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#RainwaterHarvestingSuccess story:

Calif. storms help ease drought
Rainfall feeds systems set up to capture rainwater (Suman Naishadham and Brian Melley; ASSOCIATED PRESS)

“LOS ANGELES – As Californians tally the damage from recent storms, some are taking stock of the rainwater captured by cisterns, catches, wells and underground basins – many built in recent years to provide relief to a state locked in decades of drought.

“The banked rainwater is a rare bright spot from downpours that killed at least 20 people, crumbled hillsides and damaged thousands of homes.

“Los Angeles County, which has 88 cities and 10 million people, collected enough water from the storms to supply roughly 800,000 people for a year, said Mark Pestrella, director of the Los Angeles County Public Works department. …” (this is a short excerpt; visit link to read whole article)

I always feel heartsick when fellow USA Americans in the permie movement make posts in permie groups along these lines: “Hi! We are buying land and building a house in <tropical paradise country xyz>. We are from <some city in the USA with a totally different climate> and we don’t know what grows here. It’s so overwhelming, please advise!”

I always wonder what it is that makes people (mainly my fellow USA Americans) want to go build some site and do some land-based thing in a place where they have no knowledge of the land, plants, or any people. It seems really stark and daunting to me, not to mention possibly intrusive.

I want to respond “Noooooo!!! Dont go there! Stay home! Stop colonizing other countries!”

Most of the people’s comments in response to these kinds of posts tend to focus purely on the physical land and what plants will grow there. Grrrrr. All too often we act as if this is all of permaculture or even the main part of permaculture.

Recently I was relieved to see one person reponding to such a post advise that they find an indigenous helper; offer them the land; build relationships. “Social permaculture is where you start if you dont know where you are or what grows there.” AMEN!!

There are so many of us infesting other countries/territories tho … Costa Rica, Hawaii, Puerto Rico … are some of the favorite locations where we are moving to, making life even more difficult for locals than it is already.

On a related note – Mike Hoag is going to be on the radio on Dan Wahpepah’s show at 2pm US PST 5pm US EST today — I think they’ll be sharing some observations & insights that will be helpful & relevant to this discussion. See the post Mike just made.” Very timely timing! I hope lots of people will tune in.

In a private convo recently, a fellow permie commented “It’s weird. They want to move here and we want to move there.” (“They” being citizens of various tropical countries.)

I replied that the people from these other countries want to move here bc they are starving [or not earning enough to survive, or being threatened daily with drug gang violence, etc. — added later], bc our consumerist/globalist system has messed up their ecosystems and cultures [and their homegrown economies]. We want to move there because we are indoctrinated in colonizer culture, that is what colonizers do. We jacked up our own economy, and created a soulless culture, by feeding capitalism, so then we want to move on to the next frontier where the land is cheap and the people are smiling.

Also: People who just have a food forest on their own private land are not really doing permaculture; they are just “homesteading” (which is problematic in itself). Clarification: It’s not that a person with a private food forest is necessarily NOT doing permaculture. It’s not that a person can’t be doing any stuff that’s only on their own land or only for themselves/their family.

You know what I think the difference is, I think it has to do with being a part of a community. The people I think of as really doing permaculture might be doing things on the piece of land where they live, but they are also very much woven into / giving to their local community (and also in many cases the wider communities including online communities). There are a lot of people “homesteading” and calling it permaculture. It’s not the same.

I get it about the price of land being a motivating factor for some people to move to places with lower costs of living, but the way to deal w that is build community in our own regions/country. The social aspect of permaculture is something that a lot of us USA Americans have been conditioned to ignore or neglect. I think it must be a legacy of pioneer/frontier mentality which is part of our hyper-individualistic white supremacy culture.

Further exploration:

• TikTok for one is a vast fountain of learning on this topic. Type indigenoustok, hawaiiantok, Puerto Rico, Costa Rica + colonizer, colonization, decolonize etc.

• And I just found this article: How To Decolonize The Permaculture Movement (Tobias Roberts; Huffington Post). “If you are interested in permaculture and are looking for land to create a vision of your own, why not look at land in rural Kentucky instead of Costa Rica? … After a good deal of reflection, I want to focus now on how to rescue the permaculture movement; how to save it from some of its most disturbing and troubling tendencies. … Stop Buying Land in Shangri-La Areas Around the World … While there can be positive effects through bringing new knowledge and ideas into a community, there can (and often are) unseen and ignored negative effects. When wealthy foreigners buy up land in rural, agrarian areas, this inevitably leads to gentrification.” He makes a lot of other really good points too. Don’t move to another country without making an effort to truly belong there; don’t make permaculture courses your primary source of income; stop appropriating indigenous knowledge and monetizing it on permie rah-rah YouTube channels etc.

• “Decolonizing Permaculture” — Mike Hoag with Dan Wahpepah on Dan’s radio show First Nations Radio.

This guy disconnected from the electrical grid and water for eight months — in Manhattan. (Joshua Spodek; arstechnica.com) He learned a lot; great article. Many of his experiences are similar to mine.

I actually have been thinking about this very thing lately, as we had a significant electric repair bill last week and are now facing what might be a significant plumbing repair bill.

Was just thinking about this. So many permie-oriented people romanticize moving out to the sticks and “living off-grid.” I do it in my urban place when I want to, and would do it all the time except I have “civilian” housemates who I need to provide running water & electricity for.

If it were just me here or if i had permie housemates, I’d very likely just turn off the watermain; we have enough rainwater, and also have a well (which a friend helped me retrofit with a hand-pump).

I’ve always felt like having indoor running water was a bit overrated for the cost & risk. At one point I lived without running water inside my home for 10 years, and this was in the heart of a city. I came home to my trailer one day to find a flood. Rather than call a plumber to find and fix the leak, I just shut the indoor water off. And bought a six-gallon water container with a tap. I’d refill the container every few days from an outdoor tap.

And re electricity, when it comes right down to it, I really only need electricity to charge my phone (although i cook on an electric burner & heat water with an electric kettle because it’s convenient).

None of this is to brag. I just want people to be able to work around outages; know they have options; not feel they have to panic; not get charged inordinate amounts of money for repairs.

Go read that article; he describes in detail how he did it and how he ended up making some changes permanent.

I really like his attitude, as embodied in this quote from the article:

“Attitude was more important than technology, though. Attitude made my setup doable. I’m not suggesting that “because I could do it, you can do it,” but I did tell myself that if humans could do without power for 300,000 years, then I could do so for a month.

“The experiment inspired me to learn from indigenous cultures about their practical knowledge of doing without power, including from guests on my podcast who lived among the San in the Kalahari Desert, Hadza in Tanzania, Kogi in Colombia, Tsimane in Bolivia, and Matsés in Peru. Some cultures have lived tens to hundreds of thousands of years with no electrical power—talk about resilience—and continue to choose not to adopt it.

“From them, I learned to appreciate cultural activities with friends, family, and community, like preparing food, making clothes, gathering plants, singing, dancing, and storytelling. I switched from seeing these things as luxuries to experiencing them as time and money savers. I still live in Manhattan, but I now feel I’m living in a different culture, one that values resilience, creativity, humility toward nature, and responsibility to others affected by my actions.

“Regardless of any wider effects of my experiment, it has been important to me personally. A biography of Abraham Lincoln led me to a quote of his: ‘Nothing is more damaging to you than to do something that you believe is wrong.’ In polluting as much as I was for my comfort and convenience, I was doing something I believed was wrong. Resolving that issue has at least helped me sleep better at night.”

The comment “There are just too many people” (and variations on it) pops up a lot in eco discussions online. It’s usually well-off people leading a typical upper-middle-class American lifestyle who are saying this.

A couple of my recent responses to “too many people” comments:

• Actually it’s not that we have too many people; it’s just that we have too many cars for the number of people.

• Fortunately it’s not that there are too many people (that would be tricky because are some of us willing to step up & volunteer to be killed?); it’s that the people in the rich consumerist industrialized countries (mainly USA) have a huuuuuuge footprint. People in most of the world have a tiny fraction of the typical USA resident’s footprint, consume far fewer resources per capita.

I say fortunately because we in the USA are only a tiny share of the world population, so if we get our act together and make thrift the cool thing instead of consumerism & excess being the cool thing, it’ll go a long way. The daily habits of mainstream USA put huge pressure on people & ecosystems worldwide, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

One encouraging trend is the “rewilding” movement, also known as Homegrown National Park. Many people are now rewilding their suburban and urban yards, and the effect is huge.

Another movement that’s gaining traction is Strong Towns, which is about reintroducing sustainable design into our towns & cities, so the landscape no longer needs to be dominated by cars and roads.

Also: The permaculture design movement is longstanding, and growing.

Yet another positive movement, though it has not yet caught on to a widespread degree, is the Degrowth movement. Check out the Facebook group Degrowth – join the revolution.

(FB post I made this morn in BNW News. Feel free to adapt this to your own neighborhood group, congregation etc.)

Foraging for delicious nutritious wild native plants that grow on the beachside & throughout our bioregion. The things we call “weeds” have names and offer many benefits in addition to maintenance-free, unique bioregional beauty.

Lunch today will include fresh tasty greens! Too many of the veggies I’m seeing from the store, including sometimes even the organic local veggies, are yucky and slimy from being stored in plastic.

NOTE! Photo is for visual enjoyment only; do not try to ID plants from a photo. NEVER eat wild plants unless you know what you are doing. Also: To protect other species who depend on native plants, and to protect ecosystem health, never take a whole plant or even part of a plant unless you know what you are doing. And never take the first plant you see, because it might be the only one of that species in the area.

Daytona Beach Permaculture Guild offers foraging walks in the Main Street area of Daytona Beachside, & in our city’s core historic neighborhoods on the mainland. Comment below or PM me if you are interested.

In permaculture design, “Zone Zero” is inside the house. For me, having Zone Zero organized is a very beneficial thing that ripples out into all other zones of my life.

Lately I’m into pondering various ways for housemates to share stuff, reducing the need for each of us to buy/have/keep track of our own everything.

Today, on the backside of each of the house’s main entry doors, I put up hangers for the reusable shopping bags. Anyone in the house can take any shopping bag (or umbrella, visor etc.) to use.

The hangers were things I scrounged awhile back from that fabulous emporium known as “curbside”. Another prime source of our household items is the stray stuff left in the garage by previous occupants of the house. We go “shopping” in our own house and find stuff we didn’t even know or remember was there!

I have hung my handmade bead necklaces on some of the doorknobs, where they do double duty as interior decoration and grab & go personal adornment. Anyone in the house can grab necklaces off the doorknobs to wear for the day if they want, though so far it tends to be just me.

And in the common livingroom area, there’s a laptop computer which I recently bought used and decided to have it be a “house computer.” Anyone living/staying here can use the computer. (I store my personal files on a memory stick and backup USB drive.) But, mostly we each just use our own phones as our computer. Still, I like the concept of a house computer and it can be handy to have a laptop rather than a phone for some tasks.

It’s amazing what a difference these kinds of little things can make in people’s ability to share a space without things becoming too crowded or cluttered. I have literally seen people move out of perfectly good houses/apartments because they couldn’t see solutions to their Zone Zero space challenges.

Reading this over, it seems kind of mundane and obvious so I almost thought it was too trivial to post and came close to deleting it. Yet these little things make me happy and seem to help, so maybe others of you will find it useful and fun too.

See pics with the FB post here for as long as the whim of Zuck shall permit.

#ZoneZero #HouseSharing #Experiments

UPDATE: My sharing of this post in the Transformative Adventures group has elicited some fantastic comments!

Thank you to Australia-based fellow permie Delldint Megan Fleming for contributing the following. So inspiring!

“I also live in a permaculture sharehouse. I provide a house computer and landline phone for anyone to use. We have an op shop box that we put things in for others to take. Every so often if no-one in the house wants the contents we donate it further afield. We have a free shelf out on the street frontage with a fridge, many people donate food there to each other. We actively cultivate gifting economy in our local area and are part of a widening circle of friends who help each other out for friendship rather than trade.”

And:

“Last week we set up a free box of clean bags at our free shelf and a sign ‘Walking to the shops? Forgotten a bag? Clean bags are in the box under the shelf’ This morning I noticed all the bags were gone, then an hour later someone else had refilled the box 🙂 likewise there is a cupboard full of clean jars for jam making etc. Today is very hot and the shelf is empty, so I changed the blackboard to say ‘You are welcome to fill your water bottle at the tap behind the shelf'”

And from another Transformative Adventures member, Nora Hauk:

“I think being very intentional about shared items in collective spaces is a good idea. In my experiences living cooperatively (in intentional cooperative houses), there are times when one housemate’s items spill into/ overtake common spaces, often narrated as ‘they are there for anyone to use’ but in practice are only used by that housemate. Intentional discussions about those common areas were really crucial for deciding how to use that space. What feels like sharing for one person may not for someone else and that’s okay.

“I’ve visited cohousing communities where beautiful shared workshop/craft space has been totally taken over by a single person’s piled up stuff because they are unwilling to throw it away and want to ‘share.’ To me, this is a genuine challenge of any type of cooperative living: how to genuinely share space, and things within it.”

So true, all of that. Very important! I once worked in an office where a well-intentioned community bookshelf started out as a great asset but over time devolved into a graveyard for people’s unwanted books and magazines.

Now, I should mention that my house is not an intentional permaculture cooperative house per se. Rather, it’s a house where I implement permaculture design principles to the greatest extent possible, while accommodating my “civilian” housemates. It’s a grand experiment. Many of the “sharing” experiments I’m doing are largely still theoretical.

For example, although the livingroom is a space I have made available for common use, both housemates prefer to treat their rooms as micro-studio apartments and stay in there most of the time when they are home.

One housemate does use the kitchen cooktop a bit, but they each also do a lot of microwave cooking in their own rooms.

As for the grab & go necklaces … well, both of my current housemates are men who don’t wear jewelry, so the point is admittedly moot.

Still, I treat the common areas as if I were sharing them fulltime. So, no leaving my personal stuff in a common area unless I’m in there using it. My office setup, crafting supplies, etc get picked up and put away in my own room each night or as soon as I’m done using them for the day.

This self-imposed discipline is something I find very helpful to my ongoing design experiments aimed at creating “sharing structures.”

I’m sitting enjoying a book after dinner and suddenly realize I am hearing a marching band. Sounds like it’s coming from the next block! In fact, it’s coming from a couple miles west of here, on the other side of the bridge. The Intracoastal Waterway amplifies sounds. My guess is that I’m hearing a practice session of the Bethune-Cookman University marching band. But it could be a high school or other school band. What a treat!

Almost daily, I am treated to the amplified whistles of passing freight-trains, courtesy of that riverine sound-magnifier that lies between our barrier island and the train tracks. I especially love hearing the richly melodic train whistle, the clacking of the wheels and chuffing of the engine, the metallic sigh of the tracks, late late at night when all else is quiet.

And when there’s a race at the Speedway we can sometimes hear the cars vrooming even though the Speedway is 5 miles from here.

A banquet of human sounds intensified by nature!

Treats such as the sounds carried to our doorstep by the “Intracoastal Amplifier” are everywhere, every day, all around us, for free. I try to always take time to appreciate them.

What sort of rare or quirky treats are brought to you by your natural surroundings?