Category: low-footprint living

Every place has a prevailing culture. If you move someplace, to an extent you’ll do better in that place if you adjust to the culture at least somewhat.

And yet, for those of us who do activism, there are often things that we really feel an obligation to speak up about to try to change.

Sometimes speaking up can lead to feelings of shame. Like, how dare I speak against the prevailing norms.

And yet, not speaking up can lead to feelings of deep regret as it can be a violation of our moral code.

If we speak with thoughtfully strong wording, we have the potential to shake up people’s thinking and maybe shift the harmful status quo norms a bit. But then again, with strong wording we also risk being branded a fanatic or hard to deal with. (This has happened with me when I refer to mow-and-blow landscaping as “intrusive and violent.” In my own mind I’m just telling it like it is; but to the establishment it can feel like ridiculous hyperbole. And it can actually increase the resistance on the other side.)

And then again, if we try to keep our wording palatably mild and inoffensive, we risk failing to communicate the urgency of a situation.

Maybe one of the hardest things is accepting that we will rarely or never do it perfectly. But that we have to keep trying our best anyway to walk that line.

By the way, the cultural adjustment thing can also apply to cultural drift that can happen even if you’re staying in one place for years as opposed to moving to a different place.

And, to end on a positive note … Fun motivational language tidbit I saw today: A successful small-scale neighborhood developer referred to his block of various examples of “missing middle” housing as a “petting zoo of ‘missing middle’ housing.” There’s something charmingly adorable about that phrasing that piques people’s interest and doesn’t threaten their sense of safety and stability. Maybe we need some wildflower or prairie “petting zoos.”

The following paragraphs were sparked by a prompt in our group in Desireé B Stephens and Kokayi Nosakhere’s class on dismantling white supremacy culture. That class will be offered again in September by the way, and I will post the contact info. In the meantime, I highly suggest you join the intersectional allies group on Facebook, and or the EAGER group on Facebook. Both are communities of European Americans fully committed to dismantling white supremacy. This is a task that must be done in community.

Kokayi started out his post by sharing a TikTok video which I will post the link to below. The video is six minutes and very well worth a listen. I will link it below.

This TikTok creator essentially is saying that because of the extreme actions of the Trump administration, the white race is done for. Nobody is going to want to mate with us.

My response:

OK now that I have watched the video, I can say I agree with what she is conveying. Thank you so much for sharing this video with us!

Now I am going to comment from my perspective as an environmental activist / permaculture designer.

I have been very pained at the destruction wrought by white supremacy culture — which I have come to realize is the underlying culprit of all the environmental destruction including the wars etc. I feel a bottomless sadness that it took me to so late in life — and late in my career — to realize this.

However, for the rest of my life I will be working to dismantle white supremacy culture regardless of whether there’s any hope for the future of the human race on this planet or not. (As in, White supremacy culture is so destructive that I feel it could imminently destroy ALL human life on this planet.)

I actually do think there is hope, because Gaia is very forgiving if we just get our rapacious nature out of the way.

I would like to think that humans will thrive and get to have beautiful lives beyond white supremacy culture. I would like to think we can dismantle it sooner than waiting for the physical bodies to just die off.

This is also important because white supremacy culture has been internalized in many people who are not white-bodied.

Once again I am so thankful to you for choosing to engage so deeply as to teach us EAs how to dismantle white supremacy culture. What a gift, what an opportunity.

Some years ago, I wrote a book that was meant to be a practical manual for fellow environmentalists To take steps in their daily lives that would reduce their footprint and our collective footprint.

My book, with my level of awareness at the time, I was referring to the toxic destructive culture as “mainstream USA American culture.” Or “mainstream USA consumer culture.”

A few years later I started thinking, well, it’s NOT Black or brown people who are driving this. So what do I call it, so then in my talks & writings I started calling it “AENA, Anglo Euro North American culture.”

No corner of the planet is safe as long as one single particle of this culture remains. We simply must dissolve and dismantle this toxic culture.

Cultures are made up by people. Built over time, most of them. Most of them organically evolved over time in response to their environment And what brought them joy and peace and satisfaction.

Only the Anglo euro North American, white supremacy culture, was synthetically created in a relatively short burst of time and toxic energy with The most deeply unsavory of all motives.

I am grateful as an environmentalist to now have a more appropriate focus for my work of getting people motivated to care for the planet: Restore the water cycle; support and restore biodiversity; be uncompromising about equity and social justice.

Regarding what she said in the video – I would even go further than just no one’s going to want to mate with us. No one’s gonna want to hang out with us, period! Already nobody does, mostly.

Nobody is going to want to form organizations with us. Nobody is going to want to even eat with us. Nobody’s going to want to go shopping or swimming or walking or to the pub/coffeehouse or anything with us.

Humans are fundamentally social creatures. The threat of such well-deserved shunning will, I hope, be the final straw that motivates us to wake up and do the major dismantling thing to completion!

Although I really would like the motivation to stem right this minute right now from the wish to simply avoid doing more harm than we have already.

Further Exploration:

• “Trump will end the white race” — video from Winnie Lisa Auguste on TikTok https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT6dPuebN/

• Class: “Self-love meditations for white people” – Next class is in September and I cannot recommend it highly enough. This is a 4-week zoom series. Contact Desireé B Stephens or Kokayi Nosakhere. (Also highly recommend following both of their pages if you are not already.)

We are doing somatic work to metabolize the trauma from the destructive toxic culture we were born into without our consent.

We are digging deep into case studies and into unpacking our own experience and beliefs together.

The purpose is to dismantle this culture and stop the deep rooted harm it’s causing all over the planet.

For more information / registration, contact Desireé B Stephens https://desireebstephens.substack.com and-or Kokayi Nosakhere royalstar907@gmail.com. (And in the meantime also follow both of their Facebook pages, their content is absolutely gold.)

The next class is being offered in September. It’s a four week series by zoom and I cannot recommend it highly enough! Not only is it in class, it’s a whole community and a nurturing container of very authentic love and accountability.

And in the meantime I highly suggest everyome follow both their pages. This is so what’s on our plates right now (as European Americans dedicated to social / environmental justice and ecological restoration).

Added later – July 11 –

Regarding the very real feelings of despair that this video can bring up:

• Regarding the idea that people in the global majority would prefer we die out, it’s worthwhile to remember that a lot of these people who would (very rationally) wish us physically gone, aren’t familiar with the concept that we CAN deconstruct the white supremacy cultural programming. In other words, we can dismantle the software regardless of whether the physical white bodies die out. If (WHEN) we dismantle this horrific toxic culture, we won’t be brutalizing the rest of the planet anymore.
• Physical races take generations to be bred out. However, toxic cultural programming can be dismantled who knows how fast? It might be faster than we think, if we get enough of us working on it in community together!

AND

— Imagine bearing and raising a child who is born FREE of murderous toxic white supremacy programming. Because the child’s mother has done the work of metabolizing her generational harm and trauma. ❤

Further Exploration:

• EAGER Community — community on Facebook

• Intersectional Allies for Transformation — community on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/share/g/1KnbgkhfPb/?mibextid=K35XfP

Clotheslines + rainwater tub + gentle homemade soap = my favorite at-home eco laundromat!!

It may sound weird but I feel like it’s less work than having a washer and dryer, because I’m having a washer and dryer seems to induce people to do more laundry, bigger loads, own more clothing, etc.

Also, handwashing with mild soap in this very small-scale and gentle way means that young kids can help too! You know how little kids (and older kids too sometimes!) are always wanting to help, and they can actually get quite good at it! There are less fun activities and splashing around a rain tub on a hot summer day.

BTW here is me this morning using my “miniature washing machine” which is great for tiny loads of socks, underwear etc. We got a pretty good rain yesterday so I get to wash the clothes in nice clean rainwater.

(The miniature washing machine is a sturdy, wide-mouth big plastic jar, transparent, that used to contain some kind of snack I believe. Such containers are quite widely available in the waste stream. I’ve used old peanut butter jars as well. Of course, after the ants and a bit of dish soap have totally cleaned out the PB residue!)

The wash water can be tipped onto the patio for evaporative cooling, or used to water trees and shrubs.

See photo here on my deep green Facebook page (for as long as the will of the various technocrati moguls shall allow)!

Can anyone guess why I suddenly got the idea of putting a couple of boogie boards in our attic, after finding them discarded on the beach?

(If you guessed the answer right away, hold your answer for a second to give some of the other people a chance.)

BTW in case it’s not a widespread term, boogie boards are those foam boards about the length of a person’s torso, that people use to play in the water.

They are typically covered with some kind of stretchy fabric which helps hold the foam together and also probably helps cut down on the squeaky foam phenomenon. There’s often a cute design, superhero character, or some other interesting thing printed on the fabric.

I found these two boogie boards discarded on the beach over the past week, as one often does when one lives by a beach that attracts a lot of tourists who might not have room in their luggage to take home the beach toys.

OK, so have you figured out why I put them in my attic?

If not, here’s another hint: I live in a hurricane-prone region. People sometimes have to escape from their houses through the attic, or just stay up in the attic for a while til the floodwaters recede.

Now, my house is not situated in a very flood-prone part of my city, and I probably wouldn’t have thought to put those floaty recreational devices in the attic unless I had found them on the beach. (I always feel bad about the volume of unwanted stuff that gets left on the beach, so I was happy to think of a practical use!)

After sticking them up there, it occurred to me that if you had a bunch, it could double as extra attic insulation. Again, not something I’d go out of my way to buy, but if I find more on the beach they might just end up in our attic!

This little story illustrates a couple of my favorite principles of Permaculture Design: 1) making use of found/on-site resources; and 2) stacking functions (every item serves multiple functions).

Come to think of it, this also makes use of a third principle of permaculture design: “energy cycling.” This means getting the most out of the embodied energy that went into making an object, marketing it, etc., rather than just throw it away.

See this post with a photo on my Deep Green book page on Facebook. And please feel free to share this or any of my posts. The slightly quirky posts like this one might reach people that other more “heavy” posts cannot. Every person reached is somebody who might really be needing and wanting this information to get inspired and re-energized about escaping from the consumerist treadmill.

For the same reason, if you know any podcasters who might be interested in my content and philosophy, please feel free to suggest me as a podcast guest. I’ve seen synergies between host and guest reach whole new levels of people’s hearts, minds, and hands.

Developing simple protocols for next level of fridge-sharing.

For some years now, our house refrigerator has mostly been shared by an ever-changing mix of three single adult residents — some short-term, some very long-term — plus occasional guests. Typically all of the shelves and the vegetable drawers are packed. Each person gets their own shelf, and their own shelf on the fridge door.

The person who has the bottom shelf and the person who has the middle shelf each also gets one of the two vegetable crisper drawers, to make up for the fact that they don’t have as much storage height as the top-shelf person.

This format works well for when individuals have a lot of different dietary requirements / medical needs etc so communal cooking isn’t practical. Also, a lot of people have had bad experiences with communal living arrangements, including bad experiences with sharing a fridge. So it can help to have some delineated boundaries.

For the past few years, the top shelf plus top door-shelf is one person’s space. And so on with the middle and bottom. But with cubby-boxes and some streamlining as shown here, each shelf could potentially be shared by two.

(The cubby-box is actually a crisper drawer from a larger fridge that someone was throwing away.)

By tightening and streamlining, such as sharing of condiments, it becomes feasible to share the fridge among four or five adults, or more, plus kids.

If each person has their own cubby-box (which could be labeled with masking-tape and marker, if people like), it’s easier to set boundaries to reassure people who have had issues with sharing a fridge in the past and are leery.

At this moment, while we are engaged in various experimental tweaks and thought-experiments to take the communal protocols to the next level, the fridge is temporarily not fully in use. The middle shelf contains a water filter pitcher, left by a previous resident. I now use it to provide chilled water to passersby who need it.

See this post with photo here, on my Facebook page DEEP GREEN book by jenny nazak.

Further Exploration:

• You might also enjoy Sharon Astyk’s superb post on sharing a kitchen in hard times/disasters. She and her husband have 10 kids, and are very much about optimizing sharing with community, so you can bet she knows a thing or two! I’ll post the link once I see it. I thought she had posted it already but maybe not. In the meantime, enjoy reading previous installments of her excellent series “prepping room by room.” I have often shared similar thoughts here on this blog, and it’s really solid advice. https://ko-fi.com/post/Prepping-Room-by-Room-Part-3-Bedrooms-T6T51HGFH8

Here’s a page with a list of some of Sharon’s recent posts. Including the prepping room by room series. It’s got part 1 bathroom, part 2 living room, part 3 bedroom. I think kitchen will probably be soon. https://ko-fi.com/sharonastyk/posts

***Update July 9, 2025: OK, here you go! Sharon’s post Prepping room by room: kitchens https://ko-fi.com/post/Prepping-Room-by-Room-Part-4-Kitchens-P5P01HQJD4

From Sharon’s kitchen prep post: “So I’ve been putting off this part of the series because it involves so many moving pieces. For most of us, Kitchens are the centerpiece of home in so many ways, and thus they are both most affected by disasters and also most important in some ways during a crisis. The reality is that all of us need to feed ourselves even during disaster.

“Years ago I wrote that the day after the end of the world, someone is going to get up and want breakfast. And that’s the truth. Worlds end. People die. But others go on. And that going on often happens first in the kitchen. So let’s talk about that. …”

#501collective #StarshineHouse

Question asked in a post by Permaculture/bioregionalist friend & colleague Molly.

My comments in response:

Because I’m not good at growing annual vegetables. Never have been.

I’m good at foraging. And I grow some fruit trees and a lot of native plants.

Other than that I prefer to concentrate on the things I am good at, that I can contribute to my community & the world.

And I would rather pay local farmers and other local people for the food they love to grow, are good at growing, and are happy to sell/barter.

Same answer goes for my whole household, as for me as an individual.

And: I actually think the real answer to this question for me – and maybe for other people – is that it’s lonely drudge work and not a good use of energy, unless it is done in community.

Otherwise everything is too much work. The seeding, harvesting etc — It’s not meant to be an individual endeavor. It scales up a lot better than it works at an individual or small household scale.

Even a block scale or neighborhood scale would make it more appealing and fun and therefore more people would want to keep trying and working together.

Also different people will always be better with different aspects of the task, and different areas of the neighborhood will always be better suited to growing different vegetables and fruits. Even two lots next-door to each other can differ quite greatly.

On a related note that I don’t hear talked about, I think there’s a massive cognitive drain in permie + related circles, from too many people who are not meant to be farming moving out to the country on acreage because they feel like they’re “supposed to.”

Somehow the Permaculture Design concept “Grow food where the people are” (including in cities, suburbs, etc.) got warped into “move out onto a big piece of land and enact a modern-day version of that ‘American Gothic’ painting, get completely tied up in trying to grow all of your own food.”

BTW “grow food where the people are” is only one of the Permaculture design concepts. Permaculture design is about energy cycling, water stewardship, stewardship of human energy, and so much more. It’s really natural engineering that we all can have the opportunity to do, by ourselves and together.

And to expand on my thought about cognitive drain … What seems apparent, at least with a lot of people, is that when they say they don’t have time to garden or grow vegetables, they mean that their “job” takes up all/most of their time / energy. Typically the “job” is something that is done at a company, and is done mainly or only for money rather than also being something that the person loves and is a fit for their deepest skills and heart’s calling.

Furthermore, the person’s heart’s calling is likely unrelated to gardening as well as to their job. Each of us has something or some things that we feel like we were born to do, born to share — but unfortunately the mainstream economy does not value or compensate those things enough.

So here’s a person already burnt out from their company job, beating themself up because they’re not gardening as in growing rows and rows of vegetables.

And then on top of that, if they’re trying to work their job and also grow vegetables, they have less than zero time for the thing or things they are really gifted at & called to do. Things that their community and the world needs quite desperately despite the fact that the mainstream economy does not adequately value or compensate.

In this environment, the only way to carve out self-determinism is to ruthlessly cut down on the squandering of our own human energy. To be absolute fierce bulldogs in guarding our own time, energy, and creativity. Any sacrifice becomes worth it to cut the bills if we’re doing it so that we can have creative and occupational self determination.

One of my dreams is for everybody to be able to do their heart’s calling, such that all of our work will make music together like a cosmic symphony.

And yes, that will include growing vegetables.

It will also of course include all the quotidian basics basics like doing laundry, but laundry won’t be a drudge because we will be doing it together in an ecologically harmonious way, with lots of elders and kids splashing in and around a natural body of water as the work gets done. Or rain tubs or what have you. In society 2.0, it won’t just be a certain age women who are burdened with the domestic tasks. Actually I’m not sure it’s ever been that way. I think children have always helped. It’s just in recent industrial capitalist society that children get sidelined and not involved in the household economy.

A friend/colleague in Texas just posted that they have hit the road in search of places to cool off. Typically for people that tends to mean the mountains – Colorado etc. — Or at least someplace that’s not 900,000,000% humidity.

So in a little bit of a spirit of impishness, as well as fully legitimate red carpet of friendship and wish to show off my gem of an adopted hometown, I’ve offered the below comment. (I also belatedly noticed that I offered this in the spirit of bioregionalism, wanting to help my fellow hot-climate-dwellers find ways to cool off and get a change of scenery without having to escape the basic prevailing summer essence of heat.)

Well I wouldn’t call it cool exactly, temperature-wise, but you’re welcome to cruise out here to Daytona Beach; our house and low-footprint living lab has a little guest bedroom.

And the ocean just a couple minutes walk down the road is a cooling dip, and you can check out our passive cooling measures at the house, and explore some really cool history and architecture and cultural attractions in this very cool groovy adopted city of mine! You’d be most welcome! ✌️☕️🌊🌊🌊