Category: low-footprint living

A company called Rainplan just popped up on my Facebook feed. They seem to have gathered a lot of info & resources under one “roof,” so I’m posting a couple of their links here for you.

• “We created a group for those who want to continue talking about rainwater reuse. Why? So you don’t get lost in the shuffle of this ad and have one place to find more resources or community comments.” https://m.facebook.com/groups/1799505453802812/?ref=share&mibextid=SDPelY

• Dispelling the myth that “rainwater collection is illegal.” And, a list of incentive programs. https://myrainplan.com/collectyourrain/

We are communicating about serious stuff, but that doesn’t mean we can’t use humor. (“We” = climate communicators, eco activists, permaculturists, greenminded people, change agents, or whatever words you use to classify your activist self.)

In fact, humor might be a good idea, not only to increase people’s interest in checking out lower-footprint options, but also to keep ourselves from getting too doomy and gloomy.

Lately I’ve started using humorous hashtags. Examples: #PrepperHomeEc, #DoomerStyleFiles in some of my social-media posts about solar cooking, rainwater collection and other nuts-and-bolts of daily living. Referring to myself as aspiring to be the Martha Stewart of the zombie apocalypse.

It’s too early to say whether this is helping to spark enthusiasm for low-footprint/DIY/anticonsumerist living, but it certainly is helping me enjoy my work more, keep a buoyant outlook instead of feeling bogged down by the sheer heaviness and scariness of stuff.

As more of us are getting engaged in deconstructing and dismantling “whiteness” (colonizer culture) and engaging more actively in anti-racism, we are learning that we need to do a bit more in terms of speaking up to the people in our circles when we hear them say certain kinds of things. (Racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, poor-shaming, occupational elitism — to name a few.)

Whiteness has many features that make it hard to speak up. Conformity; aversion to confrontation and so on. But, we can get better. Every day we can think of as practice.

Regardless of the extent to which we manage to speak up verbally, it struck me that there is a very simple way that we can speak up nonverbally, and that is by simply showing up as ourselves. Not in an in-your-face kind of way, not with the defiant T-shirt or whatever, just in a way like matter-of-factly going about being ourselves. Not trying to hide our differentness, so to speak.

There is a wide terrain of grey area here. Sometimes I feel like I’m being myself and I realize later that I was being kind of in-your-face. It’s something we can all play with.

Oh and without thinking I just sort of found myself veering out of the original topic what was really about political and social justice type stuff. I do find, though, that it becomes easier to express different views if people basically feel like we can trust each other.

Ways of expression include how we dress, and how openly we talk about our “non-middle-class-acceptable” occupations, living arrangements, old-age planning, and other life stuff.

There is a reason why the emotional/social consequences of failure to conform can feel like death. Being the “weird one(s)” in your group can be very uncomfortable and in some cases catastrophic even if no actual immediate physical danger is involved. (This post does not apply to actual dangerous/abusive situations, seek help and escape if you’ve got one of those.)

There was a period of my life when I seriously felt like I was in the closet to my family. (In my case it was in terms of financial choices and occupational path.) And it shouldn’t have been that way, but I noticed it and things can be different. I shouldn’t have been such a wuss, considering how much other people have to go through. I could’ve had it pretty easy if I had just been willing to endure some mild disapproval or maybe even just questioning.

This “matter-of-factly being ourselves” definitely applies to our environmental activism too. As environmentalists in society, one of the approaches we often took was to tone things down so we wouldn’t seem too weird or extreme. We thought that would help popularize eco stuff. But it kind of had the opposite effect. We didn’t push the envelope enough.

Happy end-of-year holidays everyone! May you find and/or create lots of joy and love for yourself and your family (however you define family), work group, social group, or other people you spend time with.

Further Reading:

• “Five tips on talking politics with family without falling out — from a conflict resolution expert” (Majbritt Lyck-Bowen; theconversation.com). She brings up the concept of “brave spaces”: “… I suggest instead that we turn our family gatherings into ‘brave spaces’, where discussion of controversial issues is welcomed and respectful. The concept of brave spaces was proposed by education researchers Brian Arao and Kristi Clemens in 2013 as an approach to discussing diversity in educational settings. … Conversations can quickly turn into arguments. But they can also be opportunities to build trust, challenge the biases, stereotypes and prejudices that we hold, and to repair and deepen relationships. Instead of shying away from difficult topics, here are some guidelines to keep in mind as you discuss them.”

Fellow Boomers, these kinds of memes are really gross, super cringe, and honestly I think it’s getting kind of embarrassing, don’t you? [Sepia-toned blurry photo of kids playing outside. Caption: “We had a social network, it was called being outside.“]

Let’s look at this. We are smugly taking credit for how our parents/grandparents raised us.

Therefore, when we post these kind of shaming memes, implicitly putting down today’s kids because they didn’t grow up in the wholesome manner that we thought was appropriate —

UM … IF we think the younger generation is so bad (which I don’t BTW), well, the blame should be on US, not the kids. We were the parents (and/or the aunts, uncles etc..)

We raised them. And WE, the highly populous “Me Generation,” with our highly vocal mouths and our outsized wallets, shaped the society they grew up in!!! (And I personally think they turned out great, especially considering the societal circumstances they grew up in.)

Recently I learned the term for this kind of post, it’s “weaponized nostalgia.” Being smug like this may feel good in the moment but it doesn’t solve anything, and we’d do better to look at how we (with our large-numbered demographic and outsized spending power) can shape society in a compassionate creative direction moving forward.

It’s not too late for us to change. Or perhaps I should say change BACK. “Get back to the garden,” as it were, to use a phrase from our Woodstock era. We can be models of thrift, wisdom, peace-seeking, community spirit, and yes, dare I say a bit of healthy self-sacrifice, to the younger and future generations.

TL;DR: Reaching across political divides. Self-reflection after failed effort. (Image of “my favorite big fat swimming pool,” AKA the Atlantic Ocean at the end of my street, for visual interest.)

Putting this out there in case my experience might help other people. And also as a note to my future self, so I can at least avoid adding more discord into the world even in situations where I fail to increase the peace.

The topic of this post is “Reaching out to social-media friends across political divides’.”

This post is meant to serve as a reference for myself, and possibly for other people, who are striving to be more authentic and more effective in “reaching across the divide.”

Specifically, I’m talking about communicating with people who I’m connected with on Facebook, who either 1) I have never met in real life, just friended through business circles or something; or 2) we know each other IRL but haven’t been in touch for some years.

And suddenly a post of theirs pops up in my feed. Just out of the blue for some reason suddenly I see one of their posts. Whereas I usually don’t. And the post is very shocking somehow. In a political / societal sense. Like a strong hate meme or something.

My first impulse is to just block those people; decide that they are impossible and off the deep end and no use trying to talk to them.

But the thing is, people are influenced by other people. How often in my life have I ended up shifting my viewpoint because a fellow human being in my proximity chose to engage with me instead of just cutting me out? Maybe not everyone has experienced this, but it has definitely happened a lot with me. Because I am no saint and have had to do a lot of evolving in my life to become a somewhat decent person.

Which is not by any means to say that by reaching out, I should expect to change everyone’s mind, or even change a lot of people’s minds. But at least sometimes it’s worth trying to bridge the divide. ***And (very important!) actually a lot of the time, we end up finding out that the divide was an illusion and we really are more on the same page than we had thought.***

In my anti-racism learning in recent years, I’ve been introduced to the concept of calling people IN as opposed to calling-out.

This is not about glossing over racism, misogyny, transphobia, xenophobia, or any other hate and bigotry. The object of such communication isn’t to have warm fuzzy feelings and be pals with people who spout that kind of stuff & live it to some degree.

Rather, the object is to try to make some kind of difference in that person’s outlook, based on my connection with the person (whatever connection existed before I saw the person post hate speech). ***OR, probably just as often — or maybe even more often — to realize that we actually really are basically on the same page!***

So far, most of my efforts to call people in have been very clumsy. Today an old social acquaintance I tried to engage got furious, accused me of fakeness and narcissism, and blocked me.

Now I’m not saying the outcome would’ve been any different if I had tread more slowly and cautiously. But next time something like this comes up, I have an idea of how I could approach things so there might be a little bit more of a chance of an opening for dialogue.

What I did was jump right into a direct message to someone I hadn’t spoken with in 10 years or more! After seeing a really strong hate meme on their page. For some reason today a post of theirs suddenly popped up on my feed. Let’s just say it managed to cover the bases of misogynoir, homophobia, transphobia, xenophobia, just plain recreational cruelty, and probably some other things as well. And their followers posted additional hateful GIFs reinforcing the original.

I decided to direct message my old friend.

What I should’ve done is just written something like, “Hey _, it’s been some years and suddenly your post popped up on my feed so I thought I would say hi. How are you doing?”

And then let the response come, and then try something from there.

Instead, I launched into the whole kit and caboodle all at once. I did at least first ask “How are you?” — but then rather than just wait for a response to that, and go from there, I immediately launched into “what’s the deal with that meme, you always seemed like a really nice person” etc.

A couple months ago, this shoe was on the other foot with a different person from my life. Someone from way back in school days, who I had “Facebook friended” but we had never really talked, messaged me in response to a post of mine that she interpreted as being antisemitic. Accused me of supporting Nazis, condoning murder etc.

I was too reactive and started jumping down their throat, when instead what I needed to do was take a deep breath and ask which post they were referring to, because I actually didn’t know and I had to go checking back.

That encounter was salvaged because I was able to explain to this old school acquaintance that the post they had interpreted as being antisemitic had nothing to do with Israel, and was about Native Americans.

Now still, there is a gap between me and that person. I have not attempted further discussion, and I imagine that if they knew that I was sympathetic towards the Palestinians as well as the Israelis they would not be happy. But at least there is some possibility for further discussion.

Whereas with the person who I contacted today, my hasty jumping-in closed off all possibility of a dialogue as I have been blocked.

Again I’m not looking for any kind of reassurance that I’m a good person yada yada. This is practical troubleshooting.

Why does it matter? Who cares what individuals are saying to each other in the direct messages of social media?

Well, I don’t think that war and peace are an on-off switch thing that only has to do with what governments are doing from on high. I think that war or peace is here and now, on the ground in front of us, happening between us as everyday grassroots individuals.

I am a strong believer in the butterfly effect, and the neighbor effect. Contagion can be beneficial or not.

In World War II Germany and other parts of Europe, neighborly relations broke down as people found themselves on opposite sides of the political divide. Now, as well as back then, some of the divide probably will not be able to be helped. If somebody is going to spout hate and genocide, there may likely be no reasoning with them. But there are times when I feel I have a responsibility to try.

Another dimension of my personal sense of responsibility is in my capacity as a person who identifies as “left/liberal.” Many times, we so-called “liberals” have been meanspirited in our characterizations of “the other side,” and we have posted mean memes as well. Two wrongs don’t make a right. I have started talking with my “liberalish” friends about this, and I should have started long ago. So my attempts at outreach across the liberal – conservative divide are part of an ongoing amends and reform too.

Note, I would not presume to try to tell someone else that they need to try to engage people who are spouting hate. Activism takes many forms.

Other lessons for me:

• After the incident, I realized belatedly that although I thought I had gotten my intention focused on increasing understanding, there was still some part of me that was in it to try to convert somebody. The feeling of me being right and wanting to prove someone else wrong.
• It’s OK to feel sad. The person this morning was someone I had known from a very peace-centered community years back. I literally can’t remember anyone in that community being mean to anyone. I was actually the meanest person I knew in that community! There is grief in acknowledging that people change, and/or that all along this person was not who I thought they were. In such cases, though, I need to remind myself that the tragedy is collective rather than just personal.
• Although I have done a lot of work on it, I am still too much of an approval-seeker. When I catch myself trying to just “be liked,” I have to acknowledge it and check myself. On that note, when the person called me narcissistic they were actually right in a way, because in part of my message I was “trying to be nice” in a way that, when I thought about it later, was inauthentic. People who have dealt with narcissism are very rightfully allergic to fakeness. We should all be allergic to fakeness.And I can see how that would come across as like narcissistic love-bombing.
• Things work better in these interactions if I stay focused on my larger purpose, which is to try to add to the level of peace in the world, or failing that, at least not add to the pain & discord that’s already out there.
• By no means is it good, necessary, possible, or wise to try to talk to everyone. When I first saw the hate meme meme pop up on my feed, my first impulse was oh, just unfriend this person. And sometimes that might be the best course.
• If I’m going to choose to try to talk to people, popular movies and social stuff can be a good onramp. For example, when I checked this person’s page after seeing the hate meme, I saw that they had posted about a current popular movie, dealing with TEOTWAWKI / Doomer-adjacent themes. One thing I noticed about the great political divide in the USA is that there are Doomers on both sides of it. And doomerism is something I can relate to.
• And regarding social stuff as an onramp: I could just ask “Hey, are you still going to XYZ community social event that we used to go to back in the day?” Or “Do you still do XYZ type of work?”
• If I’m going to choose to try to do this engagement, I have to remember to correct for my problematic behavior patterns. Which I have made progress on but they still do crop up. Mine include a general lack of social skills, and a tendency to talk too much, use too many words. Those tendencies are things I can correct for if I remember to do that.

And in closing (if you have read this far, thank you so much!!):

How about you? Have you had experience with trying to reach across “the divide”? And have you had experience where you just decided to quietly block or unfriend somebody? (I have done that too.)

Please feel free to share anything that has worked for you, or has not worked for you. I’m not so self-important as to believe that my tiny actions are going to make the difference between our country breaking out in a civil war or not, but I do really strongly believe in the butterfly effect and all that, and I believe in doing what I can as an individual. And I know a lot of you are similarly minded and that things weigh on your hearts.

Further exploration:

• Posting a quote here from one of my alltime favorite teachers. Harry Palmer, author of the Avatar® materials. This quote has made a huge difference in my life: “When we perceive that the only difference between us is beliefs and that beliefs can be created or discreated with ease, the right and wrong game will wind down, a co-create game will unfold, and world peace will ensue.”

• And a dear steadfast reader, Tim B, shares this excellent quote from a transcript of popular commentator Rachel Maddow’s podcast: ” … I want us all to make ourselves as resilient as we can. And that means not having baggage trailing behind you that you don’t want to be trailing behind you. It means making up with your estranged family members. It means getting to know your neighbors. It means if you have very serious concerns about politics, it means working in a political campaign. It means having something to do with the civic life of where you are so that you are not alone. While we have a tough year in this country, this has come for us in this generation, in this country, in this lifetime. And it does not come for every generation. It has come for us and we need to be up to it. And it means you cannot live in your phone and you cannot, you can’t build from a position of despair and feeling powerless.”

• Tim B also reminded me that Katharine Hayhoe’s book has been on my reading list. Saving Us: A Climate Scientist’s Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World. I need to bump it up. Tim shared this quote from the book: ” … ironically, the very thing we fear most. Talk about it. Why are people not talking about something that matters to them so much? Even if we agree it’s real and it’s serious, talking about it can be discouraging and depressing. There’s too great a risk the conversation might devolve into a screaming match or end up leaving everyone overwhelmed by the enormity of the problem. We want to talk about it; we just don’t know how.” (Her highly acclaimed book sets out to explain the “how.”)

Today I forgot to set up the solar oven in time to make a hot lunch.

(This being a regular urban house, hooked up to the grid with electricity and running water and all that stuff, we do of course have a regular oven, stovetop, etc. But I really like to use the solar oven whenever I can.) 

That’s OK, the weather has been warm so I didn’t really feel the need for hot lunch. So instead I opted for one of my favorite, easy-prep cold lunches.

• Greens from my garden
• Wild greens foraged from nearby
• The last of an onion and a jalapeño purchased last week from Joanne’s organic shop (on West ISB just the other side of the bridge)
• Can of refried beans from rotating out old hurricane-rations this past week
  - Remains of a bag of shredded cheddar purchased at the 1313 neighborhood minimart last week
• Tabasco sauce, probably purchased from minimart
• Ritz crackers and sour cream purchased at neighborhood 711 today

Chopped all veggies into small pieces.

Combined all ingredients except the crackers. Left the various ingredients loosely layered in the bowl rather than vigorously mixed. Then spooned the dip onto the crackers. Tasty, filling lunch w plenty of leftovers! This will end up being multiple meals.

Note: If I had felt inclined, I could have puréed the dip ingredients in my mini blender to make a smooth creamy dip. I sometimes do that. But today I felt like having a more chunky, multi-colored, multi-textured lunch experience.

Fun fact about the shredded cheddar: It was cheaper by pound to buy it shredded than to buy it in a block. The minimart proprietor thinks it’s because shrink-wrapping a block of cheddar costs the cheesemaking company more than packing shredded cheddar loosely into a bag.

(I say “fun fact” because the favorable price meant not having to use the cheese-grater. One less dish for me to wash.)

Eco note: Both types of cheese, the block and the shredded, came packaged in plastic. So there was no advantage, in terms of single-use-plastic avoidance, to either the block of cheese or the bag of shredded cheese.

PS. Oh, and an apple for dessert. Also from the 7-Eleven. They seem to make an effort to offer fresh fruit at low prices there. For example, I routinely pick up two bananas for a dollar. Can’t beat that in the neighborhood!

You can see pics here, in this post on my Deep Green Book page on Facebook.

#fooddesertfusioncuisine #PrepperHomeEc #DoomerBoomer #TEOTWAWKIstylefiles

We’ve had a few nights of what in Florida passes as chilly weather. Last night it dropped from 73 to 48!

A lot of the houses in my historic seaside neighborhood actually have fireplaces. Some of the fireplaces are still usable, while others have been converted to strictly decorative. Or in my case, removed by previous owners in order to create a bedroom closet. Boo, hiss!!!

I wish the prior owners of my house had left the fireplace intact, instead of turning it into a closet. I would love to have a compact, high-efficiency woodstove attached to that chimney. Right now, the house just has a chimney with no fireplace or way to rig up a woodstove.

In my experience, closets in Florida are just mold-boxes, and here in the semitropics I much prefer a wicker armoire to a closet. Of course the real-estate industry or some other well-heeled industry has made sure that we can’t legally call any room a “bedroom” unless it has a closet, which is just plain silly because obviously people got along for many years living in bedrooms that had no closets.

Interested in high-efficiency heating with deadwood twigs? Visit the forums at https://www.permies.com and look for Rocket Mass Heater (RMH), Rocket Stove, Russian Stove. There are also abundant videos on YouTube from many sources, and writings in many places online. (I’m not being coy here; there are just literally more than I can keep track of!)

Also check out at Aprovecho Research Center’s booklet/series Capturing Heat, which I think is available as PDF even if it’s out of print.

And be sure to Google or other type of search for “passive solar.” Simple, low-tech ways to stay warm just by using the heat of the sun plus glass windows, dark-painted surfaces, rocks, discarded concrete chunks, and other elements widely available for cheap or free. No photons were murdered in the making of my warm kettle of water in the solar oven this afternoon!

Regarding heat tolerance: The human body seems to have a certain temperature envelope. Interestingly though, a lot of people here in Florida are very heat-intolerant as well as being cold-intolerant. But that heat-intolerance is probably mostly an artifact of the modern age of ubiquitous central AC.

There are ways to acclimate to the heat though, probably a lot more easily than acclimating to the cold! Fortunately the human body is more heat-tolerant than cold-tolerant overall.

That said, I accidentally found one of the best ways of becoming cold-tolerant. I gained a bunch of weight LOL. I’m still a fairly average-size person, which just means I was extremely stringbean-skinny before. I will say, if you are a fellow stringbean who plans to pursue the weight-gain plan for surviving the zombie apocalypse, try to gain your weight a little earlier in life than I did. If you gain a bunch of weight in your 50s, it’s super heavy to carry around ha ha.

So how about you guys, has it gotten chilly where you are? And have you turned on the heat yet this season?

Do you have central heating, or do you use radiant heaters etc.?

This house came with central heating and AC, but since we have different temperature tolerances, each housemate uses their own little heater to control their room temperature. I am in my I believe 14th winter with no heat other than passive solar. It’s going great, and if anything I have trouble when I spend a long time in buildings with forced-air heating; I end up with dry skin and dry nose/throat etc. And I really love cold temperatures for sleeping.

When I was a kid, I was amazed to find out that my grandparents in Massachusetts would sleep with their bedroom window open even in January. Now I totally get it!

PS. I almost forgot to mention! For more tips on thriving in chilly weather, you can also use the search feature of this blog, as I have often posted about the topic. Look for terms such as “doing without heat” and “winter.”