Author: jennynazak

Success and failure are in the eyes of the person characterizing them.

Success and failure always have collective benefits and implications.

Failure is just success waiting to happen. “Mistakes are just knowledge waiting to happen.” (The latter is a quote I heard on a home renovation show I saw a few times; the celebrity is a young woman who builds houses out of old scraps and discarded windows etc. If I can find her name I will add it here. She’s so bright and positive.)

Anything that fails can be tweaked. Keep your eye on the goal or intention, and do the next thing. In Japanese it’s referred to as kaizen. A process of continuous ongoing improvement. (This term has also been adopted by the English-language worlds in business and industry.)

Any success, no matter how small and specific, can be reverse-engineered for replication and wider application.

This post was prompted by a widespread limiting belief in the Permaculture and Collapse communities, that community is just too hard to do.

It’s not. And there are successes. As one example, a colleague of mine has lived in long-term collegial partnership in a home on a Permaculture education farm. Obviously their partnership is working and durable. The success could be reverse engineered. What is causing it to work? What makes things work in the long run.

I have the same example regarding my two long-term housemates. They have worked out really well and our assets not only to our shared home but also to our community. Now, in today’s world, these living arrangements often have a natural ending point, for example, if someone Hass to leave to go take care of a relative or for some other life change. But I can generalize some of the conditions that have led to the success, when it’s time to have to search for new housemates.

I don’t have any ironclad rules offhand, but one thing that seems to work is to be very clear upfront about what the intentions of this household are, and make sure that we have sufficient alignment even when not all fellow residents share the same goals.

For example, this house and I have a hardcore goal of extreme thriftiness, and aspiring to 100% landfill diversion. Not everybody who lives here feels as strongly as I do, but it’s possible for us to have sufficient alignment that it works.

Your successes are our successes. Your “failures” are an illusion. Failures are just something that didn’t get tweaked yet toward the optimum. Keep going! And share what works. Also share what doesn’t work. It’s an ongoing group task for all of us.

Not letting kids read books that capture their interest has huge consequences.

I grew up in a mostly very strict family but our parents somehow gave us this huge pocket of laissez-faire freedom when it came to checking out library books. It’s almost as if they thought it would benefit us to read any kind of ideas and we would develop critical thinking skills!!

There were important things that the adults in my life didn’t necessarily feel comfortable talking with me about. Or have the tools to do so. But since I could find out the information I needed from Books & Magazines, I ended up being able to navigate the world.

PS. You know what’s super enticing and makes people want to read? Especially teenagers I imagine. Declaring some book “forbidden”!

Economic resistance can take many forms! Including very tiny seemingly very tiny stuff.

Here, cutting a scrap of stretchy fabric from a pair of old tights into stretchy ties that can be used for various purposes. In the kitchen, and other rooms, and out in the garden etc. I even use them to tie bamboo poles together to make trellises and little outdoor rooms. Various kinds of stretchy fabric are suitable. Old T-shirts etc. If using outdoors, you can choose greens and browns that blend in well with the landscape.

No one should ever have to buy any kind of twist ties for any reason. Not to mention which, a lot of us probably have a bunch of unused twist ties in a random kitchen drawer somewhere. (I don’t, because I have actively refrained from buying them, as well as from buying plastic bags and things like that.)

Football napkin in the pic is a cute little Super Bowl day souvenir that my sweet friend Catina Johnson brought me the other day (with a delicious boxed meal!).

oops it looks like a technology glitch vaporized a bunch of my post. Well the gist is that little things like this help train us that we really don’t have to buy very much. My favorite way to buy things is used, or only from my friends and neighbors, and from Black & indigenous businesses.

PPS. I still have the pair of old tights, I just cut the upper part off and now they are a set of sleeves which I can put on on a cold morning. When it’s cool enough to need sleeves but not so cool that you need a whole jacket. The tights are nice thick fleecy tights, they just never did actually fit me the way they were designed to be used. So I turned them into sleeves ha ha!

For those who may not be familiar with the idea of a garment known as sleeves, I took some pictures to try to show what I mean. I think i picked this concept up in Austin from a super elegant supermodel-looking artist I know from back in the RV park in south Austin — check out her art The Art of Flip Solomon!

Final picture is me downtown and ready to attend Cinematique board meeting, as you can notice I have added one of my favorite warm scarves to this outfit. So, portable sleeves and a scarf for optimum warmth and didn’t need a jacket over my sleeveless T-shirt.

PS. Sewing machines can be awesome, but really I have found my best friend to be a simple needle and thread. I do have my grandmother’s old treadle machine which is foot powered and awesome but I simply can’t keep it tuned even though I was able to find a scanned instruction manual on the Internet. Needle and thread remains my best friend and a core part of any bug-out bag.

And:

There could be lots of reasons why it’s desirable to not need a jacket. First, you may not have a jacket, and jackets are not the easiest thing to sew. Also, you may just like your shirt as part of your outfit and not want to cover it up with a jacket. And also, if you are walking or cycling, it can be easier to have a less bulky outfit.

Scarves are very easy to make even if one is not good at sewing or knitting or crocheting. Even the clunkiest, uneven sewing stitches can make a pretty darn good serviceable scarf. And sleeves, when it comes right down to it it’s just a couple tubes of fabric stitched together.

Now, I don’t want to discourage anyone from making a jacket. That can be a very fun adventure. Although, there are many available in thrift shops. But if you want to make your own jacket, you can learn how by disassembling a shirt or jacket from a thrift shop and then cutting your own fabric to make your own version of the garment.

One of my favorite dresses was made this way. I disassembled a very elegant seven-panel dress from the thrift shop, and then based on it I sewed a five-panel dress made of T-shirt fabric.

Love this! This is a fancy version of what I made in a one bedroom apartment to make it into a two bedroom apartment.

(Photo of really cute modular room within a room, meant for a kid to enjoy. The kid in me absolutely loves it and could totally live there. Post that I shared from a group called “homemade haven: recipes, decor, diy and garden ideas”).

Mine was made out of bookcases and folding screens & other stuff scrounged from curbside, cobbled together w some re-claimed screws and other scavenged hardware, pieces of lumber — all scrounged from the urban abundant beneficence of the curbside goddess.

The roommate got the “real” bedroom, and I got an adorable corner of the living room which was surprisingly fun and pleasant, but then again I just love tiny cute spaces where I can find most of my stuff without looking too hard lol.

BTW the “real” bedroom had to be walked through in order to access the bathroom, which created stressful situations at times. However, pee jars exist. So do nearby public restrooms in a pinch.

As another benefit of creating the creative extra bedroom, I enjoyed the economic benefits of not having to pay 70% of my income as rent, which I had been doing at times for some years. So I got to continue being an artist and ecosocial educator and activist (which is and was a key part of my deepest calling; and furthermore is, low pay notwithstanding, an essential function of society) and get by on just some occasional housecleaning gigs and other misc gigs instead of having to get a “real” (=soul-sucking) job.

Resistance takes many forms, one of them can be 24-7-365 economic resistance. That’s my favorite. It doesn’t mean we can perfectly boycott anything, but we can get really darn close.

Also, I do support actual boycott, strike days, buy nothing days, etc. It’s just that I think it might be most effective if a lot of us are having “buy almost nothing weeks” and “buy almost nothing months” etc. Adding up to years of buying almost nothing except from local businesses, Black businesses, indigenous businesses, etc. Which I think a lot of us on this space are doing already! And I’m so happy to be on this path of adventure and resistance with you all.

On a different level, I know from various training that “what we resist persists.” So, while it is convenient to use the phrase economic resistance, I actually prefer to think of it as re-empowerment of ourselves. Taking back our economic agency, and choosing to define what we think is cool and worthy of spending our money and energy on. And re-opening the long-shut doors to our true deepest creativity and humanity. As opposed to being puppets of social norms and fake status.

My book DEEP GREEN, in addition to being available free to read online here on this blog, also exists in a mobile-friendly PDF format. I’m going to attempt to upload it here for you. I have been selling the PDF for $7, and you’re welcome to buy me a cup of coffee or something but there is no obligation. Times have come to this point.

*NOTE: If you are among my early readers who previously paid $7 for the PDF, don’t forget to redeem the early-bird intro offer for a free mini teleconsult! Contact me and we’ll arrange a time.*

When I first put out my book in 2017 (and even more, back around 2007 when I first started on this path of voluntary low-footprint living), it turned out that most people were too prosperous to care about saving $50 or even $100 off their electric bill and so on.

And not enough disasters had kicked in for people to worry all that much about being vulnerable in their dependency on electricity, cars, and so on.

I suspect that this may be changing as we speak, and I hope that my book will be helpful to you and your community.

(PS. And no matter how hard I tried to emphasize that a radical reduction path enables creative and occupational freedom, that message just did not seem to take. It hasn’t even seemed to take in the book that I co-authored with my colleagues, Living FREE. We are still troubleshooting our outreach. One would think there is no higher price on earth than gaining the financial freedom and the confidence to be able to afford to do one’s heart’s calling, but obviously something isn’t quite getting across.)

Good article that I found when looking into pre-colonialist approach to urban planning in African cities.

What they say about the importance of recognizing the value of informality — and working with rather than against informality — absolutely resonates with what I’ve observed in a lot of cities in USA (and elsewhere) where I’ve lived or read about, as far as the unfortunate modern urban planning tendency to “sanitize” and homogenize traditional neighborhoods that had very resilient economies and cultures.

URBAN PLANNING AND CLIMATE RESILIENT AFRICAN CITIES
DR. PATRICK BRANDFUL COBBINAH, UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE

Here’s the link: https://www.undrr.org/words-action-implementation-guide-land-use-and-urban-planning/urban-planning-and-climate-resilient-african-cities

“Informality is a defining feature of African cities. Studies show that informal economic activities constitute 80 percent of economic activities in urban Africa. Over 80 percent of land tenure arrangements are mostly informal, via the leadership of traditional, indigenous or tribal leaders. And more than 50 percent of urban residents live in locations characterized as informal settlements. So, informality is the foundation of Africa’s urban development/growth. …

“But urban planning has so far failed to acknowledge the importance of informality in Africa’s development paradigm, frequently treating it with heavy handedness (via demolition, eviction etc.), or using it for political gains. Until urban planning in Africa is deconstructed to focus on matters and issues that are of concern to its citizenry rather than implementing foreign and colonial ideologies, the potency of informality will not be realized. Informality in itself is not a problem – it’s the lack of urban planning’s capacity to work with informality that’s the problem.”

Near the end, I enjoyed the photo and description of the Makoko Floating School in Lagos, Nigeria:

“The Floating School was a movable ‘watercraft’ located in the centre of the community of Makoko, built like a pontoon on a series of plastic drums or barrels, making it less vulnerable to flooding and extreme weather. It was also designed to harvest rainwater, recycle organic waste, and use renewable energy.

“With a total size of about 200 m2, the floating prototype structure is scalable and adaptable for other uses, such as community hubs, health care clinics, markets, or even housing. … This idea now constitutes the backbone of a larger project on African Water Cities to develop climate-adaptive floating homes and other buildings to improve adaptation efforts in locations, including Cairo, Kinshasa, Luanda, Abidjan, and Dakar.”

And, googling African Water Cities, I found this gem: https://fortomorrow.org/explore-solutions/african-water-cities

“Water Cities® is a nature-based ecosystem for inclusive built environments on and around water towards sustainable urbanisation and climate change adaptation. Through extensive research in several African cities and proactive action in the built environment, Water Cities was established as a venture to pioneer innovative solutions – with exemplary building solutions such as Makoko Floating System (MFS™) – to shape the future of human civilisation.”

Go check out the article, the illustrations are beautiful! I can so picture my coastal area flourishing with this model. The illustrations at the top of the article shows an aerial view that reminded me of aerial views of our coastal Florida region after a hurricane. Except that what would’ve been miserably flooded streets, ruined houses, are instead a deliberate network of canals, filled with small boats moving about their business. And houses designed to float or otherwise accommodate being on water.

Someone in a thread mentioned that it’s hard to invest in continuing ed and training when they are just struggling to put food on the table. I offered this comment:

I totally understand. For most of my life, the occupations I have chosen have been quite low income. The main way I have gotten some kind of leeway is by cutting something. A lot of the expenses I have cut, other people might not have been willing to cut.

Big ones for me have been: sharing housing; choosing not to own a car; cutting out all but a tiny amount of electricity consumption.

Each person varies in what they are willing to cut. For me, I have been willing to cut just about anything in order to be able to free up the money (and time) to take care of my mental health and further my education. (Not only permaculture / ecology classroom education but also land based apprenticeships etc.)

Another thing that helps is if you can pursue certifications that can somehow be connected to your main occupation, therefore could potentially be a tax deduction or even credit.

For example, I just saw a friend’s picture of walking in a forest, and it reminded me that “forest bathing” is a certification now. A professional who gets people out into forest immersion. This could be connected to occupations such as yoga instructor, therapist, etc.