Punk Gardener

may keep my brain well oiled as I age, because suddenly nearly every choice I make when I decide to purchase something becomes a tangle of weighing “least impact and stress and greatest efficiency, durability & usability”.
 Like many people of my generation and economic background I was raised to replace what got broke in my home without much thought– after all, things break & replacing them is as easy as heading to the nearest few stores to comparison price shop. Or if I’m lazy simply heading to the nearest big box store & grabbing the same brand of *whatever thing got busted* off the shelf.
  It was nearly as automatic & simple as breathing– this whole being an U.S. consumer thing.
  Not anymore.
 
One of my 222 Fifth brand Kyoto cereal bowls has slowly developed a crack.

 I’ve had the set maybe 3 years.

 & I started to, without thinking, look for a replacement bowl from the same maker & style online.

After all, it would be weird to have a non matching cereal bowl.

 Right.

 & I only caught my thorny nest of consumerist assumptions when I found my china pattern discontinued.

   If I slow down my brain & think, really think about what I am supporting with my money…

   One very lovely cereal bowl, handmade in the U.S. by an independent artist purchased from etsy.com is now mine. & it is a one of a kind. So it in no way matches my other dinner ware. I imagine over time as pieces get worn & break that I will have a wonderful collection of one of a kind bowls & plates in many colors & shapes. None alike & that will be a reminder to cherish each one. A reminder that having the ability to make or buy the necessities of life is a blessing.

Nine companies join clean energy partnership

Look at these lovely little homes built using recycled hardwood. Dreamy!

MyFox Austin | Tiny Houses Popping Up Around Austin

It was just about a year ago that my Casandra like ravings finally reached culmination & I convinced Mr. Punk Gardener that all the economic collapse & debt bubble induced chaos I’d been going on about for the last year or two was well fraggin’ nigh & we’d better either leave the country asap or sink our $ into hard assets (gardening tools, a house, cheap personal transportation) while our $ still had some value & our credit line was still open.

Leaving the country was expensive & would take time & might complicate Mr. Punk Gardener’s career … in the end we just opted for the devil we knew, it seemed more do able from where we were.

So it was just about a year ago that I started talking to Mr. Punk Gardener about manufactured housing.
& he agreed– get us into a home, for cheap, NOW. A home we could take with us if we ever had to leave Austin.
& after that, things moved fast.

It was probably the most stressful time we’ve had yet in our relationship. We were doing so much so quickly & without our own car (we’d given up the car a few months before).

By the end of Oct. we’d picked out this lot & started negotiating with our builders.

A year later, as I watch the new Great Depression roll over us from the relative safety of Fig Tree Cottage, I’m frickin’ glad we did what we did when we did.

If you need any big ticket items in the next 5 years, buy them now if possible.

I really hate being Casandra– but I’ve been good at it so far (what a crummy thing to be good at).

The current value of your money is as good as it’s going to get. Buy now & then do everything you can to reduce your debt & pull the belt well fraggin’ in. Learn to sew, learn to garden… most importantly use your social networks to contact your neighbors. You’re going to need them & they will need you.

If you have any excess resources, I’d wait for real rock bottom & buy some cheap land with good water access. It doesn’t have to be much. You can either live on it cheaply eventually or wait the long game for the turnaround & sell it off.
No, we are not going back to the stone age– the Corp system is fat & wealthy & they won’t allow the social upset to get bad enough to stop the game, but they will use this time to consolidate power & drive down the working class to get more cheap labor.
Food & energy costs will go way up from here.

This was always coming– you can’t run an economy on credit & a quick hard fall will be better in the end than a long slow decline.

& this time could be used to restructure our lives around community & sustainability– things that really matter.

Don’t panic & bring your towel.

Peak Oil Hausfrau: Retrofitting the Suburbs

Great post about confronting suburban rot (& the flight of the white collar class back to the cities) before it gets any worse.

“E = life enhancement / ecological resource use.”

No Impact Man: Strangely, a way to enhance both technology and environmental activism

Texas Paying Cash Toward Cleaner Cars from greenrightnow.com

President Bush has linked higher food prices to higher demand from India and China, but the leaked World Bank study disputes that: “Rapid income growth in developing countries has not led to large increases in global grain consumption and was not a major factor responsible for the large price increases.”

Carectomy.com

The Theory of Anyway

A great post by Pat Meadows on why , even if you don’t believe in climate destabilization or peak oil, going green still makes sense.

It makes sense to care about the effects of our actions in both the short & long term.

It makes sense to question if what makes us happy in life is using up more resources or spending more time on things that feed our hearts & minds.

It makes sense to think about how the way we live expresses our values to the next generation & to each other.

EPA blocks access to testing on pesticide that may be killing bees