Category: low-footprint living

I copy-pasted my recent post “Pay people to plant trees” and emailed it to a few fellow activists in my bioregion.

Got this nice reply from one of the recipients, to the effect that she’d like to see some ordinances regarding “natural” plantings, instead of the current ordinances that not only allow, but often actually require, developers and HOAs to use toxic, violent landscaping practices that devalue trees and native plants.

My response:

Thanks for this!

Ordinances are often cumbersome and difficult to pass. And in some cases nowadays, Tallahassee has actually passed laws prohibiting municipalities from passing any kind of local ordinances around trees and so on. Not that we shouldn’t keep trying!!

Rather than ordinances, it could be that a stronger leverage point is simply interacting with the planning process, talking directly w developers and their attorneys etc.

I have been attending some planning board meetings, redevelopment meetings and so on. There may be some hope there.

Many times these days, developers (and city planners too!) are actually interested in a more eco-friendly approach; they just need informational resources such as plant lists, pattern books etc. that will help them navigate permitting, community acceptance, etc. And the resources are abundant; it’s just that people, even professionals, don’t know about these websites and other resources. Part of my self-appointed job as a freelance sustainability educator is to connect people w these resources.

Another key leverage point is realtors. Realtors have a lot of influence over clients and buyers; they can be educating people about how “curb appeal” is not shaved grass with zero trees.

Another potential leverage point is affordable / workforce / attainable housing. People working in the affordable-housing spaces have some leverage to promote natural landscaping and gentle maintenance practices.

Such practices actually help reduce the overhead cost of housing while also providing shade, heat mitigation, stormwater absorption, beauty, and other value to residents and the surrounding community alike. If some of the trees are fruit trees, an additional benefit is food for the residents.

I am here to support you in any way I can, to connect you with information and other resources.

This blog is largely devoted to calling out structural ills in our society with a purpose of fixing them. Even though there is a solution-oriented intent, I am all well aware that a blog like this can be, come across very cranky and scolding.

And I don’t plan on changing that focus although I am always trying to refine my tone and manner.

By the way I’m testing out talk to type on WordPress and it seems to have habits of deleting whole paragraphs right after I’ve spoken them. Ha ha one has already vanished.

yeah cant do this anymore – i better compose offline in the text app bc the same Paragraph that I have spoken and re-spoken has no vanished three times

So as I was saying, one sweet trend I see in society in the past couple years or maybe more is the trend of wishing people Happy Mother’s Day more widely. In other words even strangers in the street. Happy Mother’s Day if you are a mother etc.

Little things like this may seem insignificant, but an emerging practice or cultural habit of small passing kind words to strangers may make the difference in our crazy times. Like a glue or threads repairing the social fabric, though on a micro scale.

Also, that aside, mothers are just awesome and deserve respect. It’s really good hearing this.

Happy Mother’s Day to all mothers everywhere. And to our Mother Earth.

In the suburbs, one gets constant noise and air pollution from leaf blowers and other destructive suburban yard appliances. It’s ironic that the suburbs were first developed to get people away from factories, industrial pollution, and noise but now we have all this endless acreage of private green lawn that’s maintained by chemicals and noisy lawn equipment.

(For the original post about the new station grand opening ceremony, go here. And thank you to Maggie Ardito and other transportation activists who really are trying to make transportation conditions better for the non-motoring public. As well as providing opportunities for the recreational cyclists etc. to get out in nature.)

For Daytona Beach residents using public transport: Take the 60 bus to Deland, then either walk a couple miles south on 17/92 (Woodward) or transfer to I believe it’s the 20 bus.

Oh wait, I forgot that Deland Sunrail station is not downtown. Rather, it’s near the Amtrak.

So You’ll actually need to walk 7 miles from the supermarket at Amelia & 92 that is the endpoint of the 60 bus route. (I have done that.) Or transfer to the 20 bus, ride it to downtown and then from downtown it’s a couple or 3-mile walk to the station. (Have done that too.)

Be careful, walk on the left side of the road so you can see the traffic coming, there’s no sidewalks in a lot of places.

I’ve walked to this Amtrak station many times, so I know whereof I speak. Maybe they will put some sidewalks etc in. Now that the Sunrail station is there.

Added later:

I do still support the opening of the station. I might not have made the same location choice; would have wanted it to be easy walking distance of downtown (and for that matter I would have kept Amtrak downtown too, way back when it was. But alas I don’t have a time machine).

What I would do at this point would be to add bus service running to the Amtrak; I don’t understand why they’re hasn’t always been one. And now that we also have sun rail in the same vicinity, that just brings even more justification to have a bus route going to those train stations.

And sidewalks as I mentioned before for pedestrians and cyclists and wheelchair users and other non-motorists to be able to get to the stations safely.

Added even more later:

I just looked more closely at the map and found out the sun rail station is absolutely nowhere effing near the Amtrak! More human insanity, inspired by the availability of massive amounts of petroleum. Well in Permaculture design we always have to work with where we’re at, so there you have it. Keep in mind, location is everything and we in the USA have massively flubbed that basic design principle of Mother Nature by locating things far from each other that should be near each other.

By the way, once while traveling overseas I walked five or 10 miles from a port to a train station. I have a feeling somehow that USA car-culture design patterns influenced this. Our destructive ways have spread far and wide across the planet.

All of this said, I still support the Sunrail as I do the Amtrak. And we will find ways to retrofit basic needs.

Degrowth conference coming up; live streaming will be available. The following info is copy-pasted from a post by Chris Andrews in the Degrowth – join the revolution group:

In a few days the Beyond Growth Conference is happening in Brussels.

This three days major event is a cross-party initiative of 20 members of the European Parliament, which will take place in the European Parliament in Brussels.

This overview of the conference is my synthesis of the description on the conference website:

“The conference is a gathering of high-level speakers from multiple backgrounds aiming to discuss and co-create policies for sustainable prosperity in Europe, creating a path towards a European sustainable economy. The conference intends to put into practice a post-growth future-fit EU, which includes social well-being, and viable economic development that respects of planetary boundaries.”

The conference may well prove to be a feel-good talk-fest along the lines of the “Conference of the Parties” (COP) conferences that have been going on for decades with little effect. However, to me, just the fact that this conference is happening is amazing, because growth is being questioned by the mainstream, specifically the European Union.

The conference comprises seven major presentations (plenaries) and twenty focus-group session. Topics that caught my attention include:

· Limits to Growth: where do we stand and where do we go from here?

· Which prosperous future? Confronting narratives of growth

· Changing the goal: from GDP growth to social prosperity

· Addressing the limits of resource consumption: towards a resilient economy

· Building an energy sector compatible with ecological limits

· A financial system fit for a postgrowth economy

· What does a credible EU-wide, social and economic framework to achieve a just transition look like?

There are over 150 presenters at the conference; names that caught my attention include:

· Jason Hickel, economic anthropologist

· Tim Jackson, ecological economist

· Giorgos Kallis, ecological economist

· Ursula Von der Leyen, President of the European Commission

· Kate Raworth, ecological economist

· Vandana Shiva, Physicist

· Joseph E. Stiglitz, economist.

All of the plenary sessions will be available live on YouTube and on the conference website. All the focus panel sessions will be livestreamed on the conference website. There’s a link to the YouTube channel in the comments below.

As far as I can tell you must be registered to watch the streamed presentations on the conference website, but I’m not certain about that. I’ll put a link for registration, which is free, in the comments.

The first session starts on 15 May at 9.00am Central European Time (CET), which makes it a convenient 5pm Australian Eastern Standard time (AEST). The sessions will run until 6.30pm CET, which is 2.30 am AEST, which is not so convenient. Fortunately, the conference website says that all of the sessions will be recorded and available to replay, but I have no details on that.

This could be very interesting to anyone who is interested in degrowth, or even survival!

Here is the link:

https://www.beyond-growth-2023.eu/about-beyond-growth/?fbclid=IwAR1z4IgJS2lr7rVYNffZwZJMnl_3VzTFiaLyFf7hPCvDoEsacfKNBcR-GBw

#degrowth #conference

I’m glad my county is planning on doing a basic decent common-sense thing of planting trees and other vegetation around stormwater ponds. That said …

They need to pay people, not rely on volunteers!!!

They pay contractors to cut grass needlessly, prune trees excessively, and spray poison; they need to pay people for this important work of planting trees.

According to the announcement, they are looking to volunteers not only to plant the trees, but also to water them til they are established! I guess the volunteers are supposed to haul their own water to the site???

Talking points (feel free to add your own):

1 – The local governments can perfectly well afford to pay people to plant trees — they can just take it out of that unnecessary mowing, spraying, palm-tree-mutilating, leaf-blowing budget.

2 – Another very important reason for paying people is that the conventional landscaping companies need to start seeing the value in taking care of trees. Getting paid to plant and care for trees is maybe the only thing that will get some of these guys to respect and appreciate trees and other vegetation.

3 – Furthermore, the grass guys need to be brought on board with the tree program because otherwise the trees will never be safe. Turfgrass and trees are not compatible right next to each other; they require different conditions to survive and thrive. All too often, turfgrass growing right up next to trees leads to the death of trees from chemicals, string trimmers, ride-on mowers, companies who just consider trees and other plants an annoyance that’s in the way of their mowers and their paychecks (and should probably have chosen a business model that doesn’t involve living creatures of any kind), etc.

4 – We absolutely need, yesterday, a strong local base of landscapers who have skills of natural stormwater management; nutrient filtration; eco-landscaping. We need to stop seeing it as optional and stop shamelessly exploiting the tender hearts and weary hands of people who care so much about plants and nature that they will do hard hard labor for free, spend gas money etc., for what they see as a worthy and essential cause. Developing a base of stormwater-savvy landscaping is a matter of sheer self preservation. Will we collectively be smart enough to wake up and see this, as so many other cities around the world have? Only time will tell. I hope no more destruction and suffering has to happen before we wake up.

Side note on 4: A lot of the volunteers whose labor and wallets tend to be taken for granted as a cost-cutting opportunity for local government are older women, often retired, who are members of the local native plant societies. Not valuing the labor and cultivated wisdom of women / older people: Coinky-dink? I think not.

The only way to ensure the safety and viability of the trees in the long run is to get the mow-and-blow guys on board with the program. Show them that horticulture and eco-holistic-minded landscape maintenance can actually pay. It has to be a coordinated effort. Otherwise the investment will be totally wasted, and will cost money, mark my words, even if volunteer labor is exploited to plant and establish the trees.

I will call the number next week and update you if I get any more information.

P.S. Probably no one at the county will listen to me if I try to tell them this. But, for what it’s worth I’m saying it here: They can get a whole bunch of trees and other plants growing around ponds for free, and those trees and plants will be a lot more robust and zero-maintenance or close to it, if instead of having people expend labor to plant the trees they just back off on mowing and allow the buzzcut turfgrass at pond-edges to succeed to wildflowers, then soft woody perennials, then shrubs, then trees. This natural succession process happens faster than people think.

Note on succession: Succession is one of the core organizing principles of nature that we permaculture design professionals learn in our training. Succession is a natural process that occurs on the social/economic as well as the physical landscape, by the way, although in this post I am of course talking about the physical plants.

Another note on succession: Humans acting mindfully in alignment with nature can gently speed up the process of succession. But that’s a topic for another post and another day. For now, just let the pond edges grow. And/or pay people to plant and establish the plantings.

NOTE! All of the above notwithstanding, I do support people who are volunteering from the heart, and I don’t want to shut down community volunteerism. We just need to be careful not to undermine the bigger picture of sustainability, which includes economics and people’s livelihoods.

Suggested action: we could contact the county saying thanks for doing this and please give this department a budget for this project. Same for any other project like this and any other local government body.

UPDATE Wed 5/17/2023:

I just now got off the phone with the county point person for this project. Very nice conversation. She is very committed to this project and she is an environmental sciences student and knows her stuff and is taking input from county arborists and so on.

She doesn’t know the answer offhand to my question of why they are using volunteers rather than paying people, but she’s going to look into it. (BTW the trees themselves are paid for by a county fund that comes from fines that are levied against developers and others who remove trees unlawfully.)

She’s also going to look into ways of making it easier for the people watering the trees. For example, possibly collecting rainwater and having it stored nearby for the people doing the watering.

I told her that if the answer turns out to be funding that I may be able to help her connect with some federal funding sources I’ve heard about.

Also she was able to answer my point of concern regarding that the tree planting needs to be coordinated with the grass guys being on board. They are absolutely getting the grass mowing service people on board.

And she also gave me the good news that there are people coming forward to volunteer and that a lot of the volunteers are residents who live in the neighborhoods near the publicly accessible stormwater pond sites where the county is wanting to plant trees This is the best possible scenario, that people living closest by are most invested.

I’m going to email her and we will be keeping in touch. I let her know that I am part of various eco grassroots groups of citizens, and she looks forward to staying connected with us.

Further exploration:

• Tree Replacement Trust – volusia.org

(Posted this comment in the Non-consumerist group in response to some mean-spirited comments on a post, but this could apply to any anti-consumerist/footprint-lowering-type counterculture group. Feel free to copy-paste and adapt according to your needs.)

This is a group where we have the opportunity to support each other in alternatives to the brutal consumerist “default settings” of the mainstream world.

There’s a lot of harshness and meanness in the world. We at least don’t have to bring it into this group.

Thank you to the OP and everyone else who has shared what they did to navigate the world in a way that eased their financial burden and allowed them to be more themselves.

Every drop of water makes up the ocean. Every person taking and sharing a different path helps de-normalize the extreme consumerism of our society, and reduce our dependence on centralized distant entities that don’t care about our wellbeing.