Is it truly possible for someone to be self-sufficient? I like to garden, grow medicinal herbs and believe it’s good to learn whatever we can about the old-fashioned ways of doing things. Some of my friends like to make their own soap, keep bees, garden, can vegetables, make wine, make their own bread, hunt, butcher their own deer, and raise chickens, and I would love to raise goats, sheep and cows if we had enough land.
It appears to be part of a nationwide trend toward natural living. The reasons for the trend, at least in the beginning, appear to be a mixture of:
– An increased awareness of how unhealthy processed food is;
– The aging of the population leading people to try eating healthier;
– People becoming more involved in their own health care (a trend which began in the 1990s);
– Concern about peak oil and environmental sustainability;
– An awareness of living in the end times and getting ready in case they need to survive without buying or selling (Revelation 13).
The movement has gained momentum in the past few years, mostly due to the economy. More women home schooling their kids, necessitating some home budget cutting measures has also added to the movement. Recently, another reason to be self-sustaining in regard to electricity has been presenting itself: rolling blackouts and brownouts in Texas and elsewhere due to environmental regulations and new power plants not being built. If this becomes more widespread, and it probably will, the less we have to rely on the electrical grid the better off we will be.
Some survival sites encourage people to learn how to do everything – from blacksmithing, marksmanship and candle making to midwifery, weaving and setting up your own solar electric system. It would be great if we could learn all the old skills and some new ones like energy production. The thing is, it really isn’t possible to be totally and completely self-sufficient.
It’s worth trying to learn all we can and to have access to instructions in print, in case the need for something arises. But there isn’t enough time in each person’s day to be able to learn more than a few of these things, at best, at an expert level. I wonder just how many people believe they’re really being self-sufficient while still relying on consumer goods. We may be fooling ourselves since almost everyone still has to rely on regular grocery store trips, maybe ordering ingredients, things that are not produced locally, anything made of or packaged in plastic which is made of oil, shipping to stores or delivery which requires oil, anything requiring electricity or municipal water, or a vehicle that we can’t repair ourselves, especially if it has any computer parts. Even if we have everything we may need, it will eventually wear out and need to be replaced.
Since no one can be truly self-sufficient, I believe we will see a trend toward more communal living. Throughout history, families and tribes tended to live together or near each other and to divide labor. Most people living far from their families and not knowing their neighbors is mostly a recent Western phenomenon. Older people took care of and taught younger children while the more able-bodied adults did the manual labor. There have always been economic systems and trade, and the more intricate the system and the more specialized the labor, the better quality of life was in general.
Capitalism remains the best system, of course, because the other extreme, communism, doesn’t provide enough incentive for production and innovation. I especially dislike the fact that in communism, the hardest workers get the same credit and compensation as the slackers do. We may end up with something in-between at some point in the future, at least temporarily. The idea isn’t an extremely pleasant one but it may be necessary at least for awhile if one of the following or something similar happens to occur:
– The economy completely collapses
– We have war in our own country – civil war or invasion
– If peak oil really is true. We will never suddenly, completely run out of oil. Its easy availability will decline (very slowly at first) and over time become prohibitively expensive. There’s “plenty” of oil left, but it will require more energy to extract it from shale and to find it in harder-to-get-to locations.
I believe it would be a good idea to start thinking about ways to cooperate within a family or community. Read about intentional communities and how they organize, their criteria for membership, and their division of labor. Maybe adapt some of their ideas to use in a family household. If you happen to have the opportunity to make some type of alternative living arrangement, you could benefit from taking it and doing it early. It’s always better to choose something than have something forced upon you. Maybe you could find out what skills or products others could offer for barter in your area, and figure out what you could offer that isn’t already being done. If everyone you know has chickens, you could raise sheep. Find a need and fill it, something that most people can’t do. For example, don’t rely on growing tomatoes or sewing for barter (unless you have an unusual level of expertise, like making clothes without a pattern). Learn a more unique and valuable skill.
There’s a fascinating guest article on a blog owned by Dmitry Orlov, author of Reinventing Collapse. It’s about a 1,050 acre commune in Tennessee [called “The Farm”] that was started in 1971 by 320 people on a 50-bus caravan from San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. While I don’t advocate their lifestyle and don’t think we all need to rush out and join a commune of course, it’s informative and interesting. They weren’t totally self-sufficient either but they had a pretty good system set up.
At its peak, there were over 1,000 people living there plus numerous guests always coming and going, which dwindled to 200 people years later, and lately their population is increasing again. When they got there, they lived in tents and buses while they were building structures for sleeping, bathing, sanitation, and a kitchen. Later they had buildings for canning and freezing, a motor pool, school, clinic, and used an old log cabin already on the property for a business center. They got water from a springhouse, stored in a reclaimed water tower. They had a party line telephone network set up that went to the buildings and even the tents, and was dialed by using Morse code. There was even a line dedicated to emergencies.
Some of the skills they used were welding, auto mechanics, construction, ham radio, printing, teaching, food preservation, and a lot of technical creativity. They had positions for fire marshal, night sentries, gate and patrol security, and medical personnel. They printed a weekly newspaper called “Amazing Tales of Real Life” and printed do-it-yourself books.
Communes are a type of “Intentional Community.” An organization called Fellowship for Intentional Community has a list of over 500 intentional communities of different kinds, and the common ingredient is shared values. Most members are between the ages of 30-60. Some are just where people live near each other to form a nice family neighborhood. Some are ecology-oriented, many are artists’ enclaves, and some share the same religion. Most of the religious ones tend to be of the New Age variety, but there are some that claim to be Christian. They tend to be egalitarian and democratic. Most are rural or suburban, and some are urban. Very few are true communes, where they share all their possessions.
A few intentional community dwellers deliberately live in crime-ridden areas to be lights in the darkness. More of them, however, form communities to get away from crime. Dmitry Orlov (mentioned above) lived in Russia for 12 years and had an opportunity to frequently visit Russia after their economic collapse. He says jobs providing security detail proliferated and he expects the same thing to happen in the U.S. Many experts advise setting up a serious version of a neighborhood watch if crime gets too rampant in the future.
Communal living, BTW, has gotten a bad name from communism and the recreational drugs and promiscuity of some of the hippies, and rightly so. Remember though, that the early Christians “had all things in common” – they sold their possessions and pooled the money. Some Jews in Israel have taken it a step further, forming kibbutzim (Hebrew for “communal settlements”). They were founded around 1940 mostly by Eastern European immigrants, so they probably were influenced by Soviet Communism. That’s just the lifestyle they were accustomed to, so that should come as no surprise. It’s worth noting that although the atheistic form of Communism has failed, the worshipers of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob have made it work for much longer – assuming they kept their Jewish roots and didn’t adhere to the atheist aspect of Soviet Communism.
There are around 700 kibbutzim in Israel now, with 40 to 1,000+ members each. Most members live in their own home and have communal playgrounds, dining halls, auditoriums, libraries, swimming pools, tennis courts, medical clinics, laundry, and grocery stores. It’s largely due to the kibbutzim that the “deserts are blooming” with agriculture in formerly barren land. They grow a large percentage of the produce that Israel exports around the world. They have businesses manufacturing a wide variety of things, specializing in metal work, plastic and processed food. They also cater to tourism, with guest houses, swimming pools, horseback riding, tennis courts, museums, exotic animal farms and water parks. They don’t have enough workers for all the labor available, so they host volunteers to live and work there for awhile, and hire locals.
Whether you get inspired to join or start an intentional community, use some of their ideas within your own neighborhood or household, or set up a bartering situation, these people are on the vanguard of what appears to be a positive trend and we can learn from their mistakes and successes.