Category: low-footprint living

is one typical piece of advice in the zombie / prepper circles.

To which I say …

“Move to rural areas.”
— No. I don’t feel safe in rural areas, and I’m not likely to feel safer there as times get worse.

And fortunately we don’t all want to move to rural areas, as there would never be room for us all to sprawl out like that. So many stories of one or two people moving onto 10 acres etc. The math doesn’t work. Plus as times get tougher we need to be pooling our energies and resources, not getting even more isolated than we are now.

• On the subject of ruralness (rurality?), over at permies.com There is a thread of people who own land trying to connect with people who want to live on land. One of the attributes people give, along with the location and number of acres, is proximity to a hardware store. Personally, I would care a lot more about proximity to a pub, and that’s not only because I enjoy a drink or two. It’s also because if you are near a pub (or diner, coffee shop), you are connected to the people of the area and you can go there, become a regular, offer your skills & resources, ask around for what you need.
• Start collecting rainwater and using it wherever you’re at
• Start reducing your dependence on electricity wherever you’re at (solar panels or no — getting by with minimal electricity is a useful skill)
• Be a resource for your neighbors and community. Share skills and share stuff.
• Do whatever you can to retrofit your house to be less dependent on artificial cooling and heating. Passive heat, passive cooling is the way to go.
• Work on getting a critical mass of people in your town or city to start growing food in public spaces. Fruit trees, nut trees, etc. A lot of towns and cities at least in the USA currently have vast expanses of nonfunctional turfgrass; that space could easily instead be used to grow food instead of useless mowed grass.
• Work on your mental health, spiritual health. We will need it, not only for ourselves but to comfort others around us who might be in shock.
• Be a beacon of kindness and compassion.

Environmental Defense fund has some good tips. 5 greener summer vacation ideas.

Their post came across my Facebook feed with the link above. “Hot take: sometimes vacations are stressful. Between budgeting, the mini panic attack over whether you remembered to pack your toothbrush, potential plane delays, traffic, etc.…it can be a lot. But with these tips you’ll have one less thing to worry about.”

I appreciate that they are sharing tips such as forgoing flight; downloading a birdwatching app; adventuring by bicycle or other human power; opting for a staycation.

My favorite eco-friendly vacation tip is to stay home. Staycation! Deepen our understanding of our own bioregion; take adventure excursions in our own backyard.

A while back, I posted about a company that offers virtual tours of a marketplace in some beautiful country or countries. Participants get to hear about the history of the area while purchasing traditional handcrafted clothing and other articles. And with the Internet being what it is today, I’m pretty sure any of us could connect with someone located in any country we’re interested in, and pay them to be our virtual tour guide. There are a couple of countries where I’d like to do this, including Slovakia and Kazakhstan.

Other vacation tips: spend it on education, by taking a course or attending a virtual conference. Take a permaculture design course; many are available online, and then you can start implementing hands-on right away in your own community.

Or, how about some consciousness training; mindfulness retreat. Lots of those types of courses are available online too, or there may be instructors in your local area as well.

Anti-racism courses are good too. Decolonizing our minds and dismantling colonizer culture is an important part of restoring ecosystem health and addressing structural inequities.

Dismantling our own inner prisons is an exhilarating adventure! And it benefits all beings.

I am in favor of reparations for all descendants of enslaved African people who were stolen from their homelands and brought to the USA, the Caribbean, etc.

While I can’t say what the criteria would be (that’s out of my lane, as my bloodline is British colonizer on one side and Eastern European immigrant on the other), I would tentatively suggest the one-drop rule. After all, if someone could be enslaved for one drop, it seems fair that that would be the criterion for reparations too.

Or, how about a “one ancestor” rule. Like (for example) the Daughters / Sons of the American Revolution manage to screen people for membership. Prospective members just have to prove that they had at least one ancestor who fought in the Revolutionary War.

It should be no harder for determining slavery reparations. Say, a person has to prove that they had at least one ancestor who was enslaved?

But then again, that might be hard, because there wasn’t necessarily the paper trail. I have heard that it can be very difficult for Black people to determine their ancestry because it was not necessarily written down.

In any case, I’m sure we can come up with something!

Really, we should ask Black people. Rather than just the government concocting some policy, we need to make sure that Black people themselves have the biggest voice in how this is implemented.

If people are worried that it would cost more than we can afford, I would say we can take it out of our massively bloated war budget and prison budget.

I was looking for the title of the fast fashion documentary I saw a while back that’s really good, and my search yielded this whole cool page which has seven documentaries, including the one I was looking for.

Here you go! From earth.org, 7 Must-See Fast Fashion Documentaries.

And the one I was looking for, The True Cost, was mentioned as being the best one to see if you watch no other.

I was blown away to learn that the fashion industry employees something like one in six people worldwide. And the footprint is way beyond what I could imagine.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve always enjoyed making / mending / after-market “editing” my clothes, but for the past few years more than ever I’m super committed to buying as few new clothes as I can possibly get away with.

Veterans for Peace (VFP) offers a presentation on the link between climate crisis and militarism.

“Veterans For Peace Climate Crisis and Militarism Project is part of the world-wide movement to end the climate crisis and promote climate, environmental, racial, and economic justice. Our emphasis focuses on how US militarism, the single largest institutional source of greenhouse gasses on the planet, fuels the climate crisis.”

Go here to view a short version of their 20-minute slideshow presentation, and find out how to schedule a full presentation for your group.

Please feel free to share / forward this to anyone who you feel would be interested.

Bottled water — it’s everywhere. It’s actually work sometimes to avoid the stuff, as people are constantly offering it and hardly anyone questions the huge volume of plastic trash.

Some people might wonder why I am so hard-core about refusing bottled water. If you ever see me drinking a bottle of plastic water, it probably means I’m having a medical emergency, or am severely dehydrated and there is no drinking fountain or faucet nearby.

Part of it is because I’m thrifty. Why should I pay for water in a bottle? Also the stuff is heavy to carry home from the store, and meanwhile there’s faucet water in my house that I already pay for.

But another part of that is that I just grew up not having all this plastic junk, and have never gotten used to it, and never want to get used to it.

Anyway! My own personal bias aside … Here’s a great video which might be helpful to people who are concerned about the environmental impact of bottled water:

The Story of Bottled Water, by Annie Leonard. Ms Leonard is author/narrator of the Story of Stuff video, and that whole “Story of” series of videos — which you can find on her YouTube channel.

In closing, a quote from Ms. Leonard: “There is no such thing as ‘away’. When we throw something away, it must go somewhere.”

When I first heard the title of this song Rich Men North of Richmond, I was expecting it to be a diatribe against the real fatcats. The politicians; the oligarchs who are holding the power; the greedy landlords; the exploitive employers.

People who have four and five and six houses that sit empty, while so many are struggling to just have one roof over their heads.

Are the types of people/behaviors I expected to hear called out.

Instead, the song takes a swipe at people who are members of our same general class. We all have more in common with each other than we have with the real fat cats at the top.

Regarding the fat shaming — that is so loaded with wrongness. Let’s start with how people are in a constant scramble just to earn a living, so they don’t necessarily have the time & money, don’t end up eating right.

Or, how about the fact that our standard of what constitutes a healthy body is very Anglocentric and frankly skinny.

And then there’s also the fact that snack foods are designed to be addictive.

Not that this lets any of us off the hook from trying our best to eat right & exercise for our health, but the addictive nature of snack foods combined with the fact that they are one of the few affordable pleasures … is a thing.

Plus yeah – what if it’s plain and simply a treat for the kids?

Whether housed or unhoused, earning just below the poverty line or just above it, we all need to stick together in solidarity and not take potshots at each other. The upper echelons, ruling classes, owner classes, count on us fighting with each other, shaming people one economic rung below us, and always striving to move up to the next economic rung. They like that because it keeps us working for them on the treadmill.