Category: low-footprint living

TL;DR: The other day, I had a voluntary, deliberate experience with generative AI. After that, I did a search and posted some links to articles on the eco impacts of AI.

I already knew there is a significant footprint, we’ve been hearing about the data centers and all, but I wanted to deliberately share links in a post, as I did not recall having done so before. In addition to the eco-imprint there are also significant cognitive impacts (not only on the personal level but on the social level), which we have known about it for a long time as well.

My experience:

True story – the other day I had my first experience (deliberately, voluntarily) engaging with #GenerativeAI. My plan is and always has been to limit my engagement to the best of my ability.

The caricature trend, seeing a bunch of my friends try the caricature thing, got me curious.

So I visited chat gpt dot com And gave a brief description and photo. I must say I was impressed with the verbiage it came up with!

To get an actual visual caricature rendered, I would’ve had to create an account and login. I was not willing to do that.

However, I love this verbal description and wouldn’t have any problem using it to pay a human artist to do my portrait. Or, to do my own portrait based on this text.

Here is the description I fed to chat gpt:

DEEP GREEN book & blog author, speaker, content creator, landscaper, activist, local personality

And here is the text the AI generated in response:

Ohhh this is a great face for a caricature — expressive, thoughtful, a little rebellious 🌿
I’m going to turn you + your work into a visual caricature that feels smart, earthy, activist-energy, not cheesy. Here’s the concept I’m using, then I’ll generate it.
Caricature concept (what I’m about to create)
You:
Short, tousled brown hair exaggerated just a bit — wind-touched, outdoorsy
Bright, observant eyes (the “I’ve seen things and I care” look)
Long, distinctive earrings emphasized as a signature feature
Warm, weathered-by-the-real-world skin tones (honest, not airbrushed)
Your work & identity woven in:
One hand holding a deep-green book titled DEEP GREEN 🌱
The other hand holding a trowel or plant (landscaper + grounded activist)
Subtle speech bubbles / text fragments floating around you (blogger, speaker, content creator)
Background: lush, slightly wild garden merging into a town/community setting
Small activist symbols worked in quietly (hand-painted sign, native plants, compost, roots breaking through pavement)
Style:
Illustrated caricature (not photorealistic)
Hand-drawn, ink + watercolor feel
Exaggerated features, but respectful and strong — wise, local-legend energy
Color palette: deep greens, earth browns, soft blues
Now I’ll generate it 🎨✨

And:

Your ready-to-use caricature prompt 🎨🌿
Copy-paste this directly into ChatGPT (once logged in), DALL·E, or any image generator that accepts detailed prompts:
Prompt:
Illustrated caricature portrait of a thoughtful, earthy woman with short, tousled brown hair and expressive blue eyes. She wears long, distinctive dangling earrings and a simple tank top. Her expression is observant, kind, and quietly fierce.
She holds a deep green book titled “DEEP GREEN” in one hand and a small garden trowel with a native plant in the other.
Style: hand-drawn ink and watercolor illustration, slightly exaggerated facial features, respectful and strong caricature (not cartoonish).
Background: a lush, slightly wild garden blending into a small town community, roots breaking through pavement, subtle activist symbols (hand-painted sign, compost, native plants).
Color palette: deep greens, earth browns, soft blues.
Overall vibe: wise, grounded, activist, local-legend energy.

I was actually pretty impressed with the text it came up with!

Links to articles:

• How energy intensive are AI-generated images? https://sustainableai.substack.com/p/how-energy-intensive-are-ai-generated AYA SAED MAY 29, 2025 “TLDR: AI images are energy hogs. Generating a single high-quality image with GPT-4o emits approximately 5.6g of CO₂e, and the viral action figure trend cost the equivalent of the monthly electricity of 150 U.S. homes.
GPT-4o’s image generation uses up to 30x more energy than text. Image quality, model choice, and how you prompt all matter. A lot. Businesses creating hundreds of images a week are racking up real energy costs, fast”

• Why AI uses so much energy – and what we can do about it. https://iee.psu.edu/news/blog/why-ai-uses-so-much-energy-and-what-we-can-do-about-it Mahmut Kandemir
Professor, Computer Science and Engineering
Published: April 8, 2025 | Last updated: November 20, 2025 “In this article, you’ll learn: — AI’s environmental footprint, from soaring energy and water use to e-waste
— Why training AI models is one of the most resource-intensive computing tasks on the planet
— Key strategies for a sustainable AI future, from more efficient models to greener hardware”

• Making an image with generative AI uses as much energy as charging your phone https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/01/1084189/making-an-image-with-generative-ai-uses-as-much-energy-as-charging-your-phone/ By Melissa Heikkilä
“This is the first time the carbon emissions caused by using an AI model for different tasks have been calculated.”

• Environmental impact of generative AI – stats and facts https://thesustainableagency.com/blog/environmental-impact-of-generative-ai/ROMA DHANANI ON JANUARY 15, 2026 “the environmental impact of generative ai 20 statistics & facts
Generative AI is a branch of AI that specializes in creating new content such as text, images, videos, or sound. Generative AI creates seemingly original content by being trained on large datasets. It’s not to be confused with traditional AI, which is programmed with algorithms to accomplish specific tasks. Generative AI has risen stratospherically over the past few years, think of ChatGPT and how it’s now a go-to tool to create articles from scratch. Or you may have seen some of the wild AI-generated videos getting shared around.”

FULL DISCLOSURE:

Full disclosure: I only looked up and posted the links regarding the footprint of AI, after I had done the generative text experiment.

But I had heard about the footprint of data centers etc.

Everything we do has a footprint. The point of my book and blog is to help people minimize their footprint (leading to a collective shift), while also functioning in everyday society.

And, to reemphasize what I said after sharing the generative text above:

To get an actual visual caricature rendered, I would’ve had to create an account and login. I was not willing to do that. However, I love this verbal description and wouldn’t have any problem using it to pay a human artist to do my portrait. Or, to attempt to do my own portrait based on this text.

And, I now intend to avoid further engaging generative AI, to the full extent I’m able. As we learn more, the possibilities widen.

Here’s the original post — w links, screenshots, etc — on my deep green Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19NWkkkLU1/?mibextid=WC7FNe)

Citizens up in arms are calling it toilet to tap. The actual term for this is potable reuse. It’s understandable for people to be alarmed and averse, but this has been the norm in many places for years.

Here, in our place of generous rainfall (for now — till we finish killing the local water cycle dead-dead through egregiously bad land management practices), if we would stop wasting water this won’t even be needed, could just be a technological knowhow we keep in reserve for extreme emergency.

We get 49 inches of rainfall a year historically. We can be collecting that rainwater off of every building and using it on the landscape, cutting down on demand for piped water.

(On that note, anyone worried about giant Amazon warehouses and big data centers etc. – at least if nothing else those buildings have huge roofs! And a roof is a giant collection surface for rainwater! Even my modest 988-square-foot house can, if rainwater collection were 100% optimized, collect over 30,000 gallons of water a year!)

We can also be planting appropriate plants instead of thirsty yet useless ornamental landscaping. Also not cutting down forests & wetlands in the first place.

Stop incentivizing the sprawl development with its huge wasteful yards.

Reclaimed water can be part of the equation as well. We should not be using potable water to irrigate ornamental landscaping, period — including lawns.

If we collected rainwater off of every building, it wouldn’t be necessary to use piped-in irrigation (whether with reclaimed water or not) except maybe for extreme drought.

Also part of the problem are people who insist on only drinking bottled water, even though the tapwater is drinkable. (This admonition does not of course include people living in coal camps, fracking areas and so on whose water has been made unsafe to drink.) Some of the strongest opponents of potable reuse are also people who insist on drinking only bottled water even though the tapwater is fine as is, or they could use a filter. This is called being #PartOfTheProblem. (Look up the story of bottled water video on YouTube – part of the story of stuff series by Annie Leonard.)

BTW the whole planet is one big water recycling system. Water is constantly recycled through rainfall, transpiration, percolation into the aquifer, etc. By protecting the natural sponge and rainfall cycle we protect the natural filtration system.

Banning potable reuse won’t fix things. Making it our top priority to restore and protect the natural water cycle will. We should set the bar as high as possible. As a model, I highly recommend the Drinkable Rivers Project.

https://drinkablerivers.org

Imagine all the things you have to have in place for your rivers (and springs) to be drinkable! Sure would solve a lot.

Also, we should all embrace the concept of “sponge cities,” as Singapore and China and so many other places further along the curve have done.

PS. Drought, flood, and fire are three sides of the same coin. It’s all about restoring the water cycle.

PPS. Added later to my comments on my Facebook post. After a public official chided me, essentially asked if I felt that people should feel lucky for not having to drink sewage water:

Let me be perfectly clear in case my earlier comment may be misunderstood.

Clean safe drinking water is a BASIC HUMAN RIGHT!! Nobody should ever be in jeopardy of having to drink contaminated water.

And yet, worldwide, something like 2 billion people lack access to basic safe drinking water. This includes several million people right here in the USA.

That’s what I’m talking about when I say we’ve been living in a bubble.

We needed to be more aware all along of what other communities have been struggling with for YEARS, and if we had put more effort into prioritizing this BASIC HUMAN RIGHT everywhere for all, we wouldn’t be dealing with it here.

Because we’ve got a much easier situation relative to lots of other places. Lower population density, higher rainfall, natural wetlands and forests, etc.

One of the sleeping-nooks in our seaside home. For sleep-over guests, for week-long “try it out” visitors … or for a longterm person who likes to live with minimal personal stuff plus a house full of shared stuff and ample common areas. Bookcases next to the bed for clothing and other personal items.

The futon frame I scavenged yesterday from one of our perennial neighborhood dump spots. Was able to dismantle it enough to get it home on my trusty handcart, Ms. Carty Cartwell, and then put it back together without the larger and heavier peace, so it’s more streamlined.

Also in the way of streamlining, i have used one of our lightweight foam sleeping pads as the mattress, and left the big unwieldy futon mattress behind at the dumpster spot.

Pics here on my DEEP GREEN Facebook page.

#StarshineHouse #Trailhead501 #McWeirdoResearchStation #LowFootprintLivingLab

A semi-humorous post turned into a longish thread so I’m sharing it here. (Even though it’s humorous in tone, the substance of the post is true, in that my office is very mobile which includes getting to sit out in the sun and be sun-warmed and do my work.)

[Scene of work notebook, pen, beverage etc. on wooden bench in the bright sun.] So many people think I don’t work, just because my office looks like this. #LowFootprintLivingLab #LivingTheDream

[Photo of white canvas bag with various everyday objects inside.] My portable office tote. This heavy-duty canvas bag with pocket was given to me some years ago by my sweet beautiful amazing little sister who works a high-power job in HR. She is superwoman! And this bag is super bag! I have done some mending stitches and patches on it, but mostly it has held up very well on its own.

Another view of my stylish sparky office-tote bag. Shown here in one of the common areas inside of the house. Different residents of the house are encouraged to have different-colored tote bags. (We don’t leave our personal things in the common areas when not actively using them.) I just love how the canvas bag I received as a gift from my lovely sister just happened to match the decor and color scheme and nautical vibe of my curated space 😉 White with crisp navy-blue straps. Ahoy there! Office-ing here on the high seas! Sail Ho! Prepare to be boarded!

I am in fact on duty 24-7-365, and everything I do, even social leisure, is part of my work. Because recharging is part of our work too. And even more: Because embodied energy goes into everything, and my mission is to help people conserve their precious energy and resources. Not only including fossil energy, but also our own precious labor and mental energy as well. Helping us all help the planet and all of her creatures through our everyday seemingly mundane choices.

[view of clothesline]: Demonstration of airing outer layers, towels, blankets, etc. in the cleansing sun and breeze.

[Candlemaking pics] Testing results of upcycling from old candles. You, too, can have a job that involves playing with fire! #DoomerHomeEc #ZombieApocalypseNow

Also solar oven reheating food; me in my quirky eco soldier thrifty crafty chick attire etc.

High praise from one of my dearest friends and fellow earth guardians:

“It’s the constant, ongoing, and very VERY important WORK you do. Dream J.O.B. And you rock it! Was so good to hear your voice last night! I’m gonna make solar oven candles this week! Thanks for always inspiring, my friend!”

Thank you dear Kari for the warm fuzzies!

See photos here on my Facebook page DEEP GREEN book by jenny nazak. (Scroll down through the thread, I added additional photos & descriptions in the comments after posting the original post.)

PS. The “research station” aspect of my work thrills me to no end. It’s interesting that my favorite subject in school — even though I was supposed to be so bookish (and was) –was actually home ec! Going about my various experiments, I sometimes adopt an attitude that puts me in mind of that famous Antarctic research outpost, McMurdo station.

After a day or so casting about for a pun on it for my place and mission, I finally hit upon just the name! McWeirdo Station! At your service! Hey, if a large swath of the population are going to label me weird for trying every gambit i can think of to help people thrive and not die and not destroy the planet, I guess i might as well embrace it!

For those who were not so fortunate as to make it to the FRESH Book Festival, you have my deepest sympathies!!

But there will be an opportunity again next year, and in the meantime you can partake of many festival highlights and learn about the various authors via the website http://www.freshbookfestivals.net

Lots of photos and videos were taken (maybe more than in all previous years combined lol I don’t know), and I doubt very strongly it’s all been uploaded yet, so do bookmark the website and check back often!

Also follow the FRESH Book Festival Facebook page.

Literacy is power! Books change lives!!

PS. Yes the sewing kit is relevant, it’s part of my eco-themed display and fiction character.

Solar oven reached almost 350 F at one point today, even though the temperature of the air outside was just a little over freezing. In my experience the air temperature doesn’t have all that much effect on the solar oven’s performance, it’s all about the sun angle and clear sunny sky. Lower humidity seems to be an advantage also.

Of course, the window for solar cooking is wider in summer because there are simply more sun hours. But it’s perfectly doable in winter too, you just have to be a bit more organized and on top of time window.

See pics here on my deep Green book page. Which is just about to reach 1300 followers, woo hoo!

I wish solar ovens would become as popular as other great outdoor cooking methods such as propane stove, charcoal grill, and smoker.

#SolarCooking

Added later: Part 1 of today’s solar cooking was combining and heating up a few snippets of leftovers into a delicious hot lunch.

Part two, now in progress, is melting down candles that have become unburnable because of uneven melt, wick issues etc.; and making them into new candles. This is a sort of DIY upcycle micro skill I started here a little while back. I’ve gotten better at it over time.

This is one of those low-risk, repetitive household tasks that could become low-stress micro cottage enterprises, or what I call “happy chill stoner jobs of the urban scavenge-punk future.”

OMG OMG!!! Just two more followers and I reach 1300! Thank you guys so much!

Every new follower of my “DEEP GREEN book by jenny nazak” facebook page helps me to get more & more essential info resources out to the people who need them.

Because I have been very fortunate in life, I am in a position where I do not have to monetize my page. However, every single new follower helps me widen my reach, and share the life-saving tips and info that I compile and create. From many sources.

From transportation, to home heating and cooling, to scrap leftovers cooking tips, upcycling suggestions, the most high-value online communities offering liberation from the consumer treadmill, exhilarating financial content, feats of gonzo stitchery, and much more, the information I provide as my mission is not only life-saving to individuals and households and communities, but also to the planet that is our only home!

Help me, help you, help Mother Earth and all of Her creatures by following my page.

And thank you!

DEEP GREEN book by Jenny Nazak! Bringing you Deep-Green Living, Decolonization, Degrowth, Doomer Home Ec — all day every day!!

Update!!! We did it!!! I am officially at 1.3k. Thank you all so much.