Category: low-footprint living

“There is too much talent trapped in poverty.”

So said a meme on Facebook.

And this is one major reason why I have always been so hardcore about refusing to buy/own certain things even if it’s a bit less convenient. Every little bit less that we can manage to need, is a little bit of freedom we carve out for ourselves to do our real work.

I really loved Walz’s speech last night, and particularly love what he said about neighbors. He grew up in a town of 400, and you couldn’t afford to just ignore or not know or not speak to your neighbors. Regardless of their political stripe.

A lot of us, regardless of where we’ve lived, have never been able to afford to not know our neighbors, and remain mystified that it’s even possible to go through life without ever talking to or knowing one’s neighbors. Across all political stripes. I consider it an artifact of capitalist/colonizer culture and extreme income inequality.

Some people are able to buy their way out of knowing their neighbors, because they can use money for everything. Or so it seems, until an emergency hits and they are calling on a neighbor for help.

I’m not talking about social warm fuzzies, although those are certainly a great benefit of connecting with neighbors. I’m talking sheer survival: economic and social and physical/logistical.

On a related note, the Democrats need to continue working to reform the party’s culture/reputation of elitism that alienated millions of regular people over the past couple of decades or more.

The Democrats used to really be known as the everyday people’s party, and they can be again. But they/we can’t keep dismissing the other side as being illiterate, stupid, and so on.

On a related note … I really love this article by Brandyn Gallagher – on the wider deeper harm of so-called “micro” aggressions toward hillbillies & rednecks.

The article — titled “Hillbilly Hate: ‘Micro’ aggressions, macro impact” — is really good, and the wider truth of it goes beyond hillbillies and rednecks to many many segments of society such as immigrant communities. The deplorable’s, the flyovers, etc. — all nicknames that the Democrats have bestowed upon those they deem to be inferior.

Imagine having such reliable access to healthcare and dentistry that you don’t see the problem with making fun of someone’s teeth.

No more punching down! Democrats need to focus on policies, not punch down on people less fortunate.

Highly recommend following Brandyn River, who I found via Terra Vance – Marked Melungeon. Two recent additions to my go-to favorites for nuanced wisdom.

It’s so deep, and when we really dismantle the rottenness at the root of colonizer culture, we can have hope to actually move forward and be better.

A few years back, I stumbled on a MOOC being taught by a professor named Dan Ariely. The subject was behavioral economics, and the title of the course was “A Beginner’s Guide To Irrational Behavior.” (It was offered via the Coursera platform. Not sure if it’s still being offered. I can’t seem to find it there, but if you search you may find it.)

I took the class and found it immensely enjoyable and valuable, not just personally but also for my work as an eco communicator and motivator.

As Dr. Ariely explains on his website, “Behavioral economics is the study of humans and their (occasionally irrational) interactions with the world.” For me the class was like a fusion of psychology, sociology, and consumer behavior.

Yesterday, I went surfing on the web to revisit behavioral economics and Dr. Ariely. I found an interesting interview (linked below), where he brings up the phrase “choice architecture.” This phrase isn’t referring to one’s ideal house or the crème de la crème of buildings.

Rather, “choice architecture” is the idea that a lot of our choices are actually not as free or as rooted in our core beliefs and principles as we think. We are very influenced by our physical surroundings.

For example: If the store is only a few blocks away, but I drive my car instead of cycling or walking because the roads are hazardous thanks to high-speed traffic and no sidewalks, would you assume that I don’t care about climate change? Possibly!

Conversely, in cities and countries where it’s easy and fun to walk to the store or pub, people are more likely to walk, whether or not they particularly care about the ecological situation. It’s baked into the built environment.

Another example is if you’re living in a food desert. You’re more likely to depend on the corner minimart, which doesn’t usually have fresh produce. (Although some of them have tried to fill a bit of that need in recent years. I see lots of convenience stores carrying apples and bananas.) Whereas if you live in walking distance of the grocery store or farmers market, you’re more likely to be able to choose a healthier bag of groceries that includes plenty of fresh produce.

This “choice architecture” can even include how an application form is structured. For example, in one experiment, more people signed up to be organ donors when the process was changed from opt-in to opt-out. Meaning that the default was changed so that people were organ donors unless they specifically stated otherwise.

I think choice architecture isn’t just the physical built environment; it’s also social norms. And the entire culture we are steeped in.

Further Reading:

• This post on Dr. Ariely’s website (same page as I linked above) is a real goodie from a DEEP GREEN standpoint. It pertains to Black Friday consumer behavior. (For readers outside the USA, Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving and is a day when big stores have what are supposed to be super bargain sales. USA-merican shoppers turn out en masse for the sales, and engage in some rather extreme behavior, such as lining up outside the store while it’s still dark or even the night before.) Here you go: The 7 Irrational Behaviors of Black Friday. Enjoy!

• Interview with Dr. Ariely, regarding choice architecture: “Dan Ariely: When Are Our Decisions Made for Us?” Audio recording and transcript. (NPR; host Guy Raz.)

What is a healthy measure of anger? There are some people who would insist that we must resist and suppress and stamp out any little bit of anger that’s in us.

The problem is, anger suppressed isn’t really dealt with, and it comes out in other ways. Anger needs to be felt and processed. Not only for our own health, but so that we don’t end up spewing it at those around us.

But also, anger almost always includes valuable information. It can be information to ourselves that a boundary is being violated. It can motivate civic activism.

Feeling angry can be a real drag, especially as a peace activist. But, I am learning to get better at experiencing it when it comes. Take a deep breath, identify what it’s about. Try to leave a huge buffer between feeling it and actually verbalizing anything about it publicly.

Ideally we can fully process our anger and then distill out what is the constructive thing that we want to do with it.

But, I find we don’t always get the luxury of a time-buffer between “feeling anger” and “speaking to another person.” Fortunately, the old folk remedy of “counting to 10” is often enough. (There are some old sayings that exist for a reason.)

But it’s usually possible to take a deep breath and have a few seconds in order to formulate an appropriate tone of communication. Which might or might not include any angry words at all.

Obviously if somebody has deployed the ride-on mower onto your yard without your permission, you might actually need to yell and scream right then and there to get the situation stopped.

Counting to 10 helped me just now, made the difference between me going off on someone who was cutting a tree, and me asking a calm question. Neighborly relations were preserved, and actually understanding was increased, and my worry (which was rooted in lack of information) got resolved.

I started out saying anger, but ended up using the word worry. One thing that I find is that usually when I’m angry, there’s almost always something underneath it like a primal fear or worry, which ultimately is self-centered. Once I sift out the primal self-centered part, though, there’s usually some constructive legitimate component too, which I can then channel out into my communication with the relevant people.

This is an ongoing process for me. I still all too often start talking before I have fully processed an emotion. So, I keep practicing, and am also helped along by observing other people who are a lot better at this. (I have a lot of mentors who don’t necessarily know they are my mentors.)

I don’t know a single religion that says it’s OK to increase the suffering in the world. We want to reduce the suffering in the world. Anger, expressed inappropriately, increases the suffering of the people around us and often of ourselves too.

But glossing over or suppressing valid emotion that contains information can also increase the suffering in the world, albeit in a less obvious and immediate way.

I look at how the mainstream environmental movement has really limited it’s effectiveness by having a culture of speaking calmly and rationally all the time so as not to offend and turn people off. Spouting science very clinically and counting on that to motivate people’s passion. Hey, when your house is burning, it’s OK not to worry about offending people! Get them to stop the fire!

It struck me that there are all different flavors of anger. If emotions are like all different flavors of ice cream, each emotion furthermore has sub-flavors.

There is boiling hot anger, and collected cool anger. There’s very physical and very internal anger.

About 10 years ago, at an interfaith event for Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Day here in Daytona Beach, I got to hear an incredibly stirring sermon at a hugely packed Baptist church. A major theme was what Dr. King referred to as “The value of a bothered man.” The preacher was one Rev. John Gunn out of Jacksonville. Every cell in my body was on fire. (If you ever get a chance to hear Rev. Gunn preach, go!)

Sometimes managing anger is a matter of managing one’s attention. I noticed that if I keep putting my attention on something that’s bothering me, I can either get more and more frustrated, or I can go into a very creative solution mindset. It all depends on the kind of attention I’m using.

There’s a reason why there’s a whole chapter of my book titled “Get your mind in order.” The mind is Ground Zero!

When I first wrote my book DEEP GREEN, my audience was simply “people living in the USA (and other rich industrialized consumerist nations) who want to reduce their eco footprints.”

I have a narrower and more focused audience as well. And that is, people who are kept up at night by this goal! (In other words, people who share my perception of the level of urgency.) People who can feel that the level of urgency warrants a wartime-level, WWII-style, home-front mobilization. But who have come to recognize that no government or governments are ever likely to implement this. If they do, it’ll be great, but we can’t sit around waiting for it. The subset of people who feel this so strongly that they want to do whatever they can manage, to contribute to that grassroots green mobilization.

Over time, I also noticed there was a wider audience I was naturally including in my communication.

Besides the aforementioned segment, I realized that my communication about low-footprint living (or what I might call “voluntary austerity,” inspired by the name of the movement Riot for Austerity which inspired my book) is also something that could be helpful for:

• People experiencing involuntary austerity, because of increasing income inequality and wealth inequality (among other dysfunctions of a society rooted in capitalism).

• People experiencing natural disasters. Back in 2017 when I wrote my book, even that recently, natural disasters were nowhere near as common place as they have become with each passing year. Fires, floods, droughts, tornadoes — to name a few. And honestly a lot of us would call those at least in part unnatural disasters caused at least in part by bad human practices. Destructive land-use practices; excessively centralized systems of distributing daily essential such as food and water; etc. Speaking of which, I would also add the increasingly frequent and severe electric-power-grid outages as a disaster in themselves. Low-footprint living as a daily practice can help buffer a person and their community against the worst edge of vulnerability resulting from the above disasters.

In the words of Henry David Thoreau, “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.”

That’s true, and also, security is a measure of the things you recognize that you don’t actually need, although they may be nice to have.

The thing we have all too often been synonymizing with both wealth and security, money (and all its equivalents including gold, Bitcoin, Wall Street funds, etc.), is in fact very brittle in comparison with true wealth and security.

An everyday life guided by ultralow-footprint living is a great way to achieve both wealth and security, by the deeper and more robust definitions.

Who I’m not trying to reach

A lot of people I’ve asked me, what about climate deniers, what do you say to them. And my answer is “not much.” Not that I don’t speak to them; just that I don’t waste a whole lot of time trying to argue with them.

Or people will ask, How can we expect to have an impact when the big corporations are being so destructive? My answer is that I don’t dwell on what the big corporations are doing. Granted, corporations are given a bit too big a pass for “simply meeting demand.” When a lot of times they are actually creating demand. In other words, they are helping to form a choice architecture that isn’t good for the planet.

But, operations exist to make a profit. That’s what corporations do. They exist to serve themselves and their shareholders. If we don’t like what they’re doing, we have to try not to buy their stuff. Signing petitions is great; public shaming is great … but at the end of the day, if we are still buying their stuff, nothing’s going to change.

And with the corporations it goes even deeper. Because as everyday people, not only are we customers of their products; but nowadays, with the advent of 401(k)s and all that — the “financialization of retirement” — we are supporting corporations by actually being sort of like shareholders of theirs! This is why I try to encourage people to get off of Wall Street if at all possible. Don’t have any funds that are tied to Wall Street. Otherwise it’s tricky to get corporations to change. It’s like trying to pull up a rug to take it outside and shake it clean, while we are standing on the rug!

Another subset of the population who are not my target audience is people who just don’t care about the environment. If more of us who passionately care and worry start to apply pressure by using our voices and wallets, I really believe we will create enough of a change to nudge governments and corporations in a good direction, and the “choice architecture” around us will start to shift accordingly. When that happens, even people who don’t care about the environment will automatically be living in a more environmentally friendly way because the daily living environment is set up for it.

This is a comment I typed in response to a post in the Florida Women for Harris group. And it could just as easily apply to being open & upfront about one’s environmental beliefs and practices.

The original post showed a photo of a packed meeting of Harris/Walz supporters in The Villages. A place that has long been assumed to be a total red enclave. And yet supposedly the villages has the largest Democratic club in Florida! Who knew?

My comment:

What a great illustration of something I’m seeing statewide. That maybe we just haven’t been upfront and vocal enough with the people around us. Maybe we’ve been almost like leading secret lives, putting ourselves in the closet, for years and years. So a lot of us individuals think we are an isolated island in our town or area.

(Myself, I am fortunate to know lots of people of my social and political stripe. I always have found my people, wherever I’ve lived. I could not have survived otherwise.)

Then at a time like this, we suddenly find out we are not alone, and never were.

Our culture isn’t good about prioritizing forming community. (In other times and places, not forming/finding community was not an option; a person could not survive without it.)

(I have made many blog posts about this topic, but felt the need today to make more of a consolidated compilation. Hope you find this helpful in your efforts to shift the thinking & practice in your community!)

Regarding why I refuse bottled water unless it is an absolute emergency.

This is a very important topic, and some people recently have seemed baffled when I declined offers of bottled water. So I’m going to share some of the best public information that I know of.

This has all been out there for a long time, so I assumed everyone knew it. But, it’s a big world out there and there’s a lot of information for us to try to keep track of. See various links below and in the comments.

If you ever see me drink a bottle of bottled water, you are welcome to ask me if I’m OK, because it might literally be a medical emergency.

Most recently, I drank a couple of bottles of bottled water back in 2020, at a daytime event in midsummer where I was volunteering and I noticed I had started to experience symptoms of heat exhaustion. After searching extensively for a working faucet or water fountain to refill my cup and not finding anything, I finally gave up and drank two bottles of bottled water.

Still, I felt bad about accepting the bottled water, and was very angry with myself. I could have planned better, brought a bigger jug of water from home.

A fellow civic activist, who is also a fellow environmentally concerned citizen, commented on my post:

“I remember life before the cult of bottled water, before adults went around sucking on bottles of water like over grown toddlers. Yes, I understand the need to stay hydrated and the bottled water trend is here to stay but so is my mental image of over grown toddlers sucking on their bottles. Sometimes I even imagine them in cute little Oshkosh B’Gosh overalls. Makes my world more fun.”

To which I responded:

Yes, so true and so well put! And — Saying that the plastic trash bottled water trend is here to stay is a self-defeating attitude. It’s the same kind of defeatist mentality we have often lamented in our fellow Boomers, that everything is just doomed to stay the way it is even though we are killing the planet, oh well.

Isn’t it funny how the generation with the most money and resources IN THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF HUMANKIND is the one that just lays down and plays dead and claims helplessness over environmental and social problems? Hmmm …

The fact is: More and more people these days are conscientiously carrying their own reusable bottles. And, furthermore, we are deriving great self-expressive enjoyment from it, so I would say THIS trend is here to stay!

At a gathering the other week outdoors in a park, a couple of very glamorous ladies were toting those very large Stanley cups full of some kind of delicious beverage, and their cups that matched their gorgeous nails and stylish outfits were just very eye-catching!

People like you and me, who get out and about a lot, are in a great position of influence! I so enjoy carrying my cute reusable containers and utensils and beautiful heirloom cloth napkins from my childhood! #fashionplanet

We are stylish grown-up ladies, we don’t have to be part of the herd of overgrown toddlers!

Further exploration/action:

• If you don’t watch or read anything else, PLEASE PLEASE just watch this 8-minute video. She really sums things up. The Story of Bottled Water, by Annie Leonard (originator of the popular acclaimed series “The Story Of Stuff”)

• Please don’t assume that all these bottles are getting recycled. It’s very much the opposite. Google search: bottled water trash

• On a sidenote, when I was living in Tokyo and had an evening side-job at a karaoke snack pub in Shibuya, we got the water by refilling glass bottles with tap-water, and served that to customers. I’m pretty sure every karaoke snack probably did and does the same thing still. At least I hope so, I hope a bunch of them haven’t converted to single use plastic!

• There are communities that actually have a dangerous water supply. Flint, Michigan, is just one example. And the mining communities in West Virginia. When we drink bottled water just for convenience or as a status symbol, we are actually throwing those communities under the bus. Let’s step it up and push for REAL solutions!! As Annie Leonard says in her story of bottled water video linked above, the real solutions are: invest in public water infrastructure; prevent pollution; [install & use] drinking fountains; and boycott bottled water.

• If you for some reason just feel a compulsion to spend money on plastic bottles of water, please buy it for someone who NEEDS it. Here is a Facebook page where you can go to bid on their handmade jewelry etc and the money will be donated to buy bottles of water for workers and families in the coal camps of West Virginia. Where the water and land has been hideously poisoned by our endless consumerist capitalist demand for “cheap energy on tap.” Follow this Facebook page: Marked Melungeon Company Store.

• Regarding recycling: “Americans buy 29 billion water bottles a year. For every six bottles people buy, only one is recycled. … U.S. landfills are overflowing with 2 million tons of discarded water bottles.” And it takes up to 1,000 years for one bottle to decompose.(healthyhumanlife.com) Numerous other websites report similar figures, or even worse.