A Homesteader’s Philosophical Dilemma

“Interesting article:

‘I wanted to physically make the world a better place,’ Janes said. With his family’s help, he bought 40 acres of forested land on Denman Island. It came with two trailers. Janes and a girlfriend he’s no longer with moved into one, and promptly sold the other — ‘a big, ugly, white vinyl doublewide,’ he said. They planted a vegetable garden and got some chickens. Self-sufficiency ‘was definitely an ideal,’ Janes explained, ‘but we were doing everything we could’ to achieve it.

-Mike W”

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I realized in the ”60s and 70s that self-sufficiency is a DIRECTION. You never will get there, even remotely. In those years we were raising a lot of our own food, and when I planted some wheat and went through all the steps to get it from the field to flour for bread (unlike potatoes or corn, which you eat just the way it comes out of the ground), I saw that self sufficiency is a myth. BUT that’s no reason to give up. The idea is to become as self-sufficient as possible. AND, we weren’t really doing it to make the world a better place. We did it because whatever we could produce was better and cheaper and more tuned in than what we could buy.  Like building one’s own house. AND in doing that, it turns out that it IS better for the world.

-LK

About Lloyd Kahn

Lloyd Kahn started building his own home in the early '60s and went on to publish books showing homeowners how they could build their own homes with their own hands. He got his start in publishing by working as the shelter editor of the Whole Earth Catalog with Stewart Brand in the late '60s. He has since authored six highly-graphic books on homemade building, all of which are interrelated. The books, "The Shelter Library Of Building Books," include Shelter, Shelter II (1978), Home Work (2004), Builders of the Pacific Coast (2008), Tiny Homes (2012), and Tiny Homes on the Move (2014). Lloyd operates from Northern California studio built of recycled lumber, set in the midst of a vegetable garden, and hooked into the world via five Mac computers. You can check out videos (one with over 450,000 views) on Lloyd by doing a search on YouTube:

3 Responses to A Homesteader’s Philosophical Dilemma

  1. Lloyd your comment at the end of this post is the best, most simple direct explanation of self -sufficiency I have ever read. It should be enshrined!
    Many Thanks
    Scrap

  2. I grow over wintering soft red wheat in our garden. It's not for bread baking but suitable for pasta. I skip the ground flour trip and use the whole berry as I use rice, barley, oats,…boil the grain and season as you like. It's good!

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