Category: low-footprint living

In permaculture, one of the site design concepts we talk about is sectors. This is anywhere on a site where something comes in (or comes near enough to be an influence). Could be water, noise, sunlight, wind, streetlights, foot traffic, car traffic what have you. Everything has a use; nothing is ever only bad and there are trade-offs. Design creativity makes all the difference. The willingness to see all incoming elements as the resources that they are. (An organization can be a “site” too BTW.)

At our low-footprint-living laboratory, the sun has two personas:

• a fierce, ruthless, blistering death-star that we must constantly buffer our living spaces from;

and

• a beautiful, clean, free energy source for cooking food, sterilizing tools & cloths, drying laundry, keeping phones charged during outages, and much more! Including of course being the source of food for all the beautiful plants who grow here. Yes, photosynthesis is happening all around us and isn’t that a lovely thing!

See pix here on my DEEP GREEN book by jenny nazak Facebook page.

BTW my solar panel charging experiment yesterday, using the roof of the sea-grape arbor, didn’t work; no matter how i tried tweaking the position it never got up much wattage. Now I’ve plunked it in the middle of the sidewalk and am keeping an eye out to avoid inconveniencing people who need the sidewalk to get from point A to point B.

Charging-station using micro solar panel!

The fountain success (previous post) led me to rig up a little charging-station inside the sea-grape arbor, with the mini solar panel.

I had never put the panel up there on the roof of the sea-grape arbor before, or thought to make a little charging-station.

But when the fountain pump stopped, I realized the generator needed to be recharged and voilà it occurred to me to just try to charge it right here. (Usually I charge it out at the solar-oven platform by the sidewalk.)

As an unexpected bonus, by Murphy’s law, since I was wanting sun for the recharge, the sky clouded up and it just now started sprinkling. That’s actually fine with me, I’ll be happy to take a few clouds and raindrops — there will always be more sun later to recharge the generator!

Instant rooftoop micro solar!! Photos here.

That’s the great thing about deciding to turn one’s house into a permaculture guild headquarters and low-footprint-living laboratory: New possibilities always just pop up around the corner of every moment. That’s how our human minds work, when we can manage to allow ourselves to get out in nature and let ourselves be creative in the flow.

*Update: My solar panel charging experiment yesterday, using the roof of the sea-grape arbor, didn’t work; no matter how i tried tweaking the position it never got up much wattage. Now I’ve stuck it in the middle of the sidewalk and am keeping an eye out to avoid inconveniencing people who need the sidewalk to get from point A to point B.

Goals!!! Wooooottttt!

Hey! One of my crazy experiments actually worked. I have never had one of these fountain things, But I put in an order to the curbside goddess to manifest a fountain or mini pond and look what happened! Within a matter of maybe a week or so, a near neighbor stuck one out by the curb in front of their house.

The little pump is powered by AC current, which we don’t have an electric outlet outside, but my tiny little generator that we use for keeping phones charged during outages has an AC plug and it’s working great.

i’ve never known how much electricity these things used, but the sticker on the bottom said 120 V AC and 0.23 A, which if you multiply the volts times the amps you get the wattage which is under 30 watts! Not too much of an extravagance for a couple or a few hours a day.

This is a little bit of a mental/emotional win for me because in the past, after securing my wish from the curbside goddess, I would’ve just procrastinated forever on every single step of this, and this little curbside manifestation gem might have sat somewhere in a forlorn location in my yard until I gave up and stuck it back out at the curb for someone else to take yada yada. Thereby perpetuating the cycle. Instead I am breaking the cycle ha ha!

I said to myself, look, the worst that can happen is it doesn’t work, right? Also even if any part of it doesn’t work, things can often be fixed by cleaning.

And also, this cute object can just be a nice decoration even without any water or electricity. Yard decor in my little Sea Grape arbor — AKA the “faery squat” as one friend calls it!

BTW the little generator I’m using to power the pump is recharged by solar panel or shore power, and there are many similar brands commonly available.

This one is a 200 W generator which is enough for anything we need during a power outage — basically, charging our phones and maybe making a little smoothie with the mini blender ha ha. Priorities!

By the way, when my innocent civilian housemates or neighbors witnessing my various activities (ferrying jugs of rainwater here and there etc.) ask what I’m up to, I will often say “Ohhhh, just a little ‘spairmint!! If it goes well you’ll hear all about it — and otherwise I take the secret all the way to the grave!”

Just joking though, as I tend to keep iterating my processes until something works. And I also recognize that there’s value in reporting when things don’t quite work. And on some occasions I will actually decide to scrap a micro mission in order to use various energies more wisely elsewhere. Really tickled that this one is working though!

See pics here (for as long as infrastructure and the will of various tech bro’s shall allow haha).

Tasks around the house can feel drudgey and Sisyphean. Some big ones that come to mind are constantly trimming back vegetation, constantly dealing with laundry and dishes, managing water levels in rain-tubs, mending screens.

In a nature centered household where things are done mainly by hand and with DIY fixes rather than off the shelf store-bought stuff, tasks can feel exhausting unless we troubleshoot why this is.

Here are some factors that came to me:

• Having to do a task alone. Humans, even the introverts among us, are social animals. Big tasks such as large loads of laundry and dishes, are best done with friends and/or kids. And yes, the kids actually help! Or they’re just playing together nearby, which is helping you too. The modern capitalist society pattern, where each parent has to watch their kids in solitude — and hope the kids will let them alone long enough so they can maybe put in a load of laundry etc. — is just exhausting.

• Always being the one who has to do a certain task. Unless it’s your specialty that you love, and you have an agreed-upon division of labor, this is a quick recipe for burnout.

• Living with people who are fundamentally not aligned with your values. Of course, household members will always have different priorities, but ideally everyone can at least find alignment around a shared set of basic values.

• Not connecting the task with collective/community goals. If it feels like you’re only doing something for yourself or your immediate household, that’s not always a powerful enough motive. At least for myself, I find it easier to be diligent with tasks if I also see them as gathering data and improving processes for the collective good.

• Not obtaining a yield. When I say yield, I mean a benefit beyond just “this task is done.” For example, constantly trimming back vines can just feel so drudgey and relentless, unless I am thinking of it also as gaining a benefit such as harvesting basket-weaving materials, opening up areas of air circulation, opening up areas of sun for fruit trees, etc. Sweeping and mopping is a daily thing, but I usually don’t mind it because I enjoy the opportunity to exercise and stretch certain muscles that only get worked from sweeping in mopping. It’s also an opportunity to introduce pleasant scents to the house via essential oils. Mending towels and washcloths can be a pleasant meditative task and allows me to practice different types of stitchery.

• Having to work a “regular job.” By which I mean a job in the mainstream economy, 40+ hours a week, particularly one outside the home with a commute. Many of us are finding our way out of the stranglehold of having to work such a job, and are trying to help others do the same. But while you’re in transition it’s just going to feel exhausting to have to work somewhere outside your home all day (this also includes working fulltime enriching someone else even though you’re working from home), and then basically have a day’s worth of work waiting for you back at your own house. Ideally we would all be able to make our livelihoods from our homes and neighborhoods (and/or work itinerantly / nomadically with few or no constant household chores).

• Being very project-oriented as opposed to process-oriented. In other words, wanting to do a task and have it be complete and stay done. As opposed to needing to keep being done on a daily or weekly basis. Many of us just don’t have a lot of patience with tasks that don’t stay done. But we can train ourselves to be more process-oriented; in other words, less focused on getting some sort of big result. More appreciative of the flow. I’m not sure, but I think that being project-oriented, and not patient with process and flow, may be an artifact of colonizer culture. And as we are learning, we can dismantle our colonialist programming.

• Feeling like you have to do it perfectly. This is definitely an artifact of colonialism / white supremacy culture. Perfectionism is one of the 15 pillars of white supremacy culture. Read about the 15 pillars here: https://www.whitesupremacyculture.info/characteristics.html

• Your house and yard are too big for the number of people living there. Move to a smaller place; or add more people.

Is there anything else you can think of that makes tasks feel relentless and exhausting?

Housework, and our whole lives, need not and should not feel like a Sisyphean grind. Of course there will always be some tasks we like less than others. But there’s no reason why we can’t experience things mainly as an iterative playful flow; and take a childlike delight in our continuous and steady refinement of processes.

Did I say repetitive? I meant constant constant constant. It could feel drudgy and Sisyphean but it doesn’t have to be; I will go into that in another post.

Here’s just a short list of the very very constant tasks:

• trimming back vines & other vegetation
• lowering & lifting shade-curtains
• managing rain-storage tanks/tubs: the tanks themselves as well as the water in them
• putting out solar oven, repositioning as needed
• mending (clothes, window-screens, etc.)
• maintaining shade-trellises
• and of course all the same tasks a regular household has, including laundry, dishes, sweeping and mopping. But in a nature-oriented house, I find that the laundry and dishes are actually much lighter load because we know we don’t have machinery to rely on. So we work smarter, and without even thinking about it we generate less of a load in the first place. A little bit of Jevons paradox in reverse there!

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention

• harvesting food and medicine!

• refilling outdoor hand-wash / foot-wash stations

• managing compost, recycling, and trash

• negotiating trade-offs between shade, privacy, and airflow (this item actually spans multiple of the aforementioned categories including trimming back vegetation, pulling shades and so on)

I will add more as they occur to me but these are the big main ones.

Even on my tiny urban homesite (1/10 of an acre house and grounds included), these tasks are constantly ongoing. Especially as they are done with hand tools.

This is why I mostly advise people to resist buying a bunch of acreage. For many reasons – our own energy, and also saving room for other people and other species. Those of us steeped in colonizer culture tend to compulsively acquire and hoard a lot more space and other resources than we need. We can unlearn this, and must. For our own good as well as everyone else’s.

Terminology notes:

• A lot of us in doomer/prepper/permie circles use the word “homestead.” But Black and indigenous educators I trust deeply have pointed out that this term has racist and colonialist antecedents. I therefore prefer homesite, or smallholding.

• Our house is not off-grid, nor do we aspire to be. Rather, even while being on-grid we simply choose to minimize use of resources, including electricity and consumer purchases. According to my research up to this point, staying on-grid but minimizing consumption is actually the simplest, lowest-footprint, and least expensive option for most of us.

In the permaculture community, it seems like a lot of people think making a livelihood on site has to mean farming. That is very much not the case. Not only is not everyone good at farming; there are many other categories of human needs besides growing food.

A related issue is that people feel like they need to own 10 or 20 or more acres. Again, very much not the case. And it’s a very harmful misconception. Because it encourages hoarding and scarcity thinking.

Every homesite is different, as are the needs and resources of its surrounding communities. So the livelihoods that are possible will vary from place to place.

So this is just one example of thinking about how many ways there are to make a livelihood on one’s own homesite. Example given here is Starshine House, my home and permaculture headquarters which is on 1/10 of an acre in our coastal small city.

Writer and content creator is always an occupation, possible almost everywhere.

Artist, same.

Teleconsulting; virtual educator. (I conduct my death Doula services almost exclusively by phone and zoom. And I know people who teach English to students in China and other far away places!)

Basket-weaving – we have so many palm fronds and vines and other materials that I haven’t even started to experiment with even though I have taken a basketweaving class.

Sewing. In particular, living by the beach, I often find good sturdy canvas from discarded chairs and umbrellas. A person could make a whole livelihood just from stitching bags.

Sewing machine mechanic. I can’t keep it tuned, and anyone who can would likely have lots of other business from the surrounding community as well. I believe we lost our sewing machine mechanic in town a few years ago. At a shop where I had a part-time job a few years ago, we used to have to have a mechanic visit every year from the Carolinas just to keep our machine tuned.

Bicycle mechanic. The closest bike shops are 7 miles away in either direction.

Matting and framing. There are a lot of artists around here and there’s getting to be a critical mess of galleries downtown.

Candlemaking. I started getting good at making new candles by melting down leftover chunks of old candles, and making wigs from old T-shirt material. There’s a knack to it but I seem to be getting better at it. A person could probably make a whole business out of this.

Yogurt making, kombucha, sourdough — really any cottage food industry.

These are just what I can think of off the top of my head, on a little 1/10 of an acre home and yard.

Of course there’s no need to make one’s entire livelihood on one’s homesite. A person could get a job nearby. My thinking is that the job wouldn’t have to take over all of one’s waking hours, because we always have our home livelihood.

Neighborhood lawn-mowing and landscaping business, neighborhood delivery business, all manner of neighborhood-based businesses where a person draws their entire customer base from just a few square blocks.

If you’re trying to live within the default settings of the mainstream economy, the aforementioned occupations will sound like they wouldn’t provide enough money. But, coupled with the lifestyle of thrift and mutual aid, sharing a home and either sharing vehicles or not needing a vehicle at all, it becomes more and more viable.

Never underestimate the power of peer pressure.

That’s it, that’s the post. Peer pressure is an unbelievably powerful force. Use it for the good.

And possibly even a more powerful force is intergenerational pressure. Old people don’t want to be seen as uncool by their grandkids or other younger relatives.

It works in reverse as well. My grandparents had a huge influence on me. They were huge forces for mindfulness, thrift, dismantling entitled attitudes.

Use peer pressure and intergenerational pressure to nudge people to prioritize the good of the planet, all species, marginalized peoples.