I’ve been reading another Michael Pollan interview. He’s the guy with the radical, seven-word nutritional theory:
Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.
Naturally, anything this simple must be accompanied by a book which explains what food is, how to attain a leafy-plant based diet, and how to learn self-control at the plate. Pollan also make an argument that not only are over-processed foods non-nutritious, mono-culture food production is inherently poisonous. He says:
“We’re using the original solar technology, photosynthesis, making food from sunlight, but we’ve mistakenly focused on fossil fuel. We’re taking 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce one calorie of food energy. It doesn’t have to be that way.”
I’ve been dwelling on sustainable living, with an emphasis on long, healthy lives. It is obvious to me that if I wish to avoid excessive health-care costs in my old age, I need to maintain a discipline of activity and nutrition, rest and recreation. Spending 10 oil calories to create one food calorie is neither sustainable nor desirable. Not only that, but I would rather eat organic vegetables from my own gardens produced with poly-culture food production techniques. With the price of housing and fuel, food and materials all skyrocketing, my overriding concern is how little time I now have to invest myself into my own sustenance.The snappy analysis (on my part) is that I have delayed action on these things because I am unsettled about where I should plant myself. I am clear that where I am now will not work. Pardon the bluebird of happiness and all, but I live on a postage stamp in a tree-filled, early-60’s suburb. My backyard is too small and too shady to seriously culture. I have watched my wife’s diligent work over the last five years and agree with her assessment that sun-hungry food crops simply will not grow well here. (If the front yard were larger or less shady, I’d even consider that alternative. But it’s not.) The other problem is that the land is simply too expensive to grow food upon.I love my neighborhood: I love our location, I’ve grown accustomed to my neighbors and local restaurants — we’re so central and yet well ensconced within South Austin. So much of what I dream of doing involves transforming a big chunk of land into a sustainable habitat — it’s simply not appropriate to do any of it on rental property in the middle of town. I’ve frequently daydreamed about buying an abandoned farm or homestead in an adjacent, Western county, and we’ve crisscrossed it so often that I know almost exactly where. It has been hard to consider making the break away from the friends and culture we’ve grown accustomed to, as would be required if we moved out into the sticks.
At the same time, it is just such a break that would provide the opportunity to develop new, sustainable habits, to solve old problems in new ways, and to rebuild a network of sustainable life support. One certainly opens oneself up to a vast improvement in quality of life when one controls ones own food production. Not only would the food taste better, but would actually be better for me. Better nutrition now means better health down the road. I’m excited to start, but I still have many unresolved issues.
Foremost: it’s counterproductive to assume that I can build a sustainable network of life support all by myself. I would certainly want my wife and child to be supported, but also my parents, and I’d like to be able to offer assistance to my siblings and siblings-in-law — so I’ve got a handful of potential dependents that I would like to house and feed. In order to really meet everyone’s needs, there has to be more able-bodied people — a working community — who can provide the means to support all of the dependents.
This is where I begin to get lost, as once you add people, you add complexity. So many more questions: How many ‘workers’ are needed to support how many ‘dependents’? How much land will be needed? How do we determine membership? How will housing be arranged? What would the community produce that would pay both for the land and for any other financial obligations the community might hold? How are investments in and ownership of the community managed? Will members ‘buy’ in? Will they be ‘paid out’ when they leave?
In brief, all of the problems of starting a corporation, a small town, and a sustainable community will hit all at the same time. I hesitate to move forward in that direction for fear of having to be responsible for these very kinds of decisions. The unpleasant aspects of running a non-profit organization are very clear to me, and the political fallout for being the one holding the bag is not to be relished. My desire to put more of my own sustenance under my own control grows stronger. Now I’m faced with the realization that I’m being cheated — even in the grocery store! — by food overproduced 1000%, unnecessarily wasting resources and degrading the food in the process.
Somewhere exists my Holy Land. I’m betting it’s in central Texas. I don’t know where or how big, but I know it’s out there. On that land, I’ll build super-insulated homes with thick, adobe walls, embedded with heating coils provided by camouflaged passive solar water heaters. The junipers will be stripped away and native oaks and elms will be restored. Polyculture gardens and orchards planted along areas with lots of open, Southern exposure. Water will be collected and retained in vast quantities, for personal use and for agriculture.
If all this work is done just for me and my immediate family, it would be an incredible waste of resources. Very, very expensive, and sure to be uneven work since I’m not skilled in building adobes or planting polyculture gardens. If we failed, we would have nothing to eat. If we were even moderately successful, we would have more food than we could eat or sell. Everything I know about long-term sustainable cultures indicates that several families are required in order to reasonably share the risk and the work and the fruits of such work. Further, the cultural unity of those families must be without break or question. Without instituting some new culture or forcing the majority into converting to a specific faith, it would seem to be extremely difficult to find compatible families unless they were self-selecting, somehow.
Since I’m at an impasse, I come again from another direction. I should look to see what existing sustainable communities already exist and seek to tie in with them. I may lose much of the direct control I seek, but would be placing trust in a similar community mechanism would get me the same result. Again, finding a group with compatible cultures is going to be difficult. Assessing the long-term viability of a group is problematic if the assessment is based on the presence of particular people and not community processes. At the very least, such a search may provide more ideas and suggestions if I do decide to go off on my own anyway.
All food for thought.
9 responses so far ↓
1 sanguinea // Apr 3, 2008 at 8:41 am
good luck in your research! *grin* i go back and forth with my desire to be part of such a community. i would certainly require “my own damn hut.”
two intentional communities i have had personal experience with -
Eastwind in MO is one rural IC that sells products. i just visited for a few days, but damn it was beautiful and nicely set up. i had fresh milk straight from the cow and it was the best milk i’ve ever had. good opportunity for privacy, but it’s in the sticks, dude.
Ganas, in Staten Island, is a good one to investigate for ideas on structure - they have 3 (if i recall correctly) levels of involvement - core group, extended core group, and people who just live there and pay “expenses”, aka rent. i lived there for three years. they run a few resale stores in the neighborhood, too. big personal drawback - lack of privacy.
2 xephyr // Apr 3, 2008 at 8:48 am
What were your privacy issues and what would have helped to resolve them?
3 sanguinea // Apr 3, 2008 at 9:21 am
well, ganas is about 10 houses and has a population of between about 75-90 people at any given time. anyone can go in any house. the house i lived in had about 10 people, so i was almost never alone in the house - getting a measure of solitude is important to me to recharge and enjoy. going out into the woods to be alone was not an option because, um, staten island.
if i was in a more rural (but not incredibly in the sticks - hours from nowhere) setting with my own little cottage, it would be fine. or even if i was in a house with a few people, but there were spaces people could go and be assured of solitude - like a hermit cottage or something, i bet that would work, too.
4 jessaries // Apr 3, 2008 at 9:26 am
My square foot gardening friends move their boxes with them…. It’s a great way to just learn what these food crops do and get familiar with them (if you aren’t already?).
I have way, way too little space to do everything I plan on, eventually Brian says I can garden on the roof if I run out of space, seriously.
Hey and since you’re so brainy you’d like the biointensive methods, http://www.growbiointensive.org/publications_main.html.
I’m understand, and the one thing I’m realizing is that *I* can’t do it all.
5 xephyr // Apr 3, 2008 at 9:30 am
Sqft gardening is awesome, but still not practical when your yard is covered in ash and pecan shade for all but a few hours a day.
Although, the idea of building the housing such that the roof space is used for agricultural production is really smart.
6 kaffee_spinne // Apr 3, 2008 at 9:47 am
We’re planting in our back yard: vegetables, herbs, fruit trees. At some point I’d love a small chicken coop.
For the moment: we get a box from a local CSA every two weeks. Pickup is a short trip down Brodie in another neighborhood. It provides more than enough vegetables for us. We’re also very close to Costco and HEBs for bulk staples.
I like the idea of neighborhood sharing/bartering of things one has in excess (baked goods, eggs, zuccinni, or trade skills). My neighborhood has a great community, e-list, tons of young kids and organizes community events. For the most part we’re taking baby steps. Closely nearby in another neighborhood I pick up raw milk every two weeks that comes from another nearby farm.
Some folks in my neighborhood have joined a local beer collective. I think this is getting to be the way to go for things.
7 jessaries // Apr 3, 2008 at 10:07 am
I’ll never be able to sell this place to anyone normal. My psuedo plan is that if we ever do move out to use this space as my mini intensive city/market farm, or something atleast until I get my perenial plants established at the new place and then?
Yes, in Texas south wall plants and rooftop gardens are a good idea!
We have a *gasp* Arizona Ash in the front yard, it’s killin’ me! The shade and cool climate under is great, but man it takes up a lot of space and does some damage if we let it go. And it’s in a stupid place, almost 30 and probably gonna die eventually. grrr
8 scorpionis // Apr 3, 2008 at 12:10 pm
One by one the Arizona Ashes in our neighborhood are falling down, branch by branch. I worry a lot about the one in the neighbor’s yard because it hangs over our driveway, and every Spring with the first storm bearing 60mph straight line winds, branches litter the streets. Big ones. They’re simply too brittle to withstand our weather in the Spring and the ice storms in the winter: I think they were planted because they grow fast. And I HATE those little spiky seed things they drop every year: I can’t walk in the yard barefoot.
9 scorpionis // Apr 3, 2008 at 12:26 pm
I would love for my daily job to be tending the gardens and what little livestock we owned for milk and eggs. I’d like to learn how to make butter, cheese, wine, beer, mead, and other food products that only a hundred years ago many people knew how to make, but we have now replaced with mass manufactured “food”. If we still ate meat I’d learn how to build a smoker for preserving it. I’d build a root cellar to store the vegetables.
I think has established a great starting model for how to get personal sustainability going. They grow food, sell eggs, raise Alpacas for their wool, and are (last I checked) trying to make and sell products from the wool without just selling it to a dealer. Of course, they’re about as far into the sticks as you can get! I’d like to try to emulate part of what they’ve done without being so far away, but cheapness of land is one reason they’re where they are.
The Holy Land is here: we just have to find the right spot without risking being the owners of that farm on Brodie at 290 that is now surrounded by strip malls.
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