August 2014 – Woman Aloud

Save the Planet While Saving Money

August 28, 2014 by Marika Stone, posted in Amy Dacyczyn, environment, activism, localizing, Transition Movement, Money, Vicki Robin

Some people dismissed (even dissed) Amy Dacyczyn, author of The Tightwad Gazette, a newsletter she wrote and published quarterly between 1991 and 1996, for some of her ‘extreme’ suggestions about thrift, e.g. reusing aluminum foil and extending the life of sneakers with duct tape. But she no doubt had the last laugh after her fan base swelled to 200,000 and she closed a deal for a book that became a best seller. Following her own advice, she also was able, on her husband’s modest salary, to raise six children in a handsome, mortgage-free farmhouse in rural Maine where she still lives.

The Complete Tightwad Gazette: Promoting Thrift as an Alternative Lifestyle makes recession-era ideas like frugality and avoiding debt, newly relevant in these volatile economic times. It enjoys the distinction of being one of the most stolen books from the Maine library system. While Dacyczyn (sounds like ‘decision’) doesn’t specifically tackle environmental issues, her strategies for personal financial responsibility make this classic of the genre a must-read choice for every Transitioner’s reading list. Although people have many reasons for consuming and wasting less, the positive impact on the environment cannot be overstated.

I wondered if the self-proclaimed ‘frugal zealot’ was still around, preaching what she practiced, and was a little surprised to find that The Tightwad Gazette had apparently morphed into a Facebook page and a blog (though neither affiliated with the author). Both sport the tagline: Helping You to Spend Less to Get More, and are packed with coupons. Sorry, but I think that rather misses the point. The Tightwad Gazette fan club is much more in keeping with the original along the lines of: “The highest calling in Tightwaddery is to take things that would otherwise be thrown away and turn them into something useful.” You could apply this to stuff or skills we have let languish.

It turns out that Amy Dacyczyn is happily ‘retired’ from her advice-giving career and a spell running a thrift shop (see the recent interview in The Simple Dollar). Her greatest contribution was to demonstrate that saving money could be just as effective in achieving financial stability as raising household income via all the means familiar to most modern two-income families.

Another influential book packed with ideas that will resonate with Transitioners, emerged in the same period (1992-97): Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez. A new, updated edition came out in 2008, and maintains a low five-figure sales rank on Amazon. As the title suggests, the book helps readers to examine their relationship with money. Through its 9-step program, you learn to distinguish between work that enables you to thrive vs. that which demands sacrifice – of life, family, civic life, even health. Even if you think you have a good handle on your financial life, this can be bracing reading.

As a best-seller, the book brought to a new, larger audience (myself, included) an education in financial intelligence, integrity and independence created by Joe Dominguez, a successful financial analyst who retired at age 31, “having cracked the code not of Wall Street but of money itself,” to dedicate himself to changing people’s minds about money. (Also check out the links below for FI material, offered at no cost.) Embedded were Vicki Robin’s insights about the “environmental imperative of breaking free from auto-pilot consumerism.” Her insights into “the global impact of over-consumption and the American life-style” are now indelibly part of conversations about economics and the environment, and fundamental to the ideas of Transition. Now in my 70’s, I’ll stand behind what I wrote in Too Young to Retire: 101 Ways to Start the Rest of Your Life (Penguin Plume 2004):

“…the groundbreaking book by Vicki Robin and the late Joe Dominguez … has some excellent exercises to help measure what something costs you in life energy. Find out if you are making a living or, as Dominguez and Robin mordantly suggest, ‘making a dying.’ Small, resolute steps like these not only make practical sense, but add up to financial independence and freedom later in life. That’s wealth an accountant might have difficulty accounting for.”

Vicki Robins has become one of the most respected activists for social change of her generation, influential in the development of a number of successful initiatives, including Transition Whidbey, Conversation Cafes, Awakening the Dreamer symposia, and Sustainable Seattle. You can catch up with her as I did at https://www.facebook.com/vicki.robin?fref=ts. Transition book clubs take note: Robin’s most recent book, Blessing the Hands that Feed Us: What Eating Closer to Home Can Teach Us About Food, Community and Our Place on Earth, was published in 2014.

A Four-Year Degree for Everyone?

August 18, 2014 by Marika Stone, posted in environment, activism, localizing, Transition Movement, permaculture, Rob Hopkins

The unresolved student loan crisis and the plight of debt-strapped graduates flipping burgers will keep this debate on the front burner for some time to come. But if you, too, have anecdotes about the taxi cab-driving Ph.D, or the electrician with a vacation home in the Bahamas, you know it’s not necessarily news, just more politicized –isn’t everything?

Google the question, or some version of it, and you’re likely to find plenty of opinions along the lines of former William Bennett’s (Reagan’s education secretary) “the broken promise of higher education,” the tagline of the book he’s currently promoting. Even Michael Bloomberg cautions students with so-so grades and large tuition bills to skip college and learn a trade like plumbing that can’t be outsourced or automated.

College is on the radar for two of our grandchildren who are entering their junior year in high school, and on the minds of their parents. One grandson took a workshop in entrepreneurship that enabled him to check out a school on his shortlist. The other took college level math at a local college to earn advance credits, earning an A and family accolades. Do they already feel the pressure of decisions they don’t have the maturity to make? I fear so. It seems to me that age 16 is a little young to be thinking about, let alone training to join, the workforce, especially when it is more than likely they will have several different jobs during their working life. (Young workers hold an average of nine jobs before age 32, according to the Department of Labor.)

I find it troubling that most forecasts about the ‘top jobs for the 21^st century’ from U.S. Government sources are based on a paradigm of business as usual, that is, the growth model, plus the changing demographics — by 2050, the population of older Americans will double – that is expected to create demand in certain categories, e.g. the ‘top earner’ ranks of physicians, optometrists and podiatrists. Automation, that eliminated many of the well-paid manufacturing jobs of the past, is about to do the same for the service industry, see Humans Need Not Apply. And barely factored in at the moment: the business- and life-disrupting impacts of climate change that will call upon some quite different, humanitarian skills sets: resilience, conflict-resolution, communications, and empathy.

Who would want this chillingly Orwellian description of a Department of Labor “real work day” in “future time?”

5:30 a.m. get up/get dressed/exercise

6:30 a.m. make: breakfast, school lunches, grocery list

7:30 a.m. get kids up, dressed, and fed

8:00 a.m. drop off kids and dry cleaning

9:00 a.m. on the job . . . 12 e-mail messages waiting for reply

1:30 p.m. meeting at daycare center (your child is biting!)

2:30 p.m. back on the job . . . 8 voice-mails waiting

5:00 p.m. forward office calls to cell phone

5:30 p.m. pick up child from school aftercare

6:05 p.m. pick up other child, pay late pickup fee at day care

7:00 p.m. make dinner

8:00 p.m. do: dishes, homework, laundry

8:30 p.m. bathe kids

9:00 p.m. read work memos to kids as bedtime story

9:30 p.m. fold laundry/fall asleep

We can do better than this for our children and ourselves, and my friend and colleague in Transition already is. This week she wrote that her 18-year-old daughter had completed an online course in permaculture, and had decided to forego the conventional college route of so many of her peers to launch a career in this practice. When she gets her certification, Brennah will be able to practice permaculture in a community that sounds ready to offer her many clients. This choice of career is a natural extension of the family’s long commitment to homeschooling the children, living simply, and growing as much of their own food as possible — a decision they made when they lived in my part of the world, and are carrying forward in their new environment. As part of their self-directed curriculum, the children have already raised and cared for backyard chickens, learned about and foraged for wild edibles, and more recently, added bee-keeping to their repertoire of resilience skills.

I don’t think the family realized when they began just how cutting edge many of these practices would become. Far from a redo of the back to the land movement, permaculture is a highly sophisticated system. The word itself is a combination of permanent and culture, created (and copyrighted) by founder, Bill Mollison, Australian ecologist and university professor. There are many practitioners and definitions, but this one is among the clearest: permaculture is the study of the design of those sustainable or enduring systems that support human society: agricultural and intellectual, traditional and scientific, architectural, financial and legal. It is the study of integrated systems, for the purpose of better design and application of such systems. Rob Hopkins was a permaculture teacher and the Transition movement got its start from a project with his university students.

The permaculture project submitted by Brennah as part of her certification takes a half-acre suburban plot with existing house and adds food-bearing trees and bushes, a kitchen garden, pollinator garden, and grape arbor, all positioned to take advantage of natural contours of the site and optimum growing conditions through the seasons. It will also include a grey water system, and the introduction of forage plant species into the woods behind the main house. Although zoning prohibited any livestock, the clients (who happen to be family members) had their requirements for low-maintenance and year-round yield met by the plan. If this is life’s work for the 21^st century, count me in.

Will skilled trades enjoy a renaissance? Will we, as a society, begin to value and reward practical education, skilled manual labor, and crafts more highly in the future? A few pioneering Transitioners seem to think so.

Let’s Talk Dirty

August 11, 2014August 12, 2014 by Marika Stone, posted in adaptive design, environment, activism, localizing, Transition Movement, sea level rise

I’ve wanted to write that headline ever since Dr. Mehmet Oz did his poop show on Oprah, giving us more on that subject than we ever wanted to know. But this is about sewers, another subject we just as soon not think about. It’s just flush and forget, until something goes wrong. And then, we call the plumber. The end? Not exactly.

I first got curious about sewers when we had a block-long pavement collapse in front of our building in New York City in the late 1980’s. It was caused (we were told) by the breakdown of an old water main, and it took over a week to replace the section of pipe and repair the road. In the meantime, we residents of adjacent buildings and passersby got a good look at the size of pipes that move water – and sewage, too – through underground tunnels in a city of that size. I could have stood up in the pipe, assuming I wanted to, and stretch my arms straight overhead. Back then, I wasn’t all that worried about crumbling urban infrastructure, let alone what could happen in the kind of flooding Sandy brought to lower Manhattan and Hoboken (another place I’ve lived) across the Hudson River.

Then my husband came across an oddball story from Dubai about waste management that curled our hair. Terry Gross zoomed in on it, too, in an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air with Kate Asher on her book (The Heights) about skyscrapers, including Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, still the world’s tallest building. Of course, if you’re a fan of hers, you’ll know that Terry Gross cuts right to the question that everyone wanted to ask : “When you’re on the 100th floor of a building and you flush the toilet, what exactly happens after that?” (Quick answer: about the same as what happens in a two-story townhouse, with more pipes.)

Burj Khalifa has broken all kinds of construction records, but what the official page fails to mention is that its plumbing is not connected to the Dubai sewer system. In a building designed to hold 35,000 people, this means that about 15 tons of human waste must be hauled away each day, by truck to a sewage treatment facility. Sometimes so many trucks line up this process can take 24 hours to complete, whereupon it begins again. Seems a bit cart before horse s—t, to me, design-wise. (Google Poop Trucks of Dubai if your curiosity out-weighs the eeww factor.)

Feels like the subject keeps chasing me. Found this in my inbox today: We have a “scary sewage problem,” wrote Gar Alperovitz in Alternet, due to aging, overwhelmed treatment centers and the kind of infrastructure problems I got to witness first hand over 20 years ago, in all our older cities. If the more visible roads and bridges are allowed to fall apart, chances are what is out of sight is getting even less respect and maintenance. Mix flooding from heavy rain to the runoff from agriculture, and you’ve got a sanitation and water security problem, Houston, and Toledo, too, where toxic algal blooms in Lake Erie recently poisoned the drinking water.

In his groundbreaking book, What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk About the Next American Revolution, historian/political economist/activist, Gar Alperovitz offers plenty of great ideas for addressing the huge problems with our economic system that too many people rant endlessly about on Facebook and other social media. Hint: he’s big on cooperatives. So I wasn’t at all surprised that, although he is straight talking about the challenges, he also sees plenty of opportunities, as in JOB opportunities, in fixing the monster urban sewage problem. Chief among these is prevention of storm-water runoff in the first place. He points to smart design approaches like urban forestry, green roofs, and artificial wetlands, among others. It reminds me of the ‘soft’ design approaches to an inrushing ocean – high dunes planted with dune grass vs. seawalls – that spared some Jersey Shore communities during Sandy. It also made me think of On the Water: Palisades Bay, the architectural design project that captivated me during a visit to the Museum of Modern Art in 2010 (see link below). These are the kinds of things we need to lobby for in our cities, whatever their size, as adaptive strategies to climate change that also positively impact the economy, immediately and later on. Check out Alperovitz’s work at Democracy Collaborative about building a more sustainable, equitable economy, and what we as thoughtful citizen can and must do. Sign up for his newsletter.

Click for pdf intro: On the Water: Palisades Bay (Soft infrastructure aims to synthesize solutions for storm defense and environmental enrichment along the coast.)

Photo: Van Gogh’s Toilet by Clare Wentzel

Transition and Diversity

August 4, 2014 by Marika Stone, posted in environment, activism, localizing, Transition Movement

How can we ensure that Transition isn’t primarily a pleasurable movement for predominantly white, educated, post-materialist, middle-class small community people? ~ Simplicity Collective

Among the many things we discussed last night at our monthly Transition meeting, the issue of inclusiveness – racial, ethnic, socio-economic, gender — resonated with me enough to want to investigate further. Thanks to Caroline Chen for having brought it up. Like other attendees interested in Transition, Caroline lives in Lake Worth, which takes some pride in its ethnic diversity, including a large Guatemalan community. How, she wondered, could we reach out to the wider community? I think the underlying question is: how might we build a local movement that reflects the community as it really is, and educate ourselves into a community that brings out the best in us all?

In attempting to find some answers, I was glad to discover that Transition US is responding to the Simplicity Collective’s critique. This fall, the Mid-Atlantic Transition Hub will offer a webinar entitled The Maturation of a Social Movement: A Regional Response to a Critique of the Transition Movement on the Transition US website, to explore diversity, among other issues. November 6, 2014, 2:00 pm ET, Click here to register (I just did.) An important aside: this webinar, like the regularly scheduled Salons are all available at no cost from Transition US via the Maestro Conferencing system, one of the many benefits of belonging to a worldwide movement. My donations (and yours) help keep this high quality education coming.

Funny, you don’t look … Mutts like me tend to be acutely conscious of the racial mix of any size group, or lack thereof. Even in my admittedly limited experience with face-to-face climate activism, I can see why the misconception that the environment is a white person’s issue persists. At last year’s Walk for Our Grandchildren, for example, people of color were noticeably in short supply. And yet since Katrina, no sane person would argue that climate impacts fall equally on us all in this country, let alone on the low-lying and/or island nations most threatened by a rising sea.

Check out the blogosphere, and you’ll see a lot of opinions on this. I’ll sum up like this: people who are struggling to find and keep jobs that satisfy basic needs – predominantly of color, urban, and poor — have other things to worry about beside the environment. I’ll leave that stereotype unchallenged for now.

In this recent article, (first published in Grist) Mother Jones assigns partial blame to high-profile green organizations that are falling far short in achieving equality in their hiring practices. Weirdly enough, what has existed and been tolerated, despite mounting criticism since the 1970s, is an ‘apartheid ecology.’ Furthermore, (the article continues) civil rights activists have had cause to be suspicious of any movement that would draw energy – not to mention funding – from the on-going struggles for social justice. That Green activism has been predominantly white and male is not a new problem, conferring on it an elite status that I believe has held it back. This is clearly one among many issues that the shifting demographics in this country will address and possibly resolve. As Center for Diversity and the Environment notes: In 2043, people of color will be over 50% of the U.S. Population. But everything we hear from climate scientists tells us we can’t wait that long to bring everyone into the fight for our very survival. This is the unique challenge Transition US is girding itself to tackle through educational and outreach.

I’ve barely scratched the surface of this intriguing topic. So join me in my continuing education in the weeks ahead, focusing on youth and the next generations who will literally inherit the earth (school farms, here I come!). So far, the most interesting work in the new, more inclusive environmental activism makes a strong case for the societal and economic necessity of tackling climate change and shrinking resources (energy, water, food) now, rather than later. In addition to CDE just cited, check out the mission statement of Van Jones’ Green for All: Building a green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty. Those of us seeking to build local Transition Towns could do well to borrow a page from this playbook.

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