Category: low-footprint living

Video link sent to me by a friend – John Oliver on carbon offsets. John Oliver is always great; I enjoy his bitingly humorous delivery of good information on serious topics. Bookmarking to watch. https://youtu.be/6p8zAbFKpW0

In the meantime: Re carbon offsets on a personal level, I have always said that carbon offsets are not a perfect fix, even if a person makes sure to choose the reputable ones that actually involve planting new trees rather than counting existing ones etc.

Cutting down radically on travel is the real fix but not everyone is willing to do that. It would help if national leaders would set an example. G7 meetings by Zoom only, etc.

Same for eating more vegetarian or vegan; reducing meat intake.

Rich-people habits (which have also become widespread in the more-comfortably-off stratum of the middle class) are killing the planet. And let’s be clear, in case the previous sentence isn’t. I’m not talking just “rich people” as in far-off, lofty, Bezos-level. I’m talking a little closer to home, and much larger in number.

Yes, dear readers, I’m talking about you and me: the relatively-comfortably-off stratum of the middle class. From our jet-setty flying addiction, to the pornographically huge and gleaming McMansions we see as normal houses, to retirement plans that involve colonizing and gentrifying entire countries, our demographic as a whole has adopted robber-baron lifestyle habits, and our demographic is very large.

Regarding flying. I have flown once since 2010 – for my Mom’s funeral in 2018 – and have signed a no-fly pledge. Many of us climate activists all over the world have. Check out Flight Free UK, Flight Free USA.

And, I do purchase carbon offsets for my annual long train trip to see family etc.

PS i know some of you fly a lot and are probably not interested in cutting back. I hope you will at least consider carbon offsets. Though carbon offsets are not perfect, they are a step. An expert I trust on green matters is Rob Greenfield. It was through his talks/writings that I first learned about Gold Standard carbon offsets. Those are the ones I use. BTW if I understand correctly from what I read a few years back, Rob TRIPLE-offsets his travel by purchasing triple the amount of carbon offsets.

Another thing you can do is purchase carbon offsets to retroactively offset your past flights & other travel. I did that. I bought carbon offsets for every flight I could remember taking in my adult life, and added some extra padding for good measure. It wasn’t much money. Carbon offsets only add a few bucks to the cost of a flight. If you can afford to fly, you can afford to purchase carbon offsets.

You can also do your own DIY carbon offsetting by cutting back in other categories of your consumption to balance out your high-consumption areas. I do that too. And have offered many tips in my book and this blog, and other platforms. I also continue to offer the personal one-on-one “Deep Green Tech Support” session. (Note: I include emotional support and moral support. Doesn’t tech support always include a bit of emotional support, if you think about it?)

PS. Carbon footprint isn’t everything but it’s a pretty good indicator of overall consumption footprint so I’m OK with using it as a benchmark.

(Say so many spam emails, social-media ad feed, etc.)

To which I say, No thanks, I prefer to tone & tighten my internalized misogyny! (Actually I prefer to dissolve it entirely; I was just being humorous there.)

How about this too: Tone-police & frighten the heck out of your internalized misogyny! Oh, and by the way, misogyny hurts men too.

Just came across a really interesting article in The New Yorker: Africa’s Cold Rush and the Promise of refrigeration.

I hope you are able to access the whole article, but here are a few snippets that particularly grabbed me:

• “The International Institute of Refrigeration estimates that, globally, 1.6 billion tons of food are wasted every year, and that thirty per cent of this could be saved by refrigeration—a lost harvest of sufficient abundance to feed nine hundred and fifty million people annually. In a country like Rwanda, where fewer than one in five infants and toddlers eat what the World Health Organization classifies as the minimum acceptable diet, such wastage is a matter of life and death.” (And the whole first part of the article gives a detailed portrait of what everyday life involves for small-scale farmers and fishers who eke out a livelihood in the food-supply chain that has essentially no refrigeration.)

• “In Kigali, I met the world’s first professor of cold economy, Toby Peters, from the University of Birmingham, who has spent much of the past three years working to launch aces. When I told him about my journeys alongside Rwanda’s slowly broiling milk, fish, meat, and vegetables, he defined the problem in systemic terms. ‘There is no cold chain in Rwanda,’ he said. ‘It just doesn’t exist.”

• “In the developed world, the domestic refrigerator is only the final link in the ‘cold chain’ — a series of thermally controlled spaces through which your food moves from farm to table. The cold chain is the invisible backbone of our food system, a perpetual mechanical winter that we have built for our food to live in. Artificial refrigeration was introduced in the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, but the term ‘cold chain’ gained currency only in the late nineteen-forties, when European bureaucrats rebuilding a continent shattered by war studied and copied American methods.”

• “Cold chains present a double bind; both their absence and their presence have huge ecological costs. The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that if global food waste were a country its greenhouse-gas emissions would be the third largest in the world, right behind China and the U.S. On the other hand, the chemical refrigerants and the fossil-fuel energy used to produce cooling already account for more than seven per cent of global emissions — just one per cent less than food loss. As countries like Rwanda refrigerate, those emissions are increasing rapidly. Toby Peters, the aces co-founder, has done the calculations and arrived at a terrifying conclusion: if every country were to have a cold chain similar to the ones the developed world relies on, these emissions would increase fivefold. Seen from that perspective, helping Rwanda develop an energy-efficient cold chain looks less like altruistic development aid and more like enlightened self-interest.”

• “In development literature, much has been made of Africa’s ability to ‘leapfrog’ richer countries. In Rwanda, a country in which a national network of telephone cables was never laid, cell phones became central to daily life far more quickly than in the U.S. The same is true for mobile banking and electronic payments. The hope, then, is that Rwanda and its neighbors can do something similar with refrigeration, bypassing inefficient and polluting technologies in favor of more sustainable solutions and leading the way for supposedly developed countries.”

• “Not only is the way food is refrigerated in the developed world not sustainable; the resulting supply chain isn’t even particularly resilient, as the sight of empty supermarket shelves during the past couple of years has revealed. Meanwhile, the food losses that plague the developing world occur at almost the same rate in the developed world. In the United States, where maintaining the cold chain is the domain of private enterprise, between thirty and forty per cent of the country’s food supply goes to waste in supermarkets, at restaurants, and at home. Leapfrogging in refrigeration will require more than adopting new technology; the cold chain needs to be reinvented from the ground up.”

• “Meanwhile, in Rwanda, as Alice Mukamugema, an analyst at the country’s Ministry of Agriculture, pointed out to me, consumers believe that refrigerated food isn’t fresh. (Americans in the early twentieth century expressed similar fears.) ‘Traders who sell the rejects from the National Agricultural Export Development Board packhouse on the local market even have to put them in the sun for a while, so that they don’t feel cold,’ she said.”

Lots of us in collapse-aware groups have been sharing feelings of mourning and despair. And helping each other experience those feelings rather than hide from them.

A thought though! Maybe it’s just white colonizer culture that’s reaching its collapse point of singularity. Maybe indigenous cultures, which are based on cooperation, connection, and sharing, are going to survive and thrive. Also possibly any subcultures out there that are truly doing the work to reach a point where they are based on cooperation, connection, and sharing. Just a thought.

Here’s an interesting article someone shared in the Deep Adaptation group: “Planetary scientists suggest a solution to the Fermi paradox: Superlinear scaling leading to a singularity” (phys.org). “Several years ago, physicist Enrico Fermi asked a colleague why aliens from outer space have not visited Earth. The two noted that due to the huge size of the universe, it seemed unlikely that Earth alone would harbor intelligent life. … They developed a hypothesis that suggested such rising and falling by alien space civilizations would lead to one of two scenarios. In the first, the civilization would come to realize they were growing too large and would cease traveling to or colonizing other worlds. In the second, they would not recognize their folly and would therefore collapse. From our perspective, both scenarios would have the same outcome–the aliens would not visit us, or even demonstrate evidence of their existence. The distance from them to us would be too far.”

I pay about $160 a year to have this website (including both hosting and domain) (the prices went up this year a bit).

For awhile, I was questioning whether I should continue to pay for it or not, since people mostly don’t seem to be following my “broadcasts” on this “channel.”

But, I realized it’s worth keeping for now, even just as a storage-tank for my ideas. I could download & print it all out and then shut down the website to avoid paying that annual bill, but then I’d have this big, messy, non-“copy/pasteable” stack of paper.

I could just store it on my computer harddrive but no. I could just store my ideas on the social-media cloud but that is a bit precarious and sometimes unwieldy to search.

So, for now, I decide this website is worth the price even just as a word-storage unit. And really, it always serves another purpose as well: it’s my longtime “permanent address” where people who are looking for my help & support can find me.

To any of you who are actually here reading this post … I love you and am here to support your growth and thrival!

Seen often in permaculture, gardening, and also urbanism groups are various versions of the “but fruit trees are messy” comment:

This [idea of planting fruit trees along sidewalks and in other public spaces] floats around… but sadly fruit trees are very messy and attract vermin.

Unkempt fruit trees harbor pests that can damage commercial crops (if there are any in the vicinity).

That said, if cities were willing to care for them it would sure be cool.

There’s a website to share excess produce you’ve grown. Ripe Near Me

My response:

1) Every human settlement attracts vermin. Even if we had no fruit trees, restaurants alone are enough to attract vermin.

2) When more people realize the value of good fresh food, they won’t see a fruit-smudged car windshield, fruit-strewn sidewalk etc. as such a terrible thing. The minor “messiness” will be far overridden by the appeal of nutrition and a full stomach for all.

Extra benefits from public fruit trees, as with any other public trees, include enhanced public safety, heat mitigation, drought-flood regulator.

Right now, in USA at least, the most vocal people are relatively affluent so to them, “it’s easy to just buy fruit at the grocery store; why plant messy trees?”. But as time goes on, more people will be getting a higher awareness about this.

3) Thank you to this particular commenter for sharing “Ripe Near Me”! I had heard of it before but never checked it out. I will go check it out.

P.S. Regarding the title I chose for this blog post: Bonus points and fabulous prizes to the first person who writes me with a correct ID of the little slice of heaven that this title is a call-out to. (If a certain individual, among the people I hold most dear, is still reading my blog as they used to back in the early 2000s unbeknownst to me at the time, they will get this reference right away!)

I’m starting an email newsletter. Aiming to have a readership of about 100 subscribers who are goofball-passionate about low-footprint living, and might want more support and guidance. It will land in your inbox a couple times a month. Bite-sized digest, and special treats for subscribers only. It’s free but it’s only for people who will really be happy to see me in your email inbox. You know who you are! To subscribe, email jnazak at yahoo dot com with “deep green newsletter” in the subject line.