This is the fourth article in the series – “A Primer For Paradigm Shift.” See Part 1,
Part 2,
Part 3.
What might a sustainable lifestyle look like? This article will describe my lifestyle, judged to be “sustainable” by the “footprint calculator,” maintained by the Global Footprint Network. According to the Network’s calculator, planet earth could support all of earth’s people if they consumed energy and resources and produced waste at a similar level to mine.
A short overview of my comparatively modest but very comfortable lifestyle suggests sustainability would require big changes to an average middle class lifestyle but there would also be many benefits.
Paradigm shift means a deep change in the values, beliefs, goals and function of an existing system. The consumer culture is a paradigm created by capitalism and it is responsible for extensive damage to public health, the environment, human potential, social and political well being and much more. We can do much better.
The Primer Series advocates personal, economic and social movement towards a society where humans live within the boundaries of the natural world, core goals of society are to bring out the best in positive human potential and this society is served by an honest and accountable economic system.
Starting off, here are several of the principles of paradigm shift described in this series.
- A significant amount of paradigm shift can manifest in our own lives and homes, with families, friends and neighbors as soon as we choose to prioritize our own time and money and take action.
- Capitalism and the consumer culture are at odds with environmental sustainability and social uplift.
- Paradigm Shift is not only an issue of ecological sustainability but also an issue of social sustainability.
- The greatest breakthrough needed for paradigm shift and moving towards a sustainable society and economy is not technology, rather its our own consciousness.
- Addressing the economic malpractice of capitalism addresses many social, political, economic and ecological issues all at the same time.
- Many of today’s most challenging & expensive social and ecological problems are totally avoidable. But they are very profitable. That’s why we have them.
- Capitalism and the consumer culture, remarkably, have provided us with an immense variety of tools, assets and opportunities to assist in creating a preferred future.
- Positive human potential is our greatest renewable resource.
- Every neighborhood and community has surprising allies and assets to work with for creating a preferred future.
- There are untold thousands of people and organizations already working to bring about paradigm shift all over the world, whether they identify with the term “paradigm shift” or not.
- Countless public interest organizations are on the same team on behalf of sustainability & social justice and can make common cause with each other to enhance their effectiveness & be part of more cohesive and broad social movement.
- We empower our advocacy for paradigm shift when we visibly live the change – our lifestyles, homes, transportation, food choices, how we prioritize our time & money.
Previous Articles in the Primer Series
Article one was a critique of capitalism and its consumer culture. We deconstructed the myths of capitalism and explained how external costs are, essentially, a dishonest multi-trillion dollar subsidy to capitalism, the consumer culture and the affluence of most Americans. The Primer’s conclusion – capitalism is not capable of being a partner for creating a sustainable and uplifted society.
The belief here is, we can enjoy many of the benefits of modern life and still be sustainable. Modern life does not have to be a package deal. Leaving behind what is not sustainable and healthy can actually make our lives better in many ways.
Articles 2 and 3 described “aspects” of paradigm shift – The term “aspects of paradigm shift” refers to the principles, values, goals, practical tools, allies, assets and actions that can help create tactical and strategic capacity for moving forward with paradigm shift.”
Articles 2 and 3 also looked at the wisdom of the world’s great spiritual traditions, permaculture, eco footprints, a foot print calculator and why reducing our eco footprints is a core feature of paradigm shift. Then, how to pay for paradigm shift by prioritizing our time and money and then, closely related, the “double benefit.”
Finally, this is not a time in history to be shy about advocating and living the deep social and economic changes called for by paradigm shift.
Search “Jan Spencer Paradigm Shift” here on Resilience to find the previous articles in the Primer series and also on youtube for the Primer series with fotos, graphics and narration.
Preview Of This Article
This paradigm shift series will be made more complete with this short bio and look at my more or less sustainable lifestyle. Much of the Primer is based on my own life experiences.
The goal here is to offer ideas and examples about a paradigm shift lifestyle that may be useful for others. This article will also put the Primer into a more real life and personal context.
First, what is a lifestyle? A simple definition could go like this. A lifestyle is the visible product of one’s values, attitudes, morals [or lack of], world view, likes, dislikes, goals and interests. Those products can include how we relate to others, the natural world, the future and how we prioritize our own time and money.
Some aspects of lifestyle may result from family [or lack of], class background, geographical location, race, good luck and not good luck. Lifestyles might change by choice abruptly or over time, they may be forced to change on short notice. Change in lifestyle may be strongly resisted.
After the short bio, I will describe my current lifestyle in terms of the “aspects of paradigm shift” mentioned above and questions asked in a typical footprint or carbon calculator.
Jan’s Short Bio
My own back ground is totally middle class. During those Wonder Years, I was a good student, secure family life, interest in geography, living in suburban homes in New York State, Dallas and Denison, Texas. Ecological concerns came to my attention in high school where I also had some interactions with the authorities that left me skeptical of the “System.” That was the late 60’s.
In college years I was introduced to organic gardening and was drifting towards a vegetarian diet while low skill summer jobs left me keen to avoid conventional employment. A few years after college, I lived for two years in an Arkansas Ozark back to the land intentional community with an assorted group of older hipsters, idealistic drop outs and peaceniks. The iconic self improvement book “I’m Ok, You’re Ok” manifested in our weekly interpersonal meetings.
After Sassafras ended, a year in New Zealand included some political activism with focus on New Zealand environmental issues and pushing back on American global military footprint.
All my life, I always seemed to fall in with the “right” kinds of people. I never had a fixation on a career and my parents were not overbearing. One brother had a Phd in biochemistry and post doc research at Yale and my other brother, both older, had a career as an MD and radiologist.
More low budget travel in the 1980’s included adventures all over Europe and then Kenya overland to South Africa, back to Kenya and return to Europe, all told, almost 4 years. I learned very little of the world lived in a society dominated by cars, suburbia and freeways. All that American consumer culture did not seem to make Americans happier than people in other parts of the world with far less stuff.
Back in the US, never married, no kids, I was able to accommodate my own interests which lead me towards a low cost way of life, self employment painting murals and a high level of self determination and time for personal exploration.
I was never heavy into drugs. Certainly plenty of pot although I was never a frequent user. Several times LSD, several times mushrooms. My worst drug experiences, maybe 3, were too much pot in edible form. Full recovery. I think the respectful use of cannabis and mushrooms has value.
Activism during the 80’s included protesting nuclear power, organizing and participating in Earth Days, hanging out at a Pacifica radio station when I lived in Houston, taking a Permaculture Design Course in Austin about 1990 and making bike powered political statements in Houston’s infamous Road Side Attractions Parade.
In 1991, I moved to Eugene, not knowing anyone but well aware the diverse geography and the well known counter culture of the Pacific Northwest was likely a better fit for me than Texas.
The move to Eugene has turned out well. With mural painting jobs paying the modest bills of an intentionally modest solo lifestyle, there has been time for involvements with groups advocating vegetarian food choices, opposing the construction of a huge computer chip factory and the campaign to stop proposed salvage logging on thousands of acres of protected forest land that had been burned by an arson fire.
In 2000, modest financial resources well managed plus a good bit of luck led me to becoming owner of a quarter acre suburban property with a 1050 square foot, mid 50’s frame house. The plan from the start was to do a permaculture make over with the goal to reduce my eco footprint and to produce a useful amount of my own needs – food, energy, water and income from the site. The plan has worked out well.
A huge part of my lifestyle revolves around my quarter acre suburban property. The plan from the start was to do a permaculture/paradigm shift makeover. The graphic shows gardens, edible landscaping, solar features, rain water system, habitat. South is to the left, north to the right. Click on the image to enlarge.
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What I have learned transforming this place, looking after it and why do all this permaculture stuff in the first place, is a huge part of the source material for writing “A Primer For Paradigm Shift.”
Current Lifestyle
Do I buy stuff? Of course. I buy eye glasses, peanut butter, a computer, electricity, home owners insurance, second hand clothes, a bike. As an adult, I have always been frugal. I have always fallen in with the “right” kind of people.
No jewelry, no tattoos, no shelves full of knick knacks, no “nice” clothes or fancy sound
system. I still use cassette tapes. No junk food. No cell phone.
Knowing I have a very high quality of life with a comparatively modest eco footprint, even within the context of middle class standards, suggests to me society at large can enjoy much of our comforts and security with far less impact on the environment.
Would that sustainable lifestyle be different from what most middle class Americans experience? Yes it would. There would be less square feet of residential space per person, food choices would be far more local and plant based, there would be far less use of cars, employment and wages would be very different because millions of existing jobs and their products and services will not make the cut to sustainability. Everything will cost more. For starters.
But the personal, social, economic, political and environmental benefits to be gained could be well worth the effort. We would have a higher level of social cohesion, we would have cleaner air and water. Public health would improve. We would actually have longer term safety and security. For starters.
That is what paradigm shift is all about – making thoughtful choices and changes to our way of life towards sustainability and social uplift. Those changes can deliver many benefits to our own selves, others and the planet.
Basic Lifestyle Ideals
The wisdom of the world’s great spiritual traditions is inspirational and practical. Here are 5 examples of that wisdom and note, they all support each other.
1] Modesty of lifestyle – a modest lifestyle – a small eco footprint is good for home economics, the planet, the spirit and paradigm shift. It can free up time for personal positive actions and with others.
2] Care for the natural world – we can protect and restore the natural world by how we manage our own time and money, guided by care for the planet and selective disengagement from the consumer culture.
3] Service to the community means helping to make where we live a better place. That’s participating in the life of the neighborhood and creating civic culture with friends and neighbors.
4] Uplift of the spirit. We recognize animating the spirit for positive outcomes is a critical part of sustainability, paradigm shift and lifestyle. A positive spirit creates positive interactions and raises the vibe of the community and humanity.
5] Accountability for our actions – Accountability recognizes our personal impacts and connections to others and the natural world and brings us back every time to modesty of lifestyle, care for the natural world, service to the community and uplift of the spirit.
Downsizing By Choice
The notion of comparative downsizing could be a much longer article on its own so let’s keep it short, for now. The reader might imagine some of their own scenarios.
Transitioning towards a more or less sustainable lifestyle and society presents some fascinating thoughts. Consider how one might downsize by choice at the present time and how one might be forced to downsize by and by, not by choice but because of social, economic and environmental conditions that are already coming into focus.
With affluence and the consumer culture, at present, still close to its historic high tide, one might suppose its easier and smart to make personal downsize choices and changes sooner than later.
Even a thoughtful and purposeful low footprint lifestyle is subsidized by the same low prices of just about everything, enjoyed by the mainstream. Recall the discussion in Article 1 about “external costs.” We don’t really pay an honest price for what we buy and how we consume, small footprint or not.
So is it ok to invest in the tools and tactics to help maintain ourselves during turbulent
times certain to arrive while we can still buy those tools and tactics, even at their cheap
external costs? Yes.
Why downsize? The general scientific community tells us significant social, economic and ecological disruption from climate change is unavoidable at this point. How much is “significant’? Time will tell. If climate change was our only problem, we would still be facing big disruptions. But climate change has lots of company.
Capitalism as we know it is the source of a wide range of problems from affordable housing to economic disequity to widespread public health problems that are mostly avoidable, but very profitable. Thats why we have them. Some people would call making money by creating and then claiming to fix the problems as disaster capitalism. Thanks, Naomi Klein.
Downsizing – reducing eco footprints – energy and resources, will certainly reduce human impacts on the natural world but downsizing pre-adapts us to a future where today’s many downward trends converge, reinforce each other and are more than likely to make the near future far different in terms of food choices, transportation, income, shelter. Downsizing skills will likely be helpful in a constrained future and they are a good idea no matter what the future.
A society that carelessly uses a lot of stuff simply because there is a lot of stuff to use and its made cheap by externalizing the costs of production, use and disposal is not a good bet to have a happy future. It is also ethically crippled.
The more overconsumption practiced by the more people, the worse the outcomes.
Individuals may not have a big impact on the well known trends but individuals can make healthy choices in their own lives that can benefit the home, maybe the nearby, certainly in a small way the natural world, as conditions become more unsettled.
We do have many allies, assets, tools and opportunities to work with for helping to mitigate the downward trends and create positive movement where we live. The more people making these healthy choices, the better.
This involuntary downsizing is already under way for many millions of people all over the world including the rich countries. They are the migrants, the homeless, many people with financial, social and psychiatric challenges, the many falling out of the middle class. They are the proverbial canaries in the coal mine.
Imagine thousands of the American middle class trying to make their way over the dangerous Darién Gap, navigating the Mediterranean from Libya to Italy in a leaking, listing, overloaded boat or trying to find space in over crowded homeless shelters. How might your family and friends manage those scenarios?
Our affluence and overconsumption absolutely contributes to most of our lives being very comfortable, safe, and secure. But none of those for the long term. Much of what we call comfort is not sustainable and the external costs that make such comfort affordable actually diminishes our long term safety and security.
The Primer For Paradigm Shift is all about encouraging personal and societal choices where we can maintain a reasonable level of safety, comfort and security in a sustainable way. Sustainability offers the chance for long term safety, security and comfort and for our lives to be better in many important ways. And as has been mentioned before, untold thousands of people all over the world are already shifting their own close to home paradigm and they are pointing the way. This lifestyle account is only one of many.
We have far more tools, assets and capacities available now to downsize sooner than later. The more real life examples of sustainability, the better. Purposefully reducing our eco footprints is an essential part of paradigm shift.
Aspects of Lifestyle
I see several basic parts to a lifestyle. How much energy and resources we use, what are our our social involvements, what are our goals, how do we use our time and money.
Eco footprints – Our total eco footprint is our basic ecological score card. The Global Footprint Network’s footprint calculator has me close to 1 earth. [The average American is 5 earths] That suggests the planet could support just about every one in the world if they consumed like me. The caveat, minus the the round trip jet plane ride to Europe.
Food Choices – My diet is vegetarian, close to vegan. A pound of cheese lasts me a month. The footprint calculator does not ask about food produced. My edible landscape and veggie garden provides me with close to all my fruit and veggies. I have two freezers full of what I’ve grown.
Here is list of the edible landscape – 5 apple trees, 3 pear trees, 2 peach trees, 2 walnut trees, 2 fig trees, 2 varieties of grapes, hardy kiwi, lots of brambles, a dwarf nectarine, a lemon tree and several potted citrus. Planted but not yet producing include almond, olive and a dwarf apricot. There are culinary herbs.
My veggie garden is typical. Tomatoes, cukes, fresh beans, summer and winter squash, onions, leeks, cabbage, leafy greens, broccoli, celery, lettuce, fava beans.
Some produce keeps at cool temperatures. I do freeze a lot. Freezers are quite energy efficient. I make grape juice, pickles, sauer kraut. I dry tomatoes, pears and peaches. Many veggies keep well in the ground over the Fall and winter.
I have had chickens in the past but now share the cost of chicken feed with a neighbor so that is my source for the occasional dozen eggs.
We have a food buying club among neighbors so we buy in lower cost bulk. I have many months of food in 5 gallon buckets stashed here and there around my place. The bulk of my diet is organic, beans, rice, olive oil, oatmeal, pasta. I can buy tempeh and tofu from the local source at costs much less than the grocery store.
From the regular grocery store, I buy soy and almond milk, marinara for pasta, various sauces to add to stir fries, nutritional yeast and flax as supplements. I buy raw sugar, sea salt, chips and hot sauce from the co – op. There are other odds and ends but the point for food is, I have a very healthy diet and my management style makes that diet very economical. Eugene is an exceptionally good place for having a healthy diet.
Home Life – The footprint calculator asks multiple questions about shelter. My home is mid 50’s suburban. Wren I bought it, it had 1050 square feet, two bedrooms and a one car garage. I have made some changes. The one car garage was remodeled into a bedroom early on. The south side patio was closed in to create a 350 square foot passive solar space.
Seven years after moving in, I built a 400 square foot detached passive solar accessory structure that is now my living space while I still use the kitchen and bathroom in the house. So the property now has 4 bedrooms to increase residential density and that reduces the eco footprint of everyone who lives here.
The place produces or conserves a useful amount of energy. Early on I had a glycol solar hot water heater installed and it has paid for itself long ago and saved a lot of electricity over the years. It provides all the needed hot water for over half the year, significant amounts of hot water much of the rest of the year and in our cloudy and chilly winter time, it still preheats water from 55 degree ground temperature to 70 or 80 F before the electric tank warms it to a shower temperature.
The house has been heavily insulated. The passive solar former patio helps heat the rest of the house on sunny days in the cool season and because the sun room’s temperature never falls below 40, it is a thermal buffer for most of the south side of the house.
The place also has a heat pump, thanks to various financial incentives. Heat pumps are far more energy efficient than most other forms of space heating.
In the winter time, we keep bedrooms and the kitchen heated but the larger living room stays mostly cool. There is certainly room for improvement with energy savings but the low hanging fruit has been harvested.
I catch and store 6500 gallons of rain water. The rain water is used for the garden although water from the new 3000 gallon tank could easily be made potable if necessary. Note, one inch of rain collected from 1000 square feet of surface yields about 550 gallons.
Like almost everything we use, water is tragically underpriced so the money invested in storage tanks would take decades to repay in terms of avoiding the cost of city water. Still, the place is made far more resilient with its 6500 gallons of water storage in case there is some kind of disruption.
The inside of the house is retro, it has never been remodeled. Same floors, fixtures and counter tops in the kitchen and bathroom as when it was built. My priorities have been function rather than fashion. A kitchen remodel, even for this small house could easily cost 30 to 40K.
Instead of granite counter tops, I have an edible landscape, 6500 gallon rain water system, garage turned into living space, solar hot water, heat pump and a large passive solar space. My detached living space was an investment that has been paid back years ago.
I spend a lot of time at home. This place is not on auto pilot. Advocating paradigm shift is a big part of my lifestyle. This foto shows one of dozens of site tours over the years. Literally, thousands of people have visited to see what can be done with a suburban property. The building is my personal space. I rent 3 rooms in the house. Click on the image to enlarge.
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I have been vegetarian for over 40 years, no tobacco smoking, modest alcohol, modest cannabis. Always lots of exercise and activity and positive attitude.
Its hard to quantify how a healthy lifestyle translates into money saved but few would deny exercise, healthy food choices, social engagement, meaningful projects and positive attitudes all benefit one’s health and well being. More than likely, I have avoided a “significant” amount of medical expense over the years. A healthy lifestyle benefits paradigm shift, helps pay for home improvement projects, travel that merits a foot print caveat and much more.
If the all the country’s residents had healthy lifestyles, society could avoid hundreds of billions of dollars repairing damage to people and planet and instead, invest that money in paradigm shift in countless ways. I apply this understanding to my own life.
Time and Money – Of course, a healthy lifestyle and investments in function over fashion is the result of a well established set of proprieties for what I do with my time and money.
Permaculture – Also important, the principles and ideals of permaculture such as design for multiple benefits, slow and simple solutions, efficiency and more have been critical for transforming this suburban property but permaculture ideals also apply to lifestyle.
Transportation – We live in a society dominated by cars. Our urban places, millions of jobs and the entire economic system depends on cars and their related industries and products.. There are almost as many cars, trucks and motor cycles in the US as there are people and the ecological, public health and social consequences are enormous.
I finally gave my truck away in the summer of 2023 although for the past decade I used it only a couple times a year and only for nearby reasons. Like most of us, having a vehicle involves a great deal of inertia. I had my own car since high school. Its a tough habit to break and for most people, living without a car is not easy.
I ride a non-electric bike as my primary transportation. I have two different sized bike trailers for larger loads. I ride the bike no matter the weather. For the US, Eugene is a good bike town and my location is near a major bike route along the River away from traffic. I go weeks without riding in a car.
I recently took local busses with my bike to a town on the coast, biked 25 miles to another town for the early evening return bus to Eugene. A mini vacation for $20 and no car.
My footprint caveat is a round trip jet plane to Europe. My three months in Europe each of the past two summers was a small footprint adventure not counting the plane ride. Both times included camping, both paid and feral; staying with friends, a lot of bike riding, trains, buses, self made meals from markets and even a bit of foraging. I love Europe.
The term home economics refers to any activity that produces useful outputs from the property and also allows me to reduce my participation in the mainstream economy. No fantasy of disconnecting from the mainstream. Rather, my ideal is buy what I need that is healthy for me, society and planet and avoid the rest. Click on the image to enlarge.
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Civic Engagement
Immediately upon moving into this River Road Neighborhood, I was drafted to run for a position on our neighborhood association’s executive board. Before then, I didn’t know what a neighborhood association [NA] was.
Many cities have neighborhood programs that support NAs which are made up of residents of the neighborhood and exist to make the neighborhood a better places to live. NAs are a nursery for building civic culture and learning skills for working with others.
Typically, an NA has an elected board. It usually meets once a month with programs of value to the neighborhood. It can have committees to address different issues. An NA communicates with the neighborhood, interacts with the city, it can organize events, its agenda is made up by those who participate.
We have had meetings that included food storage, neighborhood preparedness and resilience, permaculture, traffic issues, homeless and zoning changes. Our NA organized a wonderful event this past fall in the Greenway along the Willamette River. There were neighborhood groups, bike safety check up, apple cider making; kids and water biology; produce exchange, habitat restoration tours, permaculture, song circle and a lot more.
Engaging with our neighborhood association has been one of the most enriching social experiences of my life. NAs offer many opportunities to learn civic skills and reach out to the wider community.
What Do I Buy?
I buy food as described above, a subscription to the New York Times on line, occasional bike repair, occasional going out for dinner, occasional used clothes, occasional computer upgrade. I bought a used point and shoot digital camera. I pay for trash pick up and recycling. I do buy some garden seeds and plant starts along with co-pays for the occasional medical need, I do have Medicare.
I buy cat food. I bought some used furniture for the house years ago. I bought water storage tanks, two used 1600 gallons and one new 3000 gallon. One of my first investments was a solar hot water heater. Later a heat pump, a galvalume metal roof, best surface for a rain water system and a few years later, materials to build this passive solar structure I live in. Most of those home improvements were years ago.
I had the usual expenses of a car – insurance, occasional maintenance, gasoline although I didn’t drive so much in the past 10 years. I don’t have those expenses anymore.
Activity
Here are several short anecdotes of my low overhead lifestyle.
I spend a lot of time at home taking care of all the “systems” here at my place – food, water, solar, property manager. I garden, prune trees, process and store food. I spend a lot of time writing about paradigm shift for online publication, I do many zoom presentations and put them on youtube. I attend many neighborhood meetings and help produce some of them. I love organizing events.
These are simply some fotos that help illustrate my lifestyle. From upper left and clockwise. Bike ride along the Oregon coast in December. I took buses from Eugene to my ride start point with my bike. Rode 25 miles to where a bus would take me back to Eugene. Fruit from my property – figs, mulberries, peaches. I deep freeze these for later use. Wall repair. I painted the mural 15 years ago, the wall has a moisture problem and I was asked to repair the painting. My 1991 Ford Ranger. It was bought new. I gave it away summer of 2023. I am now car free. Click on the image to enlarge.
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For three years, I had a radio show on a local Pacifica Network station. Its title was “Creating A Preferred Future.” The show was monthly and focused on content now found in the Primer. There were interviews and my own thoughts about the condition of our society, permaculture, urban land use, pushing back on cars, ecovillages and what people were doing to create alternatives to the consumer culture. I stopped the program because it was simply taking too much time to produce multiple versions of the show.
One of my favorite past times is biking. Sometimes to the University of Oregon to throw the frisbee. UO is a frisbee hotspot and my level of skill is known by quite a few of the frisbee mavens there. Its off street bike way almost the entire 3 miles and I love it.
I just bike over to UO today, an infrequent dry day. On my way up the street, I had a nice chat with one neighbor. Further along on the bike way I pulled up next to a senior bike rider, senza electricita’, asked her what she thought of electric bike and we had a great conversation riding side by side for a mile.
Campus was pretty quiet but I still found some great frisbee action at the student rec fields with some members of the UO frisbee club team. They were really good. We threw for an hour. On my way home I just happened to run into a couple who lived next door 20 years ago when I first moved in here. We had a wonderful conversation walking up a steep street towards the summit of a big hill overlooking downtown Eugene.
Finally, I stopped at a friend’s to find out about the visit he had over the weekend with his daughter and son, both adults living in Portland and Denver. So that was nice. That was a fun, social, healthy afternoon.
I also go for modest rides outside Eugene’s city limits into the nearby hills. I love to hill climb on my recumbent.
Hike in the woods. A huge big leaf maple in a remnant old growth forest near Eugene. Neighborhood River Rest in the Greenway along the Willamette River. Making apple cider. I was one of the 5 main organizers. Awesome fun! Neighborhood groups. Bike safety tuneups, song circle, permaculture display, gardening info, preparedness info, fresh water biology for kids, veggie exchange, much more. Student recreation fields at the University of Oregon. I go here to find upper tier frisbee throwing. A favorite activity for me. Making apple cider at the Mushroom Festival with help from my friend Sarah’s granddaughter Poppi. Click on the image to enlarge.
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Meals. I devote a lot of time in the kitchen. My diet is close to the celebrated Mediterranean although I rarely eat fish. Every meal includes a significant amount of food produced on site. No way I produce all my food, that is not realistic but much of what I eat is from on site and much that is from the store could be produced locally. But not all of it. Total sustainability would be very very different for me, too.
My typical salad, mostly fresh, mostly raw from on site – cabbage, lettuce, celery, lemon, carrots, apple, beet, dill pickle. Dinner, from the freezer, beans, squash, tomatoes, leeks, fava beans along with dried beans and grains from the store. Breakfast, along with store oatmeal, frozen peaches, mulberries, marion berries. I add my own dried peaches, dried pears, walnuts; filberts gleaned from a nearby grove to bought granola. Afternoon snack, apples from home and peanut butter. Yum!
Our neighborhood was the site for the 2015 Northwest Permaculture Convergence, the largest permaculture event of the year in the Northwest. Our neighborhood recreation center was a “Permaculture University” for the weekend. Our neighborhood association was a big help. We had site tours, plenary sessions, workshops, outdoor expo and much more. Out of town visitors camped in the back yards of people in the neighborhood. We figure about 700 people participated one way or another.
We hosted a tour group that came to Eugene for the Neighborhoods USA conference several years ago. We did a show and tell of permaculture sites in the neighborhood with many visitors from out of town. A frequent comment we heard was, “I had no idea people were doing all this re working to suburban properties.”
Over the years, I have helped organize dozens of site tours of permaculture properties in Eugene. Literally thousands of people have visited my place to see what suburbia can become. I have self organized speaking tours on the West Coast and Northeast, making presentations in places such as Coos Bay, Yale, Seattle, Ventura, Green Mountain College, Long Island University Post, MIT and more locations.
I like to correspond with friends who live in other parts of the country and world. And of course, listening to recorded music is a much enjoyed part of my life. I love to read, history, geography, anthropology, space, architecture, language. I speak usable Italian.
That’s good. A small footprint lifestyle can take many shapes. This is a very high quality of life and no doubt, it leans heavily of the affluence I am surrounded by. Society wide sustainability with product costs internalized would be very very different without question. I think even idealistic advocates like myself have only a vague idea of what society wide sustainability would be like even if by enormous luck, we actually made that happen. But we will either choose the paradigm shift adventure and do the best we can or wish we had.
This graphic shows many of the benefits of a paradigm shift lifestyle.
Click on the image to enlarge.
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Upcoming articles in the Primer series will describe real life projects that point the way towards sustainability. We will take a look at ecovillages, permaculture in neighborhoods, alternative economics, taking paradigm shift out to a wider audience, and more.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jan Spencer is an advocate of suburban permaculture and paradigm shift in Eugene, Oregon. His focus of interest is care for the natural world, economics, urban land use and eudaimonia. His background is thoroughly middle class having lived in suburban locations much of his life in New York, Texas and currently in Eugene, Oregon. Jan earned a BA in Geography in 1974, has Permaculture Design Certificate from 1991 and has travelled out of the country for about 6 years to nearly 40 different countries. In recent years, visits to Europe have included a keen interest in urban public places, pushing back on cars and exploration by bicycle. Find links to "A Primer For Paradigm Shift" on his website. Jan is vegetarian and does not own a vehicle other than a muscle powered bike. He welcomes opportunities to speak with classes, events and organizations. You can contact Jan through his website, Suburban Permaculture.
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