Category: low-footprint living

My college asked alumni to post on the website, offering advice to the incoming freshmen of the class of 2028. Here’s what I wrote:

A warm welcome to the class of 2028!

As many others here have described, the beautiful College and surrounding area offers an incredibly rich array of experiences and resources. Please avail yourself fully!

And make a point of occasionally attending events and programs that are far outside your usual areas of interest. At the very least, you’ll have an interesting experience. And sometimes really magical connections happen.

And I would add … Please take very good care of your mental and emotional health. The College has a counseling center. Find out about it; get an overview of what’s available. You never know when you might need it, if not for yourself then for someone you know. The College’s mental-health services were a lifesaver for me, 40+ years ago.

College is incredibly mind-expanding. For many of us, it’s our first extended time away from home. That’s exhilarating, and it helps us learn and grow. But, as we come into contact with a dizzying array of new-to-us ideas, and encounter people from so many different worlds, it can sometimes also be a bit disorienting, and it’s natural to feel emotionally overwhelmed at times. The College offers many tools and resources to help you navigate these waters.

Even just knowing what your core values are, and reminding yourself of them from time to time, can help you maintain equilibrium. If you don’t yet know what your core values are, there are tools available to help you explore that.

Keep an eye on your friends and classmates; check in with each other. Cultivate your emotional intelligence along with your academic prowess.

One more piece of advice: When it comes to choosing a major and minor — or even just sampling a course outside your chosen path — please don’t shy away from the arts, humanities, and social sciences. They offer many viable paths to a livelihood. And furthermore, in order to create a sustainable society, we need the arts and humanities as much as we need science, engineering, business, and other disciplines. The wicked problems facing our world require all hands on deck.

(And by the way, “all hands on deck” includes ALL of us, no matter how long ago we graduated. No one gets to sit this out. We all have to work together, and we all get to work together.)

And back to you, New Freshman. Whatever your chosen field — and whatever your other skill areas and personality attributes — please know that you have great value to add to the world. You may hit a rough patch at times, but please don’t give up on yourself! You are unique, and there are gifts that only you can bring.

Enjoy your college life, new freshman of the class of 2028!

This question came in response to a comment I made on Sharon Astyk’s page, saying I travel by train 16 hours each way to see my family once a year. I commented:

“Air travel is so utterly miserable. I don’t understand how so many people put up with it. I’m happy to sit on Amtrak for 16 hours once a year to go visit my siblings. OK, it’s 16 hours each way, but I’m still fine with it.”

Which prompted someone to ask me:

“Is that the only time/place you travel?”

My reply to the person’s question:

Nowadays yes. I mean, I go on some occasional short trips within my state and region, but the annual trip to see family is my only super long distance one.

For a variety of reasons.

I have been very fortunate in my life. I got to travel when I was younger, and because the experiences were so rich (such as getting to travel around England, Scotland, and Wales for 5 weeks in the 1980s; and getting to live in Japan for 5 years in the 1990s), they went a long way and I am satisfied.

Before that, as a child, I grew up in the military family so we moved every couple of years. My parents took the opportunity to take us camping in many national parks and state parks all over the country when we would be moving from one assignment to the next.

As a climate activist, I am keenly conscious of the footprint of my past travel. And so I feel it’s my duty to leave it to the younger people, and to other people who have never had a chance to travel.

Fortunately I really love my adopted home place.

And I added another comment later on the same thread:

If I liked the area where my family lives, I would probably move there to live closer to them. And I may do that someday. [Note, the cost of living there is really high though.]

But I really love the place where I have made a home. There’s a really beautiful community here.

I did used to live twice as far away from my family, but I decided to at least move to the same coast of the USA as them. Did that 14 years ago and here I am.

If there were a really good network of walking paths and cycling paths, I would probably be very happy to take a very very long time on my trips to see them. Maybe nine days each way by bicycle, or 40 days each way on foot. My work is portable. But right now the safe network of paths does not exist.

(The original post on Sharon’s page was sharing a post by a person who says they’re happy to sit on a train for many hours, even though it takes so much longer than air travel. That they enjoy watching scenery and being able to get up and walk around, etc.)

PS. Although my assertions of finding air travel miserable are 100% true, there is an additional reason why I assert my dislike. I’m trying to emphasize the cramped drudgery of air travel to see if I can nudge more people to rethink hopping on airplanes. A little behavioral-economics experiment.

As I’ve said before on this blog and in various public forums, it’s not just about wanting to avoid the ecological impact. It’s about wanting to minimize my contribution to the destruction of other cultures, communities.

The rootlessness of modern industrialized culture is something I see as very much an artifact of the endless-growth economic model. And while giving various benefits to some individuals, it has had a deeply destructive impact on people, communities, cultures, ecosystems, and biosphere.

Here are two books. One of which has become very popular in recent years so you may have read it. The other one may not be as familiar but you may also have read that one.

Two books. One published in 1972; the other in 2001. Very much overlapping themes.

1) A Nation of Strangers, by Vance Packard. Published 1972.

2) Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community, by Robert Putnam. Published 2001.

I found the older book while shopping in my public library’s bookstore the other day to replenish my Little Free Library. Putnam’s book I read a couple years back. Good stuff.

I like how Packard sums up his idea of what an authentic community is:

“My own view is that an authentic community is a social network of people of various kinds, ranks, and ages who encounter each other on the streets, in the stores, at sports parks, at communal gatherings. A good deal of personal interaction occurs. There are elected leaders or spokesman whom almost all the people know at least by reputation. Some may not like their community but all recognize it as a special place with an ongoing character. It has a central core and well-understood limits. Most members base most of their daily activities in or near the community. And most are interested in cooperating to make it a place they can be proud of.”

Packard’s description very much squares with what I have found in my adopted hometown of Daytona Beach, Florida, USA. I have experienced glimpses of it in previous places where I lived, but more of it here than anywhere else before.

Another quote that grabbed me came from a novel I read yesterday, that I had purchased for my LittleFreeLibrary. The novel is Fishing in the Yemen, by Paul Torday. (The Yemeni Sheikh is speaking to the British protagonist, a mild-mannered fisheries scientist):

“‘This house was first built in the year 942 according to your calendar, and in the year 320 according to ours, and my family have lived here ever since, here and in Sana’a. It always interests me when European people come here, that they have no idea how old our civilisation is. Do you not think we have learned how to live and conduct our lives according to God, in that time? That is why some of our people hate the West so much. They wonder what the West has to offer that is so compelling that it must be imposed upon us, replacing our religion of God with the religion of money, replacing our piety and our poverty with consumer goods that we do not need, forcing money upon us that we cannot spend or if we do, cannot repay, loosening the ties that hold together families and tribes, corroding our faith, corroding our morality.'”

Mic drop. If that doesn’t just say it all.

This is something I have tried to point out many times. As a disillusioned environmentalist some years back, I was so relieved to learn in Permaculture class that humans can be a beneficial influence on the environment. Not just a “less-bad” influence.

In prepper / doomer / collapse-aware circles, many people have fallen into thinking that the earth would be better off with humans not on it. You might hear people talking about how billions of people will need to die, etc.

But this is a limited and inaccurate view, based on our experience of Euro / capitalist / colonizer culture. (Or what Daniel Quinn, author of the Ismael books, called “taker” culture.)

Humans are originally living in partnership with nature.

This 15-min TED talk is refreshing & energizing without being “hopium.”

https://youtu.be/eH5zJxQETl4?si=5B7ZgDuf40lkXmbo

Title: “3,000-yr-old solutions to modern problems.” (It’s a worldview we get introduced to in Permaculture class, with a sort of “Survey 101” of examples from many different times and places. But this is direct from the source, indigenous peoples).

TED Talk by Lyla June Johnston, Ph. D., an Indigenous musician, author and community organizer of Diné, Tsétsêhéstâhese, and European lineages. She has many other talks as well.

A lot of wealthy people have 401(k)s. Even some in the middle class have 401(k)s nowadays. So a lot of everyday people are actually benefiting from insane corporate profits.

So a lot of people who identify as middle-class are unknowingly rooting for something that is actually messing up things for the working classes.

The defense industrial complex; big Pharma; the carceral system; big investment companies that are totally commoditizing the housing market … The list of what’s behind those 401(k)s goes on.

As well as for ecosystems and communities. I wish we invested more in Main Street and less in Wall Street.

The Slow Money movement asks the question, what would the world be like if everyone’s investments were within 10 miles of their home? Great question.

With one hand, everyday people are boosting corporations, while with the other hand we are trying to survive the cutthroat world in which the corporations operate.

Oops, I actually wrote this draft months ago or longer. But when I hit publish it posted as if I had just now written it. This is a rough draft of some thing, and I will have more to add later.

Kind of a clunky title, and doesn’t capture the whole gist of what this post is about, but hopefully a title I’ll be able to remember if I ever want to refer to this post.

Some years back, I started to notice that there were two distinct income strata within the category of people who would call themselves “people of modest means.” On the upper end, people earning $50,000-$70,000 a year. On the lower end, people earning $15,000-$25,000 a year.

Even the people at the upper end of this category feel financially stressed a lot of the time. And might not imagine how people at the lower end would be able to survive.

Conversely, people at the lower end might have a hard time understanding how people at the upper end could still feel financially stressed.

Side note: More recently, I noticed two strata within the category of “older people.” No, it has long been recognized that there are the elderly elderly elderly people. But, what I see happening now is that the elderly elderly are still as healthy as the 60 to 70 year old. May be healthier. This may be a downward mobility of health, parallel to the downward mobility of other economic indicators.

Further exploration:

• “The income you need to fall in America’s lower, middle and upper classes — find out where you rank and how these social levels are defined” (Douglas Warren; Yahoo Finance; Feb 3, 2024). https://finance.yahoo.com/news/income-fall-americas-lower-middle-122100515.html

By income (Census Bureau Data):

Lower class: less than or equal to $30,000;
Lower-middle class: $30,001 – $58,020;
Middle class: $58,021 – $94,000
Upper-middle class: $94,001 – $153,000
Upper class: greater than $153,000

By net worth (Census Bureau data):

Lower class: $12,000
Lower-middle class: $61,260
Middle class: $145,200
Upper-middle class: $269,100
Upper class: $805,400

Hey There Fellow Boomers!
BOTH of the following can be true:

1) We worked/work hard at our jobs back in the day.

AND

2) Young people these days have it really tough! Back when we first started our working lives, a lot of the conditions were a heck of a lot more sane & reasonable than they are now.

How many jobs were you hired for pretty much on the spot and you could just start working that day and go home with money in your pocket? Me, a lot!

Back in the day, did they check your credit rating and all kinds of aspects of your personal life? No! And come to think of it, when I look back, I’m not sure anyone ever even checked my driver’s license or cared if I lived anywhere!

Back in the day, did any employer ever ask you to write up an entire marketing plan or entire something for their company as part of the selection process? And maybe they never even got back to you after you submitted the elaborate documents? I don’t know about you, but this never happened to me back in the day.

Or, if job conditions at a certain place seemed like too much, were you ever not able to just walk down the street and immediately get a job somewhere else? I never had a problem! Back then.

Not that we haven’t struggled, and not that we haven’t been through macroeconomic slumps too. But what’s going on now is over the top. Various types of jobs that used to be relatively easy peasy slacker jobs are not anymore!

I’m a hard worker, but a lot of what I’m hearing about these days is absolutely insane and ridiculous, and I wouldn’t want to work either!!! Anytime I have a chance to support a young person in refusing disgusting and ridiculous job conditions, I totally will!

(And the screenshot below is barely the tip of the iceberg. There’s so much more, and I’m sure a lot of you older people who are still out in the job world have seen it too. I’m lucky because I’ve been self-employed for 30 years so I’ve been somewhat insulated. I have had numerous side jobs over the years, but none that I couldn’t afford to walk away from.)

Text from screenshot of Facebook post: Calling this generation lazy when we don’t want to sit through 3 interviews for one company, wages haven’t caught up with cost of living, and we are constantly trying new side hustles, is wild.

And on NextDoor yesterday, someone said that people shouldn’t have to work three jobs just to have a roof over their head. Whereupon a fellow Boomer replied that they should up their skills so as to have skills that are worth enough to not need three jobs.

I responded:

But things are a lot different now than they were when you and I were young. I can tell by your statement that you are of a “certain age group,” same as I am.

It used to be easy to afford a small room or apartment even on just one job.

Shoot, I used to be able to afford my own apartment as a college student even just working a summer job! And that summer job helped pay my tuition as well! Same with a lot of other people I knew.

And then out in the working world, it was easy to get a really nice apartment and have a car, buy groceries, have nice clothes etc. just on one job. And I even picked a really low-paying profession, editorial work!

Things are not the same today; the structure of the economy has changed over the decades, and that change has accelerated over the past few years.

Plus, working conditions have gotten a lot more harsh on people. The delivery & warehouse jobs, for example, are crazy. When I hear what people nowadays have to deal with as far as employer expectations, I find it shocking.

Now granted, trade school and community college was and is available and a wonderful option. There are trade schools that people can attend tuition-free and then have a job placement right out of school.

But my point here is that when people are struggling, we older people should see the bigger picture, and offer them encouragement rather than shaming them for things that are a phenomenon of the larger economy.

PS. I say I’m a hard worker and it’s true, but, when it comes to bulls*** requirements and inhumane conditions, I am incredibly lazy and defiant and able to find any work-around to avoid it! And I’m known for loudly encouraging others to do the same. Resist!!!