Author: jennynazak

Two signs:

STOP HOARDING HOUSING! Live in it, rent it out … or sell it to someone who will!

STOP HOARDING LAND! Open it to public use! ReWild it! Stop mowing empty lots.

My new project. I painted signs on both sides of an old piece of plywood (that I had been using for a block party sign some years back). Now I’m putting the sign temporarily in front of various offending properties in my neighborhood, and taking photos. One of the biggest house hoarders conveniently left a sign-hangable post on their property even after the for sale sign was removed. This place is now bank owned (oh yippee — so we go from a local househoarder to a national or global househoarder). [crying and horror emojis]

I’m just hoping to raise awareness and get more people questioning our concept of what property rights are. Maybe they need to evolve. I’m tired of nobody questioning that all someone has to do is keep the lawn mowed, and pay taxes (If they are even paying their property taxes), and that’s all they owe the community. But let someone try to squat there and everyone will be on it like a sonnet.

PS. These vacant properties actually tend to be excessively mowed. Could be native duneflower meadow or scrub or even trees, but it gets mowed constantly so it doesn’t even serve the basic default natural functions of heat mitigation, stormwater absorption, erosion control, pollinator habitat, biodiversity. I have seen lawn crews literally mowing sand.[Angry emoji with mouth taped shut by cuss words]

And, In response to a fellow citizen who commented that she fully supports my efforts, but pointed out that there are county statutes against putting a sign on someone else’s property. And also that, even absent a statute, lawyers just could have a field day with it:

Thank you. And to be clear, all I do is prop up the sign for 30 seconds on a vacant lot or vacant building, so I can take a picture of it. Then I take away the sign. It’s designed to be portable and reusable.

Also, I totally encourage everyone to make their own physical or electronic versions of these signs! If electronic, it’s easy to paste them onto their favorite images of their own neighborhood vacant properties that are creating “rich blight.” And the photos can be taken from the public sidewalk, and then the image can just be electronically pasted on to the photo. In other words there is no need to even go onto a property at all.

The image with sign pasted on can then be posted on social media, shared with local neighborhood groups and local government etc.

I don’t know if I’m the first one who coined the term “rich blight”, but I did mention it in a 5-minute speech I gave back in 2015 called “filling our empty spaces”. It was for the first Daytona Elevate, a mini TED talk type event.)

Further exploration:

• Theaster Gates, Chicago, Black Cinema (Mr. Gates, an African-American potter and activist, was a great source of inspiration for my talk).

• “Filling our empty spaces,” talk by jenny nazak, 2015 on the Elevate YouTube channel.

• Vacancy taxes are a thing in many cities now. I believe strong towns even has some articles mentioning them.

Googled and found this article this morning, after reading a thread on Deep Adaptation about the LA fires. People are asking, “what now” after this disaster that has left communities in ashes. Some respondents pointed out — by way of illustrating what tends to happen, or not happen, in the wake of disasters — people in western North Carolina are still living in tents, in subfreezing temperatures and snow.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14271267/amp/winter-storm-states-americans-living-tents-hurricane-season.html

Notice (in my Facebook post) the second screenshot, which is taken from the same article regarding WNC, a link to an article about fires raging in California.

My reason for including this is that there is an ecological connection between the torrential floods and raging wildfires. That connection is, a broken water cycle. Capitalist global north human activity has disrupted the water cycle. There are ways to restore the water cycle, and some organizations are actively involved in doing so.

One organization I recommend checking out is called Water Stories. Their entire mission is the restoration of the water cycle. Their various channels (email newsletter, website, YouTube etc) offer an incredible amount of information. They also teach workshops. I have often invited my local government officials to attend their virtual workshops. And I have attended several as well. And I have often screenshot their water-cycle diagrams on my various pages, and in my emails to government officials etc.

I also recommend you follow my friend and colleague Chris Searles – BioIntegrity. His strategic small-scale watering experiments in central Texas and across the western USA are showing some very promising results.

And: Any of us that have a residential yard, or even a common area of an apartment building, or are part of a church congregation or school community — we all have an opportunity to help restore the water cycle via our choices of how we manage our little spots of land that we steward. Please get active in giving input to any organization you belong to that has stewardship over a patch of land, even if it’s only a fraction of an acre. What we do with our land management choices not only has immediate effects on the micro water cycle, but furthermore starts a beneficially-contagious visual norm.

My comment in response to a post where residents of a high-rise condo building said they want to have a community garden but management won’t let them because “liability” and “someone might get bitten by a snake”:

How disappointing. It’s a bad attitude on their part. And I don’t accept that insurance won’t allow that. This is the leverage point you guys have to work on: work on your management. Keep up the pressure.

Find as many like-minded residents as you can, and approach management together. You guys can do it! I know you can.

The snake thing is just silly. Snakes are just part of Florida, and anyone can get bitten by a snake anywhere anytime, theoretically, but in practicality, snakes hide and they really want nothing to do with us. If anyone should get bitten by a snake it’s me, constantly walking barefoot in my native & edible forest yard.

Official boards who use “liability” are using it as a stopper, they just don’t want to deal with it, but as more & more of you guys get together and raise your voices, and keep emphasizing the benefits, I think you will prevail.

You may even be able to get the landscaping company on board, because they’ll still be earning the same pay to landscape the non-edible areas. You do have to make sure they stop spraying herbicides, pesticides & other toxic stuff, otherwise your garden will be ruined.

Pay the landscapers to start adding native flowers and native shrubs; that will help with pest control and also help make sure beneficial insects are able to live there and help your food garden.

All of that said, sometimes for a condo it makes more sense to support local farmers and get delivery from Natural Concepts Revisited LLC, Keely Farms Dairy, Kelly Kretschmar, & others who deliver and/or offer CSA subscriptions, like a lot of us have started to do, than it would be to try to start a community garden where management isn’t friendly.

Long-term plan, if management is really unfriendly about lots of these kind of things, it may be time to bring in new management. Being hostile toward environmentally healthy options, when those are also the healthiest thing for people, it’s not a luxury we can afford any longer.

Best of luck to you, <community member> & everyone — and keep us posted on how it goes! Share on Beachside Neighborhood Watch if you like, you might attract some more support from residents of other condos and buildings nearby. There is strength in numbers!

More thoughts:

• In my first Permaculture Design Certificate course, back in 2005, co-instructor Larry Santoyo told us that his favorite permaculture designs are ones where there’s not a garden in sight. Not meaning that he hates gardens, just meaning that people have got a missed perception of Permaculture, because so many people focus on the idea that they have to grow their food by themselves. So what Larry was saying is, for example, that if you are a bunch of residents of a high-rise building, it may make more sense to support your local farmer than to try to start a garden on the premises.

• Personally, I would like to see the condo residents be able to do away entirely with the conventional landscaping. Mowing, purely ornamental shrubs and all that. Cut all of that out, and use the savings to let the residents have native and edible landscaping on the entire premises. Maybe part of the money savings could be used to buy extra insurance.

Important note for community activists:

If you are like me, and have put yourself out there as an activist and educator in your community, you may find yourself getting a steady stream of requests for your time and expertise. You may, like me, offer your services pro bono to marginalized communities in your area, as well as certain select public projects.

But: Many of the requests that come your way will come from people and groups who are quite wealthy not only in terms of money, but social capital/influence as well. YOU get to decide who gets your expertise for free, who needs to pay (and when those well-to-do groups push back against paying, which they typically do, feel free to send them to YouTube), and how much of your time & energy you choose to offer. Just because you have a passion and a mission for community resilience doesn’t mean you have to open a vein and show up with a shovel to their private project.

Not only have you put in the time and money for your education and apprenticeship and continued learning, but if you are like me, you have forgone a considerable amount of income over many decades in order to choose the path you have chosen, community educator. Please don’t be shy about either insisting on money* (or other compensation you prefer), or simply limiting the amount of labor you expend.

In the case of the above, I satisfied myself by offering my true best advice via posting my response to a post in a very large local forum where a lot of mainstream audiences will see it. In other words, I expended relatively modest labor for a potentially large community-awareness return. I have a personal stake in community resilience, and so the labor I expended to offer my best advice via that comment is a worthwhile trade-off for me. Bonus: I didn’t even have to leave my bed! It’s early morning, still dark and I haven’t even gotten out of bed yet. I would call that a win-win-win.)

* Regarding money, I’m getting away from the consulting model in general. When people aren’t willing to pay (whch, frankly, is appallingly often — People don’t even question that you would naturally want to show up for free, and in person yet!), I steer them to the vast realm of free info that’s out there.

And when people are willing to pay, I steer them to practitioners who are still in the thick of their income-earning years. Myself, as a person in her early 60s who owns her house free and clear, and has no kids or grandkids to support, I have the luxury of not needing to seek money. But, if I then offer my highest level of expertise and labor for free, not only will I be closing young people and marginalized people out of a potential income opportunity, but I will be perpetuating what I might call a norm of “toxic volunteerism.” (This is a phrase I just recently thought of, but it may already be a phrase in the world; someone out there may have coined it first.)

intercity bus service crisis; Greyhound station closures nationwide

I try to keep on top of stuff like this. I feel really bad that this snuck up on me. It’s really important. I myself have been an extensive user of Greyhound. Just had not ridden in the past several years since Covid started.

I usually only take one long-distance trip a year, to see my family several states away, and it is typically been by train for the past few years rather than bus. (I no longer fly, for many reasons. I signed a no-fly pledge a few years back.) This past fall, I decided to look into Greyhound bus again for the first time in a awhile.

By chance, I happened to notice that the station in St Augustine had closed down. That didn’t affect what would have been my ticket, but it gave me pause. (I ended up using Amtrak, my other usual travel mode, for my trip.)

I forgot about it until recently, when I was checking into interstate transit options just for future reference. I looked into Greyhound, and I noticed that many of the results that popped up for my home station, Daytona Beach, gave me results instead for a neighboring city about 20 miles away. And that the company name Flix bus kept popping up.

I was busy with stuff and didn’t think until this evening to look to see if this might be part of a pattern.

Looking back, I remember a trip I took by greyhound some years ago, I think it might’ve been a couple years before Covid started.

I remember that one of the layover stations, a city in the Carolinas which I was looking forward to because the bus driver told us we would like the food there, turned out to be this new building out of the city center, far from any services. There were no stores or anything we could walk to, or find any food. I heard later that it was because some university had bought up the land that the downtown stop used to be on.

https://www.vabc12.com/news/america-s-greyhound-bus-stations-are-disappearing/article_94622f54-c86b-5143-94c4-a666b2d01f2a.html

”A closure in Chicago would accelerate the crisis in intercity bus service in the United States. Intercity buses carry an estimated 60 million people annually — twice the number of people who take Amtrak every year — but companies have cut service and closed terminals in recent decades. Cities lost nearly one-third of intercity bus service between 1960 and 1980 and more than half of the remaining service between 1980 and 2006, according to Chaddick Institute research.”

Ugh. Now I’m off to go look for an update to see if the Chicago terminal ended up getting saved.

It sounds like a lot of it is driven by high real estate values in downtown areas, coupled with the privatization trends in USA life.

Also, how did a foreign company (Flix is a German company) come to own our major nationwide bus service? To me, bus service is public infrastructure. Seems like it would be a bad idea to sell it to foreign investors.

The article linked above does have a spot of good news:

“One promising model is in Atlanta, where Greyhound opened a new 14,000 square-foot dedicated terminal this year with financial support from the state and federal governments. The station is used by other intercity bus operators and is near public transit.”

So: financial support from state and federal governments; and proximity to city public transit; and shared use with other intercity bus operators. Sounds like a good formula.

From what I can tell so far, Greyhound service in Chicago is safe for now. Very important, because it is a massive transfer point serving millions of passengers, a large percentage of them people with low incomes For whom this is the best or only travel option.

* For numerous reasons, I have come to deeply loathe the airline industry. For more information about no-fly pledge, and how people are living full happy lives without getting on airplanes, check out Flight-Free USA, Flight-Free UK.

• https://www.facebook.com/share/v/18SDaFP9fL/?mibextid=WC7FNe
Krista Van Ness Oakes (Yoga instructor; author of Shedding Shame book; public speaker and more) at 1 Million Cups Daytona Beach

• “Truth and Transparency: All of Me” (Robin Greenfield)
https://youtu.be/4n5TwDhZGGY?si=9OXy_RDCQDxURoqW
This is a multi-part series on Robin’s YouTube channel. He shares deeply on various aspects of his life — past and present.

Social media is essential for my work. I stick to a few platforms that I have found to be relatively effective for building community and spreading ideas, and I only quit a platform when it is providing me with too little value for the hassle.

Similarly, I minimize my consumption (of stuff in general — electricity, gasoline etc.) for planetary reasons, as well as for personal benefit (peace of mind and financial etc) – but if I need something, I need something.

That popular saying, “There is no ethical consumption under capitalism.” It doesn’t mean we should just give up and go hog wild and buy everything without thought or conscience. And not try to push back against anything.

But by the same token, it doesn’t mean we’re supposed to just do without everything and live in a cave and not do our activism & creativity & other work etc.

Thank you for this post Lee Flier, very well said.

Photo of my favorite local beach dune wildflower, Blanket Flower – Gaillardia pulchella. Gorgeous, tough, drought tolerant, salt tolerant. Tough & resilient yet beautiful, just like a grassroots community both online & offline.

And please enjoy the following wisdom from Lee Flier (fellow permie, and artist/musician, and very deep and creative and astute thinker on social issues) – well said as always!

“A few more thoughts on the social media mess. It’s going to sound like I feel “hopeless” or think we should “give up” but I actually don’t. I think my positions on a lot of things are being mischaracterized, and that sucks.

But the thing is, we are in an oligarchy and have been for awhile. It’s just accelerating now. You’re currently having a crisis because Facebook is, in your view, about to be overrun with Nazis and haters. But the thing is, EVERYTHING IS RUN BY THESE PEOPLE. Everything. Are you going to give up the Internet entirely? Stop going to websites? Because any website you go to is probably hosted on Amazon Web Services. The computer or smartphone you’re using? Made by evil oligarchs whether directly or indirectly. Same with the car you drive, the banks and credit cards and other financial services you use, the property management company who runs your apartment complex. The stocks that make up your investment portfolio or retirement fund if you’re fortunate enough to have one. We are all participating in this shit and there’s no getting away from it unless we all want to go live in a cave. EVERYTHING has been leveraged to the gills to extract value from the environment and from other people and benefit someone else, and funnel more money to the top.

Again, this is not to say it’s hopeless and we should do nothing. ALL I’ve said is, whatever we do has to be well thought out, well organized, and massive. You deleting your Facebook account or cancelling your Prime or WaPo subscription is not going to make a damn bit of difference. But we still get to use these tools, and we do, in spite of everything, because they have value to us. If you want to organize and protest oligarchy but you refuse to use a computer or a smartphone or the Internet or social media to do it, that’s obviously not a good move.

We all know people who won’t vote, or aren’t paying much attention to politics. Those people cost us the last election, and the one in 2016. They might tell you that both parties are corrupt, there’s no difference, so there’s no point in voting. But what I always tell people like that is: no matter what you do or don’t do, one of these people is going to be in charge of a lot of things that affect your life. And your failure to vote ensures that the very worst possible person will get in. You don’t have to spend all your time obsessing over politics, but FFS pay some attention to what’s going on and vote accordingly! Right?

I feel the same way about social media. It exists, it’s ubiquitous and really, it’s become necessary in modern life. Whether or not we who are morally sickened by what’s going on participate in social media, it’s going to be there, and FB is by far the largest platform of them all. I’m not saying we shouldn’t take breaks, do things to limit our time here for the sake of our sanity, etc. But if we don’t participate at all, we leave it to the wolves. It’s not going to just go away, and what happens on it will affect our lives and the lives of people we care about, whether we want it to or not.

Eventually there’ll be a better platform, and eventually the oligarchy will likely collapse on itself, or we will figure out how to overturn it. But for now, we’re swimming in it. Only by sticking together can we ever hope to change anything.”

I posted on Deep Adaptation that I have a deep suspicion that the airline companies are systematically undercutting the train companies in Europe.

Also posted my frustration that airline tickets seem to be getting unnaturally cheap, all the while planetary resources are being depleted and it would seem more appropriate for them to be getting more expensive.

This is my original post which you can look up if you join the DA group (and then you can follow the comments.):

#rant How are airline ticket prices so cheap? Seems like the prices are totally backwards in keeping with planetary situation; ecological limitations. I’m thinking it must be some predatory pricing or something. It’s hard to listen to people talk about how they’re going here and there all over the place and how cheap the tickets are. Very sickening.

I feel the same about all this trashy consumer junk that’s sold online. How can it be that it is getting cheaper??? < horror, crying, and anger emojis.>

It’s really sickening. In the 1980s, when I had what I considered my fair lifetime allotment of Europe travel (a five-week trip around England, Wales, and Scotland, including 2-week stay in London), trains were the main mode of transport in UK and continental Europe.

Flying was practically unheard of, at least as far as I had understood. Now it seems totally reversed.

I have become convinced that the airlines have deliberately undercut the trains.

Glad I got that experience before all this stuff started happening.

Full disclosure: I said I considered my England Scotland Wales trip to be my fair lifetime allotment. However, before I thought this way, I had other trips.

In 2004, I went on a group tour to Spain with one of my aunts.

And in 1998, I went on a work-related trip to Sheffield England. And while over there, we took the ferry across to Rotterdam and toured around the Netherlands by train and bus.

That was just my Europe travel. Between 1990 and 2004, I also did three back-and-forth trips to Japan from the USA, for work. (Including my five-year stay living in Tokyo.)

Wish I had known then what I know now. Glad I got the experiences but I would have happily curtailed it for planetary reasons.

In 2017, when i wrote my book, I did retroactively purchase triple carbon offsets for every single air trip that I can remember taking in my adult life, before I quit flying. But carbon offsets are by no means a perfect mitigative remedy.

Response to a comment from someone in the group who continues to take multiple transcontinental flights (and does not feel bad about it, feeling that industry and so on have contributed so much more):

I wish we could control what government or large companies do, but we cannot. And, we can’t invent a time machine to make our past selves more aware, but we do have the current awareness of what we know now.

I might feel more guilt because I am a Boomer, and furthermore a USA citizen. And therefore am part of the demographics that has contributed most to destroying the planet. Just by our willful obliviousness, if nothing else.

My heart goes out to you & other people who are living on separate continents from their families; this is a widespread artifact of our modern age.

What is your long-term plan, as far as possibly living within low-footprint ground-transport distance of your family? (When I was really young and going through the wild times, I thought maybe I was willing to never see my family again. But it turned out not to be the case so I’m glad I did not end up staying in Japan and have to face that dilemma.)

I try not to beat myself up for what I did in the past — same as you, we only know what we know at the time, but I cannot allow myself that same behavior moving forward.

And, there is a hard reality that at some point airline travel is going to become not an option. So it behooves us everyday people to reduce our vulnerability as far as being intercontinentally far away from our families. Unless we are willing to possibly not see our families again in this lifetime.