Non-Toxic Cleaning for the Home

...mild, very good for folks with allergies and gentle enough on the land and water to be used in a greywater system. You can buy them online or at some health food stores. Laundry Bags A new invention you may not have heard of are laundry bags created to collect fine plastic fibers shed by man-made fibers in washing. These teeny tiny bits of plastic fluff are called “plastic micro-waste” and they are becoming a big problem in our oceans. See guppyfr...

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Essential System #9 – Hydration

...es, the water heater and the tank of the toilet (not the bowl). To use the water in the water heater turn off the gas or electricity that heats the water. Shut off the main water supply and open a hot water faucet somewhere in the house. You should be able to drain the water out of the heater using the heater’s drain faucet. You can also get some water out of the pipes by closing the incoming water valve and opening the highest faucet in the house...

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Water Conservation

...ider how to conserve: 58.7% Outdoor Water Clearly, the place to start with water conservation is outdoors, in designing a landscape that doesn’t need supplemental irrigation. Our rule around the SurviveLA compound is, once again, if you gotta water it you gotta be able to eat it. The vegetables that we grow are irrigated with a water-saving drip irrigation system that we’ll describe in detail in a later post. We have no lawn, and other than the ve...

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Urban Homestead Trademarks Cancelled!

After six years of legal wrangling, “urban homestead” and “urban homesteading” belong to us all. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has cancelled the trademarks thanks to the hard work of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the law firm of Winston & Strawn. Here’s the press release from the Electronic Frontier Foundation: Urban Homesteaders Win Cancellation of Bogus Trademarks Global Community Had Faced Baseless Legal Claims and Content Remo...

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The Great Water Conservation Grift

...ive and low-water landscapes. However, I believe these calls for household water conservation are a kind of misdirection from what’s really going on. In short, we as individuals are being blamed for a water shortage that would be better attributed to a class of Central Valley agricultural oligarchs whose profligate water use dwarfs what we use for our urban landscapes. Source: Public Policy Institute of California. Journalist Yasha Levine did a su...

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