Shedding

[Fire Water]

I was 19 and a sophomore in college when a friend showed me the big picture. Of course I was shaken up. I immediately changed my area of study to Sustainable Agriculture (I was lucky to be at a hippy school), and used that place to gain as much knowledge as I could to prepare for the future. My dad had also died recently and it became my responsibility to care for the family farm. At the time I had planned to chop it up and sell it, but things change.

I graduated and ran with the idea of doing everything in my power to prepare myself, and the farm, for the future. I’d like to say that I was really smart in how I went about it, but I was still very young. My first real success was to shed my idealism. In fact I’d say that “shedding” has probably become my most useful skill. I have had to shed friends, possessions, and maladaptive ways of being. Yes, it has been painful, but what has been even more painful for me is to hold on to the things that don’t work.

The thing about this process, it’s a give and take. Sacrificing idealism gave me practicality. Sacrificing the chicken eating dog (to a good home) led to a cat that eats mice and costs nothing. Giving up a house full of stuff has yielded a home that is simple and easy to maintain. Here’s my advice: if you want to be a good gardener, start by selling the Volvo. The number one thing that anyone coming into this should understand, it’s an investment.

I’d say the rewards have been worth it. I have all the friends that I want, tight friends. Friends who have something to offer. As things change I find that doors are opening for me. People are coming to see me as an asset and I help them where I can. With no car I get around by bicycle. I’m in great shape, and the garden is nutritious. The best thing: my time is my own.

Keep it simple, stupid. That works for me. Radical self-reliance works for me. Not being worried about saving the world will probably end up saving my sanity. I’d like to leave you with some hopeful conclusion, but the truth is that I don’t see much hope, just generations of hard work that has been neglected. Without people doing that work there is no hope. So if there is any hope out there it is that enough people will take this message and those like it seriously, and take the necessary steps. May God bless those who do.

[Swineherder]

Great little essay. What a neat life experience! The only true learning comes from doing, all the rest is just regurgitating someone else’s knowledge. The future will belong to those who can do – not to those who just read and comment.

Keep telling us of your experience which is sharing your knowledge. It is not so much that we will do what you do but your experiences show us what we can do.

[Glennda]

Thank you for sharing what you’ve been doing, Fire Water

Shedding mal-adaptive friends is a good part of making life better. Complainers went first from my life, then some of those who can’t bear to listen to my doomer prophecies. Now I share stories of gardening and the Occupy movement. Also the acquantences I see at Occupy actions and meetings are becoming friends I connect with more.

I’d like to look at your Radical Self-Reliance a little differently. You say in your piece –

“I have all the friends that I want, tight friends. Friends who have something to offer. As things change I find that doors are opening for me. People are coming to see me as an asset and I help them where I can.”

For me the challenge is pulling together a network of “tight friends” who can help each other. Locally in Berkeley/Oakland CA there are Transition Towns and Time Banks in very rudimentary form. It all seems very chaotic at this point. Pehaps people like me are getting their personal gear (aka Urban doomstead) together and don’t have time at this point to ferret out the networks or forge them.

I’m very intersted in what other places, city dwellers especially, are doing to build the local community structures we will need after the SHTF.

[Swineherder]

Responding to the last post, I would like to offer some thoughts. Cities, at least as we know them as mega gatherings of population may very well be a historical aberration. The main reason is they have to suck their sustainability from a large area. Think of all the food, minerals, water, resources that have to be gathered somewhere and brought to a central location to support massive amounts of people.

As long as the periphery can support the city, it works. But – but what happens when the farmers no longer farm. When the transportation system can no longer move the goods from wildly divergent areas to your location. Also, the periphery itself gets depleted. The forest get cut down, the oil wells dry up, the agricultural lands get depleted, the mines run out of ore. These are realities the city person seldom sees and to date we have managed to compensate by going farther afield – but the field is finite and we are at the edges of it in many ways.

So, it seems to me that we have to disperse. We have to go back to small groups, villages, towns at the most and that we have to be sustainable within that area to a very large degree. Doing that is a several generation type of learning. If a city person goes to the country, they literally know nothing. Think, do you know how to help a sheep birth a lamb? Do you know how to slaughter a pig? Do you know how to dig a well or find water?

Our civilization is built on two factors. One is electricity and the second is fossil fuels. If you read the stats, we are already close to our capacity in electrical generation and our grid may soon become unreliable. It appears we are at the top of the curve on peak oil and though we are comfortable at the moment, if you look at the graphs, the decline is fast.

And finally, we have to look at governance. Over the last 4 – 5 hundred years our systems of governance have become huge and the individual is more and more finding themselves limited by governance which exists for those at the top rather than for the greater community. Wars are the result – not of you and me who would find it difficult to harm another human being but by a few we have given authority or they have taken the authority to engage in this most hateful practice. A practice which destroys life, property, infrastructure and community. Small communities of tribal size may have violent disagreements that lead to one individual killing another but they don’t develop bunker buster bombs or nuclear devices that kill and destroy thousands. Our civilization is very uncivilized as long as we have war which comes from governance by a few of the many.

The new pioneer is not the one who goes to the moon and stars. In my opinion, the new pioneer learns sustainability within a limited ecosystem and raises their children with that ethos.

[Author]

Posts