Category: low-footprint living

It can be useful, if you are in a communal living situation, to create a list of really basic simple repetitive house tasks. Not only to reduce the workload of the person “in charge,” but also because people genuinely want to help and contribute.

Here’s a list of some of the most frequent repetitive tasks around our house. Most are very simple and can be done by anyone. In a later post, I’ll also be sharing a list of a more difficult tier of tasks that some residents might be willing to — or even actually want to — get involved in.

BASIC DAILY REPETITIVE TASKS at Starshine House / Trailhead 501

• Rinse out bottles for recycling bin. It should only take a couple ounces of water. Could be rainwater or well water if available. Put it in and swish it around and then turn the container upside down and let it dry in the recycling bin. Put the lid, if there is one, on top of the upside-down container. It’s particularly important to rinse out milk bottles, as they get smelly and the presence of solid matter reduces the likelihood that the container will get recycled. In the case of juice bottles and soda cans, turning them upside down in the bin is usually enough; the ants will find them and clean them out.

• For cans and jars that have sticky matter such as peanut butter residue, beans, etc., turn them upside down in the designated organic cleaning area and let the ants and other friends clean them out. This happens surprisingly quickly, like within 24 hours a lot of the time. Once they are clean, stick them in the recycling bin. I also remove the paper labels and put those in the area of the garden where we put paper trash.

• Keep the well-pump primed. Usually this happens naturally if somebody uses well water at least once every 24 hours, but that doesn’t always happen so we need to check it. If you test the pump and it’s not pumping, pour some water into the pump – it should only take a few ounces – and then try again. It should suction properly and dispense water without much difficulty.

• Paper and cardboard trash (pizza boxes etc.): Tear into smaller pieces and put it into the designated area of the garden where we put paper trash. Usually this is a large planter container.

• On extra hot sunny days in summer, draw the shades on the patio to avoid allowing sun into the house. Usually around eight or 830 is a good time. Once the sun has passed, usually around 10:30 or 10:45, open the shades again.

• Toilet: minimal maintenance is required, as we do not put toilet paper into the toilet unless we are immediately flushing it down.

• Bathroom sink: If people are using it for shaving, periodic maintenance may be necessary. (Pouring hot water down the drain every few weeks; cleaning the gunk out of the drain trap with a square of TP and putting it in the trash, etc.) Otherwise not much water is going down that drain other than when we wash our hands.

• Kitchen sink: This is used only for refilling water bottles and kettles, adding water to a cookpot, etc. And sometimes a quick wash of the hands. Since we don’t do dishes indoors, minimal water goes down the drain. Very occasional maintenance may be required. The sponge in the sink is there for scrubbing the sink and keeping it clean, dry, and not attractive to bugs. For doing dishes, there is a dishpan and water sources outdoors. Use your sponge, brush, or other cleaning implement of choice. Dishwater is dumped in designated areas of the garden.

• For greasy cookpots, greasy toaster-oven grill pan, etc., same method applies as for cans and jars with food residue. Don’t try to wash them. Put them out in the designated “ant and possum feeding area.” Once the gunk and grease is cleaned off, which usually happens within 24 hours, wash them in the dishpan outdoors or leave them for the next user to wash. Let them dry on the rack outdoors.

• Mail: Check mail — It usually comes in the afternoon.

• Refrigerator: When the cloth used to absorb water drips gets saturated, swap it out for a dry one. You’ll find the dry cloth either on the line, or already dried and folded up on top of the fridge. Hang the wet cloth outside on the line. Sometimes water pools below the vegetable crisping area. Use rags to soak it up, then dry them on the line.

As you can tell, none of these tasks are urgent (except maybe rinsing out the milk bottles, because of the smell and spoilage); they are simply constant and repetitive. However, they are a great contribution to reducing the workload, and any willingness to help is much appreciated. Performing these routine tasks on a daily basis reduces the likelihood that urgent situations will occur.

Construction noise yay!!
No actually I really mean that! Not being sarcastic! This is good construction. It’s a house being built on the lot next to me — A lot that has been vacant for a long time.

I live in a dense historic neighborhood of a city. 1/10-acre lots. Every time I see a vacant lot, my thought is the same: This vacant lot needs to be a house, an apartment building, a public fruit forest, or a stormwater sponge / wildflower meadow.

For some years now, I have been hating the noise of loud lawn appliances of city contractors hired to keep the grass buzzcut on that empty lot. What a waste of resources. Plus compromising heat mitigation and stormwater sponge capacity.

By the way, the construction noise is loud, as one expects construction noise to be. They’re cutting into concrete for utilities and such.Interestingly enough, it’s NOT louder than those industrial edgers and ride-on mowers and leaf-blowers. That should really give us pause, when our landscaping is that noisy (and fume-producing).

It’s really ironic that respectability politics nudged cottage businesses out of neighborhoods because they were “too noisy” or whatever. (Or maybe not so ironic.) And meanwhile we have these giant tanklike machines rolling around the neighborhood like a grascist brigade, conscripted to stamp out nature’s life and color.

And meanwhile we need another flood study … NOT!!

So anyway — YAY construction noise! Actually doing something, pun intended, constructive!

Every empty lot that gets filled in an old dense urban area makes it more likely that we will see growth of a healthy shopping street nearby. Our Main Street is showing signs of trying to revitalize, with year-round businesses as opposed to just itinerant festival vendors, and I am all about it!

(And yeah, I am not a fan of construction when it involves flattening forests and leveling wetlands for suburban sprawl.)

On a related note, several families with children have bought houses in the neighborhood in the past couple of years. That’s always a healthy sign. I was able to introduce some of the families to each other earlier this summer. It was totally the highlight of my week.

In my first Permaculture Design Certificate class, back in 2005, we were presented with a classification of “basic human needs.” And the Permaculture design principles and ethics introduced in class offer us a way to meet these needs sustainably and equitably.

The categories presented to us were food; water; shelter; transportation; energy; and community.

Not coincidentally, these six areas are also major categories of household expenses.

In my experience, the key to living a lifestyle of creative and occupational freedom is to radically reduce at least one of these expense categories. Ideally several or all of them.

It’s also the key for slowing down the trashing of the planet. Possibly buying ourselves a little more time to get our act together. Note, traditional and indigenous cultures already have their act together for the most part; we “rich worlders” need to get ourselves in order so we stop hogging all the resources and trashing ecosystems.

Now that more and more everyday households in the white entitled rich world are falling into financial precarity, it becomes more worthwhile to cut these expenses whether or not one is trying to cut eco-footprint.

And, there’s an additional motive for looking into our relationship with each of these essential categories of our needs. And that is that being overly dependent on large, impersonal, distant entities to meet our basic needs makes us extremely vulnerable. Unacceptably vulnerable! Particularly in times of weather disaster and other disasters. It makes our households brittle, and our communities brittle.

I’ve written and spoken extensively about how to reduce our dependency on such distant and impersonal entities, be it government or corporations or whatever.

Here I’ll just give a quick little overview of each category and some really basic things we can all do to make our households and communities more resilient. And, not coincidentally, less financially vulnerable. Stand by, I’ll be back a little later to finish this.

FOOD. Learn at least 3 to 5 wild plants in your area that are edible. Develop a relationship with them. (Look up your local native plant society or permaculture guild for guidance.) That means learn what their various phases and seasons are, and start foraging and using them well before you’re facing some kind of emergency. BTW always harvest in moderation. Never take the first one or the last one. Err on the side of LESS. Also, to the extent that you are able, cultivate something edible even if it’s just a little pot of greens or mint or something. Greens go a long way to maintain health. And, they are some of the hardest things to transport long distance because of their perishability. By growing them in your own neighborhood you’re doing yourself a favor as well as working for the greater good. And, to the extent that you can afford to and have access, buy direct from your local farmers. Learn to eat in seasons; wean yourself off of exotic produce from far away.

WATER. Calculate your household’s basic water needs. Start collecting water off your roof. Even one little barrel or tub is a good start and it’ll get you rolling. Additionally encourage your neighbors to start doing the same. If you live in an apartment building, ask management to let you set up a rainwater barrel. Fun fact: For every 1-inch rain, a 1000 square-foot roof can collect over 600 gallons of water. Most water demand is from outdoor use. Therefore you can vastly reduce your water needs by not irrigating outdoors. Choose plants that grow well naturally with the available rainfall.

SHELTER. If you have room in your home and are able, invite people to live with you for cheap or free. Many people are willing to barter chores and so on. If you don’t have a stable roof, do what it takes to go in with people and get that huge cost down. Sometimes the miraculous key to getting along with people is that we simply need to. Part of why we haven’t found it easy to get along with people is that a lot of us in cushy times and places haven’t needed to. On a related note, if you see people getting harassed by neighborhood busybodies or government for “having too many people in their house,” speak up and defend your neighbors. Because that nonsense is classist and racist.

TRANSPORTATION. If you can share a car, or do without a car entirely, do it by all means! This is a huge category of expense and worry. House-sharing can help with this. One great housemate who lived here for almost 3 years had a car and was very generous about sharing it when people needed.

ENERGY. The biggest energy users are air cooling, water heater, clothes-dryer, and air heating. Try to focus on cooling the people rather than the air. Same with heat. A very simple energy saver is the humble clothesline! If you live in an HOA or apartment or something that does not allow clothes lines, please push for that to be changed. It’s very important. Important for many reasons. One thing people don’t always think of is that sunlight is a natural disinfectant and reduces our dependency on detergents, many of which contain toxic ingredients, or simply cause skin problems in people with sensitivities. (Ask me how I know this – wink.)

COMMUNITY. Community is probably the most basic need, but it’s the one that gets ignored in our materialistically focused culture. Lack of community is very expensive. The person who won’t talk to their neighbor ends up going out and buying some yard appliance they’ll only use once a year, instead of being able to borrow from a friendly neighbor. Same with everyone burning gasoline and driving to the store instead of checking to see if a neighbor wants you to pick up anything. Or you might not hear about a job opening and you’re looking for a job. Or, you assume that your neighbors aren’t worth knowing, so you’re always running around to other cities and even other countries to try to find enjoyment and interesting company. Such examples abound. Along with providing the most essential thing that people need — the company of other people (and yes, this applies to us introverts as well) community also allows us to meet our material needs much less expensively. And not coincidentally, with much less drain on planetary resources and ecosystems.

There’s lots more to all of this, but the main thing I want everyone to recognize is how our self-interest in CONSUMING LESS is stronger than ever.

PS. For every point I made, it’s desirable and even necessary to extend your care to neighbors and others in your community regarding that resource. And don’t give up. For example, If you give a rainwater presentation and it’s not well-attended, try doing it on zoom. If that doesn’t work, post a simple little “getting started” flyer on your neighborhood app, or bring a flyers to your neighborhood meeting or city commission meeting. And you shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel; many free pamphlets and other resources exist. In fact, your local government’s own public works department or other related department might already publish (for example) free info resources related to collecting rainwater. And your local native plant society probably already has a handout flyer showing a few of your main local wild edibles.

PPS. Even if you do nothing else on the above list, you and I and all of us really need to build community with neighbors. Do what it takes. Even if you can’t share housing, you can make a little pod with three or four neighbors and alternate food prep, cooking, maybe as things get tighter (which they will), start sharing a fridge or a car among multiple household. Any initial inconvenience or extra time investment you find objectionable, be aware that it will more than pay for itself in terms of reducing your vulnerability to these large distant entities that basically have all of us held hostage. Seriously it’s priceless to disentangle from that vulnerability.

If you would like a zoom for your neighborhood or other group to ask questions about these issues and get some pointers for getting started, drop me a line and we’ll arrange it.

A while back we had a pretty big storm, and someone posted in one of the local groups that they had gotten locked out of the garage when a power failure rendered the electric garage door inoperative. The garage where they had unfortunately been keeping the emergency lanterns. In a separate location from where they had been keeping the batteries.

Hey, this kind of thing happens to everyone.

A big part of our problem is that we take electricity so much for granted that we don’t even think about ensuring redundancy. Such a very basic thing and we don’t even think about it.

I do, and I know a lot of you do also, but I’m talking us as a collective. So called modern society. It’s a little bit too “modern” in my opinion when a person cannot open their garage door (or operate a water pump, or any number of other actions) when the electricity is out!

Yes, some advance planning in this case would’ve been helpful — such as bringing the lanterns into the house, not storing them in a separate location from the batteries, etc. But the fundamental problem starts further upstream!

I like to keep candles and lanterns in the garage and in every area of the house. But also the garage door is operated manually.

Story from a hurricane a couple years back: We woke up in the morning, first day of power outage, and I produced coffee. Didn’t even have to break out the twig stove. Or wait till the sun was high enough that we could heat up water in the solar oven.

Magic? No — The night before, I just figured there might be a power outage coming so I boiled up some water and put it in the thermos. Voilà morning coffee! It was great seeing the smile on a housemate’s face.

Do you know what also creeps me out? Car keys that need batteries.

I mean, what???? Really???

(Last time I owned a car, the car keys were still just regular keys. I never got used to the new thing even though sometimes I rent a car that has one of those.)

When I mentioned that on my page, someone told me that there’s actually a little tiny physical key tucked inside of the battery-powered key fob. Well that’s a relief! Except if the person doesn’t know that there’s a key in there, which apparently happens.

And along the same lines, I never did get over the loss of hand-cranked car windows.

(Question received via comments in the non-consumerist group, where people are sharing how they save electricity by using a clothesline and in some cases doing without AC.)

We don’t stay cool. It’s summer in Florida.

But we stay pretty comfortable with various basics such as window shades, awnings, knowing which rooms are the coolest part of the house at different times of day, etc.

And at some times of the day, outdoors is more comfortable than in.

And, here and there at different times of day, even in summer in FL, it is possible to actually feel cool with the help of a breeze, an outdoor shower or wash-up etc.

Doing a tour tomorrow for Ormond-Flagler Permaculture Group & friends. Making an outline.

Starshine House / Trailhead 501 tour

This house is the tangible embodiment of a manifesto I’ve developed over the years regarding money, occupational freedom, community, and life.

A physical hub for Daytona Beach Permaculture Guild

Permaculture design principles: Mollison book, Holmgren book

A bit about me, my background. How I came to study Permaculture.

Categories of basic human needs: food; water; shelter; transportation; energy; community. A lot of people focus on food because of course it’s important. I mean, we all have to eat. But by focusing on food and the nuclear household, at the expense of all else, we create massive energy drains and also cognitive drains.

Also: A pattern language, Last child in the woods, TEK indigenous wisdom, Vanilla Beans, Iban of Sarawak etc. Sharon Astyk, Riot for Austerity. Homegrown national park. The Non-Consumer Advocate group 152.8k members!

House has 2 missions/purposes: 1) experimental lab for low-footprint living; 2) support people in disengaging from conventional economy, dependence on “a job.”

Ecological urgency; economic hardships; outages from increasingly severe weather + disasters

Living/visiting here

Creative and occupational freedom. Right livelihood; “reduce your need to earn”. Creating a tiny wedge to spring ourselves.

Importance of joy & creativity

Examples of potential livelihoods/income streams from this one tiny 1/10 acre

Hurricane evac of 2017. I had presold enough copies of my book to make the rent, so I used my phone to send the PDF to the people who had ordered the book. This was in a room where I was staying at a friend’s house for hurricane evac.

Eric Brown author. To experience abundance, “crush” at least one of the categories. Transportation, housing, food, health costs, debt.

Porous property: Little Free Library, benches etc

Mini reading room

Passive cooling & heating. Trade-offs between shade, airflow, privacy. Noise buffer and light buffer etc.

Offering a counter alternative to violent and intrusive landscaping. “Neatness disease.” GROW FOOD. Also learn what grows wild locally. Free food and medicine. Try to get people to see the value in growing and foraging food. Local passionfruit vine, loquat trees etc. Beachside ecosystem. Oaks, saw palmetto, etc. Rebuild the sponge and buffer. Promote the beauty of traditional saw palmetto yard along the beach where you can barely see the house.

Also: food desert cuisine. Learn to make something with what’s available in walking distance.

Solar cooking, retained-heat cooking (haybox), twig-fired stove etc.

Preparing a basic hurricane toilet kit.

Rainwater harvesting. Brad Lancaster etc. “Minimum Viable Product” concept from entrepreneur/startup community. Every single place I’ve lived from desert to semi tropics has the same issues, flooding plus drought.

Work (manual tasks such as scooping water out of barrels etc.) “Obtain a yield.”

Laundry – a whole subject right there. And dishes and other traditional conventional housework tasks that can take over a person’s life and suck resources.

Move many tasks outdoors. Laundry, dishes, etc. Hand-wash stations also can be used for rinsing toothbrush after brushing teeth.

Reducing/eliminating: corporate detergents, purpose-specific household cleaning products, shampoos. Use homemade or local.

Occupations that wouldn’t be a full job in the conventional economy but support a household. And potentially enable home-based livelihoods. Clothespins & corks; keeping machines in repair.

Exploring patterns for house-sharing. Flexible stay, visitors, longterm residents. Some useful simple protocols for sharing space. Small areas for private space; most areas are common-use.

Collapse-awareness vs doomerism — Parallels with end-of-life Doula practice; hospice

Collapse is now. When does it become not a dress rehearsal anymore. When we recognize it now and choose to engage.

Practicing doing without things. Making it real.

Being local, neighborhood-based

Permaculture as a decolonization movement

Centralized top-down systems are not easing up. If anything many are doubling down. An adaptive response is to keep building our own parallel systems that reduce our dependence on the main systems and minimize feeding them. Reducing dependence on electricity & personal automobile is huge.

Withhold our labor and purchasing power from corrupt, unhealthy, harmful systems. This is a group task and one that we must help everybody navigate. No person left behind. What we do with our wealth and our labor is of paramount importance.

Special manifesto for fellow Boomers & older. On sharing intergenerational wealth.

Stocks and flows. Too much stock equals hoarding and spoilage. Design & utilize flows.

Definition of a civilized society. Superior culture. I would say a superior culture is one that loves and values and takes care of all of its members.

Use your talents, humor, creativity. So many things you know and are good at — all needed front and center. Community resilience.

When we really simplify, we can end up having what seems like a lot of time. Like maybe even an abnormal unhealthy amount of time on one’s hands. But I think this reaction is an artifact of our hyper-busy culture. There is value in sitting with the stillness and seeing what emerges. Or even just noticing that you can’t deal with stillness. If that happens, notice what your impulse is. What do you try to replace that stillness with. Reinforcing the sense of abnormality is that the world around us is still going on about its fast-paced frantic motions. This is another reason why it’s important to find likeminded people, even if it’s only online at first. Don’t worry, you’ll start finding them in real life too if you haven’t already. By showing up and stepping into an alternative way of being, we set an example and create space for others.

While learning to slow down and live quieter, we can also at the same time be using our freed up time and energy as a surplus to benefit our communities. “Share surplus.”

Action steps/movements. Riot for Austerity. Homegrown national park. The Non-Consumer Advocate group 152.8k members! Bryan Hummel – beaver biomimicry, sponge-building. Chris Searles trickle-watering experiments. Aprovecho Technology center; Kerr-Cole sustainability center.

Fiz Harwood – Solomon Islanders. Amazon tribesman “I store meat in the belly of my brother.” Flows vs stocks. Everything is perishable — even money, that thing we invented to surmount perishability. There’s more resilience in building flows.

Being community guardians/nurturers and agents of change, while at the same time relinquishing and letting go of control in more & more ways.

(for choosing to live without air conditioning)

My response to the permie friend who posted this:

Not really, I’ve just done various passive retrofits for shade etc. Basic stuff. Lived without AC in Texas also.

I also don’t like feeling trapped in a shut-up house, and having high electric bills.

And I don’t like seeing people held hostage by the power companies, so i try to share DIY low-tech stuff.

Visitors have commented on how (relatively) cool it is inside the house.

And of course humans lived without AC for millennia. It’s too bad our “modern” houses are actually so primitive, in terms of not being very adapted to the prevailing climate. We can retrofit, though.

Also (added later):

We never had AC in school when I was a kid in the 60s and 70s. Never had it in college dorms or classrooms, even.

Grandparents’ houses had no AC. And their houses and yards and surrounding neighborhoods were a kids’ paradise.

When I was young and skinny, I got cold really easily. After menopause I gained a very large amount of weight. So i do feel the heat more. I don’t care; I would rather incorporate that into my liberation experiments than endure life with AC.

(Like most people, on a super hot day I can certainly enjoy a bit of AC by going to see a movie or going to the public library!)

From talking to people and from my own experience, I noticed the body seems to have a set temperature envelope that moves up and down according to the season and place. So, for example, I’m a person living without AC who almost needs a sweater when the temperature drops to 78. (Once winter comes, my temperature envelope adjusts accordingly.)

NOTE this is not meant to shame people who depend on AC. There are many reasons why people have come to depend on AC. Part of my work is pushing for a return to more ecologically oriented building designs. As in more oriented toward the prevailing weather of each place. This is an area of Permaculture design that sometimes gets overlooked but it’s very huge and exciting.

Another, trickier factor in AC dependence: We can’t overlook people’s health issues, many of which are caused by hyper-industrialized capitalist culture. Unreasonable job conditions, vast climate-controlled mega-stores, and such keep people stuck indoors for huge chunks of their lives, and then they can’t handle the ambient temperature of their place.

Yet, it’s often very possible to live without AC (or at least get by with a lot less) if you have a properly designed building or some good retrofits. Window shades, awnings, trellises, etc.

And TREES.

Oh — Another trick that I sometimes forget to mention is that at some points of the day, outside is cooler than inside! If you can manage to create an outdoor screened structure, it can be a real asset. Or if your area doesn’t have many mosquitoes you could just go on the roof or sit on the porch even if you don’t have a screen.

And before anyone says try that in Florida … i live in Florida! And before anyone says try that inland and not on the ocean … I’ve done that also.

PS. And YES, it is hot! It’s summer! That’s how summer works, especially in Florida. To conserve money and fuel, the best approach is to cool the person rather than to cool the air. Everyone has a different comfort zone anyway, so in a given building, different occupants will be having different levels of comfort. Better to work on cooling your own body appropriately. With iced drinks etc. Also in an open-air house, you will quickly notice the warm spots and cool spots of the house. And the locations will change at different times of day. Hang out where it feels best!

It’s about shade, and airflow. By the way, I’ve experienced, and other people have told me too, that sometimes it’s cooler to let the air flow in naturally than to have a mechanized fan blowing air. But there are ways to position a fan to enhance airflow rather than impede it.

Another motivating factor in my choice to do without AC is that we are frying the planet by trying to forced-air cool the entire insides of our buildings. Making the streets hotter, and increasing misery for people who don’t have access to the same level of artificial cooling. And then it becomes a vicious cycle, as people just want to hibernate indoors because “it’s so hot outside.”

Further Exploration:

• Passive cooling (Wikipedia): “Passive cooling is a building design approach that focuses on heat gain control and heat dissipation in a building in order to improve the indoor thermal comfort with low or no energy consumption. … This approach works either by preventing heat from entering the interior (heat gain prevention) or by removing heat from the building (natural cooling) … ” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passive_cooling

• Passive design architecture examples around the world 2025 (by Saumya Verma; Novatr): “This article will explain passive design, what principles passive building design follows, passive design solutions and provide examples of passive design architecture from around the globe.” https://www.novatr.com/blog/passive-design-architecture-examples

• Want more? There’s so much! Search for terms like passive cooling, indigenous natural building, vernacular architecture in hot humid climates, and so on! If you want to know how to stay cool in your prevailing climate, search for how people in other times and places with similar climates have done it. It’s great, now we have access to building wisdom from throughout history and all over the world!