Category: low-footprint living

Yes, it does seem to be at times. When even people who identify as environmentalists are jetsetting all over the planet, living in big airconditioned houses, heavily invested in the Wall Street growth paradigm, etc.

But: We still have the power to help denormalize and de-legitimize excessive consumption. We can help reset the norms of what’s considered normal and acceptable.

For example we can casually delegitimize air travel, automobile-dependent city planning, monster-sized houses, single-use plastics, etc., via our everyday conversations (in person and online).

Whatever you are comfortable with, just sprinkle it into casual conversation: “I prefer not having the responsibilities of car ownership” “So how do you offset your flights?” “I don’t want to incur that plastic” “Gosh that house is huge, I would hate to have their electric bill” (and same thing for a yard with no trees: “I would hate to have the utility bill for that place”)

I’ve never had a problem. If the collected rainwater has algae or other obvious particles in it, I might use a filter. (Or I might use that water just for irrigation, and see if the water in a different barrel is clearer.)

On that note, opaque and dark-colored barrels are most likely to keep the rainwater free of algae growth. A couple of my barrels are translucent or light-colored; those I cover keep covered with a sheet of canvas or other big cover (actually use a sauna cover that some neighbors were throwing away).

I always advise people that, if they have any doubt, to use the filter of their choice. A filter can be as simple as a piece of cheesecloth or a reusable coffee filter — or it could be a commercially available filter such as the Brita or Berkey, two very popular brands.

Or they could boil the water but it’s not usually necessary. Actually for water to be pasteurized it only needs to be 149° F for 20 minutes. (I just doublechecked and actually only 6 minutes at 149 F is needed!) Which is a lot easier than reaching the boiling point in some circumstances, such as situations with limited fuel.

Rainwater collected fresh off the roof and not right after a long dry spell (when dirt and other stuff can build up on a roof) is often very clear and fresh. If in doubt though, start small. Or start with just using it for bathing or for making hot tea/coffee.

If you have a downspout, there’s a special diverter attachment you can get that siphons off the first water off the dirty roof, so whatever follows is more likely to be clear and free of debris.

Fun story about water and impurities: 30 years ago when I lived in Tokyo, one of my fellow English conversation instructors was from Egypt. She told me that when she was growing up, her mother fed her a spoonful of Nile River water every day to help make her strong and resilient. For what it’s worth, she told me she was always very healthy.

That said, several billion people on the planet do not have access to safe drinking water, and do contract serious illnesses by drinking from rivers, lakes, and other groundwater that are their only available water source. One key aim of my rainwater research and advocacy is to help ensure safe drinking water for everyone on the planet (that people and communities are empowered to collect themselves, without corporate or government interference).

“Living more richly with less” is a lifelong passion of mine. That said, “minimalism” is not a one-size-fits-all thing. Similar to what I say in my book and blog about low-footprint living, it’s a thing you personalize to your own needs and circumstances.

I always try to reassure people that it’s about each person deciding what does and doesn’t add value to their lives, and pruning away the latter.

On that note, a lot of the minimalism depicted in glossy magazines (or the online equivalent) doesn’t seem to deal with the fact that some occupations need a lot of tools and supplies.

Like, my art and craft supplies will always take up more space than my writing supplies, since the latter are just pens, notebooks, laptop computer, phone. No matter how well I strive to keep my colored pencils, paints, and other art supplies organized, they will never look or be minimalist.

I am a big fan of continuously organizing my work tools and supplies, for sure. It’s an ongoing process and flow, not a destination.

Also: We can be minimalist as in “less is more,” and still have hobbies. In fact, I would say one of the benefits of a less-is-more type lifestyle is that it gives us more time to enjoy our hobbies. Sewing and embroidery are more of a hobby for me than an occupation, but I’m not getting rid of my threads and needles just because it’s “only” a hobby.

Same with my beads, beading supplies. Since I’ve gotten more focused on writing over the past few years, my business of making and after-marketing jewelry has been on a back burner. But I still want to keep my beads because I enjoy it as a hobby.

One way I enhance the joy of a hobby is by sharing. So I might bring my embroidery supplies to a friend’s house and we stitch together. Same with my massive inventory of beads: Lately I am thinking of new approaches to my ongoing efforts to form a craft/beading group.

My label for myself is “ornate minimalist.” I’m very choosy at what I choose to keep around, but I’m not a fan of the super-sparse aesthetic per se.

One thing that I think has turned people off of minimalism is the same thing that turns people off of low-footprint living, the Degrowth movement, and other anti-consumerist movements: People feel like they have to be perfect, do it perfectly. This is an artifact of the same toxic, perfectionist, competitive culture that prompted us to get into reduction in the first place!

The fact is that we live in an imperfect world. And most of us find it easier to make reductions in some areas than others. For example, I’ve found it easy to minimize my use of water and electricity, but always find it a bit more challenging to reduce my transportation footprint and food footprint.

I wonder if another thing that has made some people unhappy on the minimalist path is that they forget to deliberately use their freed-up time and space to pursue their creative arts, activism, or other passions. Our creative passions benefit our communities and the planet as well as ourselves, and we would do well to give them a prime place in our lives.

Also, very important point regarding “getting rid of no-longer-wanted stuff”: I strongly believe I have a responsibility to people and the planet for the stuff that I’ve chosen to buy over the years. (And I even feel this way about stuff that I have rescued that other people were throwing away.) So I always do my best to find good homes for things I no longer want.

And by offering decluttering and organizing assistance as part of my permaculture design services, I strive to help other people do the same, in order to create more joy and meaning in their lives.

This 20-minute YouTube video “How Minimalism Got Toxic: The Dark Side” offers some really good critiques of the minimalism movement. I would love to hear what you think of the video, and would also love to hear about any experiences of downsizing, decluttering, minimalizing that you’d like to share from your own life!

minimalism, downsizing

“Hiding Behind the Hedges. In Los Angeles, the wealthy will pay a fortune to protect their private lives from prying eyes. At least leafy green walls are good for the environment.”

Cool article in the New York Times; with beautiful photos. (And although this article focuses on wealthy clients, lush landscaping — offering many many benefits in addition to privacy — does not necessarily have to be expensive if we really work with nature.)

Of course this general concept can be adapted for any climate and any sized yard. Where I live, in Daytona Beach a few blocks from the ocean, I use a mix of beachy, drought-tolerant, native-species-supporting vegetation. And some food and medicine for humans too! Also, the hedges do not have to be super tidy-manicured or monoculture. They can be more soft, shaggy, polyculture.

This jewelbox effect they describe in the article is what I have aimed to create at my place. There’s a feel of outdoor rooms with a green perimeter. My intent with my yard is twofold: To provide a cozy retreat for my housemates and myself, while also providing beauty and shade, inspiration and education to neighbors and passersby.

We value our privacy (and I like to screen out the street-lights, which are super-bright to the point of disrupting sleep), but also I do love my “porous property” bench corner where anyone is invited to sit and rest! And the metal flower sculptures, animal figurines, and other art I have mounted on the fence facing the sidewalk for all to enjoy.

I would love to know what other people have done to create a lush green aesthetic in their outdoor spaces, or even indoor or semi-indoor spaces!

I love articles like this because they emphasize that people can earn a livelihood from doing landscaping that involves some thing more than just flat, buzzcut turfgrass. Moving the needle on aesthetics is important. This is a high leverage point for making change in systems, to use the terminology from Donella Meadows / Thinking in Systems that Mike Hoag has often shared in the Transformative Adventures group.

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“In a city where the bedrooms and bathrooms of one house are often within sight of the house next door, a high hedge wall — which increases privacy while reducing both noise and air pollution — has become the ultimate status symbol.”

As many people have pointed out, The recent fires in Canada; smoke in the Northeast US and Canada — as well as floods and droughts here there and everywhere — are a wakeup call. Moving north, or inland, isn’t necessarily an escape from climate effects.

And of course this whole privileged “elsewhere” mentality is a big part of what got us in trouble in the first place. It’s that whole “get ahead of the curve, race to the bottom; move to a place that is already someone else’s home” -think. Ick.

My take: The more we can adapt in place, the better off we will be, not only for ourselves but for the communities we live in. Also, my thinking tends to be how can I make my home and community better adapted, more able to welcome people who are FORCED to be climate refugees — as opposed to myself choosing to abandon my place and community even though there is no emergency.

At some point over the past couple of years, I really started to notice that if I only asked what I needed to do for my own safety, it never helped to ease my fear. No amount of planning, no amount of having, was ever enough.

But whenever I turn the question around, to how can I help and support other people; how can I help provide safety, food resilience, stable housing, clean water etc. for my community as a whole — it ends up making me feel super expansive, creative, and excited.

Of course like everyone else here, I mourn the destruction we Western industrial humans have wrought. But it just makes me want to stack and pack more beneficial relationships; get more creative with the permaculture design principles.

My favorite part of permaculture design class was always where we heard about some group of people, usually economically and socially disadvantaged, who had literally the worst piece of land ever, often really tiny and filled with trash or pollutants, and they made it into paradise. This is what gets me out of bed in the morning. I want to empower everyone everywhere to do this, so we stop trashing ecosystems, gentrifying other people’s places, etc. And it starts with what I do in my own home and city.

My first permaculture teachers, Scott Pittman and Larry Santoyo, really inspired us greatly with the stories they told.

This idea in various versions will just not die. And I don’t necessarily recommend engaging in arguments, because this particular one is an endless rabbit-hole, I have found.

That said, here are some responses I made recently that might help if you choose to try to engage the rural zealots.

“Cities will run out of water in two days if the grid goes down.”

No, not necessarily. I collect enough water off my tiny urban roof to keep my household supplied exclusively with rainwater if we need to, and I can quickly teach any neighbors how to do the same when they want to. (On that note, I am actively setting about educating my community and city about rainwater collection.)

Also: All of us expanding out into the country is really not an option. Since you are a person who seems to adamantly prefer living in the country, you’d best not wish that on yourself: all of us city-dwellers spreading out and wrecking your rural utopia. (Not to mention destroying whatever last chance the wildlife and forests might have on this planet.)

As has been the case throughout history, it will continue to be the case that some people will live in the country and others will live in the city (or town, village). And that there will continue to be social and economic interchange between the townies and the country-dwellers.

The Nature of Cities is a worldwide organization and movement that is actively working on “retrofitting” wild nature back into towns and cities. And restoring the food-growing capacity of the urban setting, and localizing transportation, and so on.

I do expect that megacities will shrink, and resume their former form of being a collection of towns and villages.

Added later:

Well then you’d better hope that a bunch of us city-dwellers commit suicide, or die of thirst or whatever, so we won’t wreck your rural idyll.

I cannot imagine what argument you are trying to win here. All of us spreading out into the country would be an absolute disaster, ecologically and socially.

Cities are not a “recent invention.” Neither are towns and villages.

And added:

And yes we absolutely need to retrofit all cities with garden allotments. Including rooftop gardens where people live underneath.

Of course canals won’t work without water. That’s what a canal is.

By the way, in our area, we get so much rain that if we were collecting and using it wisely we would stop being plagued by flooding. AND we would have enough water to share with other places. One of my fronts of effort right now is to get local and regional governments to stop the wasteful, destructive development and landscaping practices that are wrecking the water cycle and preventing healthy recharge of groundwater.

Each area — town, city, or village — needs to have relationships with local farmers. Mutually beneficial relationships. In my region we are actively cultivating economic ties with our local farmers and ranchers. We are also big on mutual aid of all kinds. We share tools and resources. etc etc etc

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I never really know what the motive of these “back to the land” zealots is. Why can’t they just be happy with their excess acreage “Green Acres” trip and leave the rest of us alone?

Maybe some of them actually don’t really like living out in the country, but they thought they had to move out there to be “sustainable”. And because misery loves company, they want to lure a bunch of us out there so we’ll be stuck hoeing potatoes with them like some post-apocalypse version of American Gothic.

(Or, maybe they’re simply realizing that they can’t run their neo-plantations without serfs. And permaculture-minded city-dwellers who are struggling with housing security and such will make easy targets. Yikes, now there’s a doomy thought. To put a more positive spin on it, some city-dwellers might be looking for exactly such a bucolic live-together situation. My thought remains, though, that this pattern of purchasing big acreage that only one or two or a few people live on is basically re-creating plantations and colonization. We still need to atone for what we did the first time around, not do it again!)

Bad idea, by the way: Squandering all our physical and mental energy toiling in isolation, reinventing wheels that other isolated people toiling on other excess acreage are simultaneously reinventing.

(On this note, I often hear versions of the following from people who have moved out to the country, especially if it’s some very different bioregion from where they’ve been living: “We are working towards some self sufficiency, learning a lot and making many mistakes.” Arghhhhh!! I cringe every time I see this. When we humans try to live and learn without community, it’s almost like we lose our whole history, whole knowledge base. And self-sufficiency is not the aim; self-reliance plus interdependence is.)

When what we need is to be bringing our highest creativity and energy to building social capital; learning how to live well in dense settlements (so that the ecosystems can recover, and so that we can flexibly accommodate fluid migration of peoples fleeing drought, famine, and other disasters). Maximizing abundance by doing more with less space; going vertical with plantings; stacking and packing beneficial interrelationships among things and people to maximize food and energy and beauty and learning and emotional nurturance and everything else we need; learning how to live deeply interconnected with each other.

Not just any women though. Black women and indigenous women. We need to listen to them; boost their signal.

Also: Men aren’t the problem; patriarchy and misogyny are. Including the internalized patriarchy, internalized misogyny that we all — including women — carry.

Recommended reading for all feminists: Hood Feminism — book by Mikki Kendall.

Recommended reading for all white women who aspire to be truly feminist and anti-racist: They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South — book by Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers.

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