be opening up our mouths on those pages at all. Frankly, we “crunchy hippie wp” need to recognize that a lot of the rest of the world considers our hygiene practices inferior. Whatever you do in your own life is your business. But I would encourage you to learn from various traditional bathing practices, and not put yourself out there as an authority outside of our little crunchy circles. If someone comes to you wanting to conserve water and soap, or stop feeling guilty about just swimming in a river, or bathing less frequently in winter, feel free to share your methods. But we can’t be going on other communities’ pages trying to say our way is the right way.

(This also applies to the big ballyhoo about washing chicken. Wash your chicken before you cook it, or don’t, but we don’t get to go onto Black people’s pages and tell them they don’t need to wash their chicken. And asking them questions, when Google is right there. If you’re not up on the chicken-washing kerfluffle, check out The Uppity Negress, who I’ve been following on Facebook for a while. Her new account is Uppity Negress Redux, since Facebook killed her other account after she reached a certain number of followers. As often happens with popular Black creators.

(On this note, if you bring a dish of your homemade food to a potluck that’s in a multicultural setting, don’t be surprised if people are hesitant to eat your food. Turns out the global majority thinks we wp are not very clean, and when I read comments on various pages, I understand why. If you go to a potluck, rather than bring a dish of homemade food you might consider instead bringing a bottle of wine, juice, a professionally baked cake or cookies. Or perhaps a tray of food purchased from a local Black business.)

I suspect that colonizer culture / Anglocentric culture is the original source of the shame-based social norms about what it takes to be clean. In traditional cultures all over the world and throughout history, I’m sure most of the kids and maybe the adults mainly stayed clean just in the course of everyday life by going into the river and so on. (Update 2024: But, in addition, traditional cultures have bathing practices that are arguably superior. And they have good reason for looking askance at us white people regarding anything that comes to hygiene. I’m saying this, again, as a person whose own personal approach to bathing and cooking is a bit “relaxed” to say the least. I don’t know if that’s from my English ancestors, or my French ancestors, or just because I’m lazy and or my mental health issues. And or that my way just plain works for me and my body. But at the very least, I keep my hands well-washed, and am sensitive to the people around me and suggest you do the same. Act as if you might be considered unclean — because actually, compared with a lot of other cultures, our “crunchy” subculture is not clean.)

So if we’re going to promote these naturalistic practices we just have to be aware and do it in a way that liberates and empowers people to find their own right choice.

That said, we do need to get clean. And there are many practices from other cultures that we can learn from and enjoy.

Personally, I find that scrubbing with a washcloth or loofah is a really great and eco-friendly way to get clean. Especially as I prefer to use little or no running water, only a small container of water scooped from the rainbarrel. And only moderate amounts of soap as I have dry skin, etc.

And quite frankly, I don’t bathe every day (though in summer I do have a cooling dip in the ocean or a rain-tub daily), and in winter I really don’t bathe every day. Nowhere near. But I do always make sure I feel clean, and at different times a year that means different frequencies.

I will say that when I went to live in Japan in the 1990s I fell in love with their method of bathing. There were public baths, but before you could go soak in that nice super hot water, you needed to scrub scrub scrub with a washcloth, get super clean and only then sit in the communal tub.

I never thought about it much growing up, because the English way of taking baths was what I grew up with, but once I did it the Japanese way I could never go back to just getting in a bathtub of water without first scrubbing clean.

Stay clean and healthy everyone, however you choose to do it. And don’t let the advertisers or indoctrinated shame tell you what clean is.

PS. Celebrities have a lot of leverage to be an anti-consumerist influence. And so do each of us in our own way. Keep going with your efforts, and thanks to each of you for helping people reduce their footprint in ways that add value to their lives.

Further exploration:

• “Why Aren’t These Famous Guys Bathing?” Barry Samaha; in Esquire magazine.

This 3-minute animated YouTube video from Water Stories, depicting the death spiral of the watershed, is an extremely helpful tool for educating ourselves and other people. When we can see the mechanism of destruction, and get other people to see it, we have a better chance of being able to muster the political will to implement the solutions. Solutions which are “embarrassingly simple” (to use a famous phrase from Bill Mollison regarding the solutions to complex problems).

Regardless of where on the planet we live … We can probably all see examples right around us of the things shown in this 3-minute video. Excess paving, removal of trees, landscaping practices that reduce the tree canopy and other surface areas of vegetation, and so on.

In my city and region: The devegetation of the beachside (barrier island), the well-meaning but misguided actions to ease flooding in low-lying areas on the mainland, etc.

And, adding insult to injury, the contamination of the groundwater with herbicides and other poisons.

The things that we think we are doing to ease flooding by spraying herbicides in the canals in the low-lying parts of town (Nova Canal is one), mowing down the vegetation on the banks, dredging the canals deeper, and so on are actually making things worse in the long term. They show it right in the video rivers getting dredged and so on and it just depletes the water table more and more and exacerbates the desertification process.

Every point of elevation above the low poinrs is a point where we have the opportunity and the obligation to catch water and allow it to infiltrate slowly into the ground (“slow, spread, and sink”) rather than let it run off down the denuded slopes and pool in the low-lying areas where we then are tasked with trying to send it “away.”

SIMPLE ACTION STEP!!! Please watch this video and communicate with your neighborhood groups, city officials, county officials and anyone else who will listen so we can all get on the same page about this.

UPDATE June 9, 2023: Water Stories has just posted its wonderful 2-minute animation video “The Revived Water Cycle – how humans can heal planet earth and resolve the climate crisis.”

Thank you so much to Water Stories (waterstories.com) for this and all of their other content which is getting the word out.

topics of this post: mortality; death & dying; getting around to things (don’t worry; I’m OK!)

I just found out that an old school friend of mine had died suddenly of a heart attack back in February. The latest of several people I know who have left their earth bodies recently.

Our society tends to be death-avoidant; we tend to avoid talking about death or even thinking about it until the time is right upon us. But death is a part of life, and I’ve always believed we can live more richly if we are willing to talk about it and prepare for it.

I always say I aspire to live to be 120. There are lots of things that need to be done on this planet, and I really want to be part of the shift that I believe is coming; contribute what peaceful and creative influence I can.

That said, various recent things, such as my physical body feeling some signs of its age (I’m using it! of course it’s going to show signs of wear, right?), and several friends my age crossing over, in some cases very suddenly, got me thinking: What would I do if today were my last day?

Actually I think about that kind of stuff all the time; I always have and it enriches my life. But I have never made a post on social media about it before.

If today were my last day, I would make a Facebook post thanking you all for your unique being, and for our interactions over the years, whether it was in person, or online only, or some mixture.

I do regret the many many times when I have fallen short in kindness, compassion, understanding, and just plain listening. As long as I live and breathe, I will always be striving to do better.

And I would say anyone should feel free to celebrate my life in any way they see fit. If you’re a gin drinker, have a dirty martini or Negroni for me. If you are a beer drinker, have a nice zesty IPA. Definitely eat lots of good food!

Of course I would say thank you to my geographically distant siblings and tell them how much I love them. (We stay in touch and I make a point of expressing my love, so they know that already, but.)

Other than that, I would mostly just have my typical day because that’s what I love. Doing my work; enjoying my house and neighbors; enjoying the beach.

Speaking of death preparations, I want to share something we learned in End-of-Life Doula class yesterday. I think this will be helpful to a lot of people. We learned that apparently a living will, Five Wishes document, etc., is not the legally binding document that we think it is. A doctor can override the wishes that we have expressed to our family members and friends, regarding what medical interventions we want or don’t want should we become incapacitated and unable to speak for ourselves. In order to avoid having our wishes overridden, family members need to get the doctor to sign a POLST form. That’s my public service announcement for today. Here’s one website I found helpful regarding POLST forms: https://polst.org/form-patients/

I would invite my local friends to a big party at some friendly outdoor venue like Main Street Station or Beaches. And I would say thank you all it’s been a great life.

If I knew I had a month rather than just a day, then added to all of the above would be that I would do my best to finish at least one of my current books in progress. I feel like I really owe the world more than I have put out so far. Feels like I have been harboring energy and resources for some big project. Actually, I would even do this if I had one day left: I would at least try to finish enough of a segment of the book that people might enjoy it.

My creative ancestors, who worked so hard just to survive, will be seriously vexed if I don’t finish at least one more book before I leave this physical incarnation.

All of that said, I still aspire to live to be 120. But we can all go anytime, so I want to be prepared just in case. I love you guys!!

How about you? What would you want to be sure and get around to if you knew you only had a little time left?

Stealing my friend Tonya R’s status because it adds visual appeal and it fits well with this topic.