​Last week, I talked about how it is that we live on planet earth and that there are things that we can do to help ourselves protect our planet earth. Most people don’t want to be eco-activists. I don’t want to be an eco-activist. I don’t necessarily agree with everything many suggest. I am not a vegan. I believe that a little meat in the human diet is a good thing and good for the environment. (More on this in a later post). However, there are things that we can do to help sustain our planet that I think do make sense.

​One concept in permaculture, is to view our space on this earth in six zones, zones 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 0. Today we’re going to be talking about zone 0, and zone 0 can be a lot of things. Zone 0 is where a person lives. Zone 0 can be that person’s house, but it can also be that person’s mind. In this case, we’re going to refer to zone 0 as the house, and in this article, our focus in zone 0 is the kitchen.

A lot has changed for me personally during the past year. While I was writing the blog posts about novel editing, I started watching YouTube videos related to prepping. It started out as sort of an exercise about what I would do if there was an EMP (Electric Magnetic Pulse) and power was out for the foreseeable future. I thought about preparations that I could take. I had talked it over with my husband and he suggested that he would just go out into the woods and live in a tent somewhere. I didn’t see that as a viable option. I thought about what I would do if I stayed here I determined that in order to truly be able to survive, I would need to be part of a community and if that happened today, I would have to organize neighbors.
This goes back to a scenario that we used to do when I was in school. This scenario was called “lifeboat”. In lifeboat, you had to decide who of a group of people would live and who would die. Everyone had positive attributes and also had negative ones. Personally, I always tried to sidestep the scenario and said that I thought that everyone should live until they died naturally. It should never be in the hands of a human being to determine who lives and who dies. Those who were meant to live would live and those who were not meant to live would not.
During the process of thinking about the possibility of an EMP, I realized that if anyone were to survive, that person would have to learn to cooperate with nature. We are all already on a big lifeboat and that lifeboat we call earth. Continue Reading

There’s a book written by David S. McRobert called There Is No Place Called “Away” Why Exporting Garbage Is Not Sustainable or Sensible. If you are taking garbage out to the curb or a dumpster every week, then you are under the illusion, like most Americans, that because they don’t see the garbage any longer, that it is gone.
Every year, the typical American family throws out 2,460 pounds of paper, 540 pounds of metals, 480 pounds of glass and 480 pounds of food scraps. The amount of wood and paper we throw away each year is enough to heat 50 million homes for 20 years. Each gallon of gas used by a car contributes about 19 pounds of carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere. For a single car driving 1,000 miles a month, that adds up to 120 tons of carbon-dioxide a year. Forty percent of food purchased ends up in a landfill.
I am watching The Time Machine where George has reached the time of the Eloi and the Morlocks when they blindly accepted cannibalism because they didn’t know anything else. We don’t have that excuse. We should know that we can do better. We can build a better world. Continue Reading

Pollution and Waste
Often when I moved out of a place where I have lived, I tried to make it look better than I originally found it. I would like to do that when I take my final breath, but I am realizing that that might be an arduous task.
When we burn fossil fuels, we release a variety of chemicals into the atmosphere. Since we have to breath air to live, the air that we breathe affects our health. The polluted air we breath puts us at higher risk of respiratory diseases including asthma. Scientific evidence shows that 6-7 hours of exposure to ground ozone, a healthy person’s lung function decreases. Air pollution is mostly carcinogens, therefore, living with pollution increases our risk of cancer. Air pollution also damages the immune, endocrine and reproductive systems. It has also been associated with higher incidents of heart problems.
Toxic chemicals are released into the air and settle on plants and pollutes water sources. Animals eat the contaminated plants and drink the water. The pollution harms our food chain. One of the worst culprits is plastic. Since the 1950s over 800 billion tons of plastic has been created worldwide and only about 9% of it has been recycled. 73% of the beach pollution is plastic and 1.1 million birds and animals are killed annually by plastic. You are eating about 70,000 microplastics every year.
Rainwater and snow can cause water pollution if it is contaminated by chemicals on rooftops and lawns Not only does air pollution affect water, but also sewers empty into rivers, chemicals from farms run down into water, and factories dump hazardous waste into waterways. Dumping trash into waterways has a negative impact on the health of the water and the creatures and plants that rely on it.
The same sources pollute the land. In addition, in order to artificially increase production, farmers are encouraged to pump chemicals into their fields often at detriment of their bottom line and their own health. These same chemicals erode soils draining it of nutrients. In many cases, modern agriculture has caused the food we eat to have half the nutritional value of the food that our own grandparents ate.
Desertification is a type of land degradation involving loss of biological productivity induced by human activities. Deserts emerge due to the rampant and unchecked depletion of nutrients in soil that are essential for it to remain arable. In just about every case, soil death occurs which traces its cause back to human overexploitation. Desertification is a significant global ecological and environmental problem with far reaching consequences on socio-economic and political conditions and has been the cause of the fall of every major civilization. Today’s forestry and agricultural systems are such that these forms of desertification are accelerated.  
The way we plow the ground destroys microbial soil life and creates a hardpan just a few inches beneath the surface. We pump irrigation water from deep aquafers that cannot be readily recharged and will eventually run dry if we continue at our current rates of removal. In addition, the water we bring up is rich in alkaline mineral salts which get trapped in the hardpan creating a toxic layer that will eventually render the soil unproductive.
Animals are kept in CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) spew toxic wastes This manure became toxic only because humans mismanage it.  
There’s Still Time to Save the Planet, Save Your Family, Save Money
Even if our government is more interested in serving the desires of special interest groups, we can all make a difference on the grassroots level. The first thing we have to do is be willing to educate ourselves and educate our families about the problems we face.
Second, we need to protect our families from the effects of the problems we face. We need decrease (or eliminate!) our use of plastics. We need to recycle everything else. We can filter our drinking water. We can get our food locally or grow it ourselves.
In addition to reducing our use of plastics (which are made from fossil fuels), we can reduce fossil fuel usage by learning to conserve energy. Some ways cost considerable amounts of money, but a lot of them just require a little human ingenuity. Doing things like turning off lights when you leave the room, batching errands you run when using a car or using mass transit, air drying dishes in the dishwasher rather than using the drying cycle, using bulk beans and cooking at home, or buying local fruits and vegetables in season, if done by the major population, will do a lot toward reducing air and water pollution.
Decreasing pollution in the air and water in these ways will save us money, who wouldn’t want that? There’s nothing like a grassroots movement to make a difference, especially in our day of the world wide web, but our biggest tool in our “save our planet, save our legacy” is in education.  There are so many more things that we can do on a larger scale.
Did you know that it takes ten times less energy to raise cows on grass than it does on grain? Did you know that plowing puts more carbon into the atmosphere every spring than any other source and you can see it on NASA satellite imagery? https://climate.nasa.gov/interactives/climate-time-machine.
Did you know that there are people who are fighting desertification in some of the driest places on earth (Saudi Arabia, China) and they are actually changing those climates? These and so many more ways can be used to repair the damage that our society has caused our planet. In fact, any one of two or three approaches on a large scale can make enough difference that they can reverse in just ten years all the damage done to the air and water since the beginning of the industrial revolution! Wouldn’t you like to give your posterity a future that includes clean air, clean water, and soil health?
It is possible if we decide to take action now. Research what you can do today! I’ll help in any way I can!

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Welcome to 2020, a new year and new decade! Here on this blog I am taking a turn in my life’s journey and devoting How my Spirit Sings down a slightly different path! This new path can be summed up in one word “LEGACY”.
This brings up the question of what does legacy means to me and how will I present that legacy in this blog—How My Spirit Sings?
Back in January 2019, I started immersing myself into prepper, gardening, and permaculture YouTube videos. I realized quite early on that prepping could only take an individual so far. It’s fine for short term, limited area disasters, but if a major event crippled the entire country’s systems, we would need to involve our entire local community if we were going to survive and that community included the natural community. That’s where permaculture came into play. 
For the past three months I have been Continue Reading

It has been a long past several months. Back in August I started contacting authors and asked the to write a story for kitten and Puppy Dog Tails Tales. I set the deadline for October 31, 2019 for all submissions to be included. Countless authors sent in their stories and I had a difficult time choosing which 100 Jerjoboch Publications would include in this first collaborative work. Learn morn about the 100 day Challenge by clicking here. 

It has been a long past several months. Back in August I started contacting authors and asked the to write a story for kitten and Puppy Dog Tails Tales. I set the deadline for October 31, 2019 for all submissions to be included. Countless authors sent in their stories and I had a difficult time choosing which 100 stories that Jerjoboch Publications would include in this first collaborative work.

Throughout November and December, several others and I painstakingly worked on editing, book cover design, and formatting. A few days ago, we had our book ready. Now it's. . . 
​                                                                                                                Click Here to Read More

Tell a Story, Any Story
One of my favorite teachers in school was our POD teacher—Mr. Schwab. I did because he used to tell us stories about his military experience during WWII. He had been a prisoner of war in Italy and had escaped and spent a night in a haystack on an Italian farm as he made his way back to Allied lines. 
We have several ways that we can hook a reader into our stories. You could write a quote from someone you know or from a famous person. You could write a joke or a riddle or pose a question. You could set a scene. You could use an interesting fact or definition. My favorite way is to tell a story.
                                                Click here to learn more about using storytelling in nonfiction