Permaculture News

RetroSuburbia crowd support campaign

To offset the cost of printing David’s forthcoming book in Australia, we are excited to announce that we have just launched a crowd support campaign.
RetroSuburbia: the downshifter’s guide to a resilient future will be self-published by David’s micro-publishing house, Melliodora Publishing, which has published David’s previous books plus a handful of other titles including the best selling The Art of Frugal Hedonism.
To print the book offshore would save $23,000, but no matter how enticing the monetary cost, David is completely committed to local printing, supporting sustainable forestry in Australia, and a truly viable paper chain. The paper stock, ink and the printing must be in accordance with the content.

There are a number of different support levels, as well as the option to pre-order the book to be launched by Costa Georgiadis on February 10 2018 at the Sustainable Living Festival in Melbourne.
Thank you for your support, and for sharing the link among your networks!
https://www.retrosuburbia.com/crowd-support/

Comments

2 thoughts on “RetroSuburbia crowd support campaign”

  1. Like David, I too coined a term that has spread around the world. I was the first person in the world to publicly used the term Zero Waste when I named my company that took all of the unwanted chemicals that would have been discarded and buried in the SF Bay Area and found ways to reuse them instead. Okay, recyclers, put that in your pipe and smoke it. With your juvenile focus on food and paper and glass, how would you deal with chemicals, which you only say yukk to, call toxic, and search earnestly for the nearest dump to put them in.
    Unlike David, my term did not take off as a fully formed theory of resource conservation because Big Garbage teamed up with the environmentalists to sell recycling as a faux recovery plan which they spread as a religion. People who never gave any thought to the lack of any scientific study of recycling, just jumped on Big Garbage’s favorite plan for putting the public to sleep and began to call themselves recyclers. Without any analysis of what they were doing – and what they were missing – people around the world began to smash up perfectly usable goods into shards of glass, paper, steel and copper and pretend that one, what they were doing was worthwhile, two, that it reduced waste and that three, they were actually dealing with an important problem. All wrong! Recycling is utterly useless, unless you own a garbage company, in which case it is brilliant. The more recycling is taking place, the more garbage is produced, because the IDEA of recycling puts people’s conscience’s to sleep. Big Garbage loves recycling and supports it to the hilt (even now that there is no one wanting to take the contaminated paper and glass and plastic any more) so it mostly all goes into dumps anyway.
    Zero Waste is a genuine, scientific, fully effective theory of REDESIGN. It has nothing whatsoever to do with recycling or waste management. If you waste your time fiddling with garbage arrangements, you have lost the game because all you are doing is playing THEIR GAME! The only way to prevent waste is to redesign all goods for perpetual reuse. Go to http://www.zerowasteinstitute.org and click on PROJECTS to see how it can be done in practice.
    Zero Waste, if applied across the board, would have a MAJOR impact on climate change. Did you know that the manufacturing of cement creates about ten percent of ALL THE CARBON DIOXIDE GOING INTO THE ATMOSPHERE. That’s only one contribution. What do you think is using up all that energy, clean water, physical resources etc. after you remove cars and computers? Giant factories that use up endless tons of electricity, equipment manufacture, water, tools, and LABOR. Labor means employees and workers using up what people use to live on. And why are they using all those inputs? To create shoddy goods that you use for a year and then discard. Or recycle! Makes no difference. Those factories will sail on consuming all those inputs to replace what you can no longer reuse. Sure, there’s food and smartphones, that are personal to you. Do you think that you aren’t fractionally using up airplanes, cars, ships, skyscrapers and private homes, not to mention streets? What tells you that you can just ignore all them? Somehow, if it isn’t a package or a spoiled potato right in your hands, you have no responsibility. Wrong! Everything that is made in the world is for you to use, fractionally, and you have exactly the same responsibility for designing it for reuse as any other object.
    David, if you are reading this, please drop that plea that I read in the NY Times article for recycling. You haven’t thought it through. Recycling is utterly useless, and not something a guru (even a reluctant one) should be hawking. Let’s talk.
    Paul Palmer

    1. Yes!! Paul, your comment is a wonderful one. Thank you for taking the time to write it, and to alert us to your projects, which are fantastic. In the NYT article, when it talks about one of the skills explained in RetroSuburbia being to recycle waste, it means composting food scraps + humanure, not anthropogenic waste.

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