Sustainable Community Living

I was talking with a friend this morning about the changes that are occurring in our world – such as the scarcity of food, rising fuel costs, farmland losses due to topsoil erosion, freshwater availability – and I was asking him how he was planning for the future – how was he going to mitigate any major changes that could cause “modern society” to come to a grinding halt.

I was speaking of course about becoming more self-sufficient, how did he plan to (as Farmer John says) “disentangle” himself from being only a tiny cog in the huge economic and agricultural machine that is todays world.  Did he have a garden?  What about a few chickens for his eggs?  How about planting some fruit trees so he could at least have fresh fruit for a few weeks a year?  Was he off the grid?  Did he have compact florescent as his light bulbs?  How about keeping his tires inflated or oil topped off so he used less gasoline?

These are all relatively harmless things that are becoming mainstream.  Not a huge leap.  It’s still allows a comfortable way of living.  However, he’s still in the middle of a big city, still buys 95% of his own food, 100% of his own fuel (car and electricity).  In a word, he’s still “dependent” on that giant machine called the global market!

I asked him to think back to this summer and how dangerously close we, as a country, came to loosing our food security.  We were down to less than a month of grain reserves.  That was the lowest we came as a nation in over 20 years to not meeting our own food needs!  That doesn’t count the additional cost we as a nation have to pay to transport and ship that food since we aren’t a local food producing economy.

If oil goes up, if food supplies go down, if costs of production rise (since fertilizer comes from natural gas, it will) what happens then?  What happens when supplies get slim and demand keeps up or raises (if the population goes up)?  You have runs on things.  Remember the articles about Costco and Sam’s clubs rationing wheat and rice sales to one bag per customer?

Well to be blunt, people begin to get desperate and buying up stuff which makes things MUCH more expensive!  If you believe in Peak Oil, if you believe that a higher demand coupled with a decreased supply equals worldwide problems, if you believe that honey bees are in trouble and having a harder and harder time doing their job, if you believe this is a throw-away society, then it’s not about fear!

It’s about being prepared for when things happen that are out of our control.  Buy seeds today – not in two years when they’re skyrocketing costs are prohibitive.  Buy those garden tools today – not when your worried about cutbacks at work and how you’re going to put food on the table.  Buy (or help to buy) land today – not when you’re 200 miles away sitting at a desk pushing papers – those papers will be there in two years, but the fertile land that has been worked for two years and produces beautifully will only be a dream.

Things take time to develop and grow.  Gardens take time to become fertile, water systems need time and several seasons to be prooven, housing takes time to construct, people need time to adjust to new ways of living.

If you’re not prepared today to move from the city and become a farmer, I understand!  There are those of us who are further along that path than you.  Let us pave that road for you.  You don’t have to do it now, but someone does!  If things aren’t prepared NOW, when things shift and change, they’ll be too expensive, or worse, simply NOT AVAILABLE!

As I said in the title, it’s not about fear – it’s about economics…what you put in today is an investment in the future.  Buy low today so that higher prices tomorrow won’t limit your choices.