Homesteading at The End of The World
And watching the world burn on our phones.
Hello Sentinels,
It’s been a hard week, watching our government ignore a potential cluster of bird flu in Missouri while an historic hurricane washes away part of the country. I’ve got family and friends in the heart of the danger zone. Fortunately, they’ve finally notified us that they’re doing mostly okay.
If you’ve been wondering what’s going on with my old site, OK Doomer, I’ve finally managed to fix the broken links. It will continue to exist in the world for people who want it. I’m posting my work here on Substack as well as my alternate site here. It doesn’t matter which one you sign up for.
You can manage things here.
Here are some stories you might be interested in:
I’ve been writing about public health a lot lately. I’m finally getting around to balancing that out with some other content readers have grown to appreciate. Here, I explore the history of homesteading as an antidote to all the YouTubers we see out there, showing off their giant pantries. It matters because some of us have been wondering how practical that lifestyle would be now. I’m planning to follow this up with another post or two about histories of food preservation and water sourcing, because it’s just good information to have:
Here’s a more personal essay on the state of things:
Earlier this year, I also did a deep dive on bunkers. Here’s an updated version that’s free for everyone. Honestly, it’s a fun read:
A lot of writers send one post out at a time. I’m trying not to clog up everyone’s inboxes, so I’ll be sending out digests of posts once or twice a week. You can always check the site or the app if you want more frequent updates.
This newsletter is free, but it relies on support to keep going.
If you can, please consider that.
I subscribe to several “everything is terrible” and “we are all gonna die” publications.
If you are writing about public health, or what I like to call, survival of the richest (and richest white people at that), you gotta check out gofundme.
Americans pay for every life emergency through begging.
All of the illnesses that covid causes are happening to people- and they are all asking for help. Parents begging for money to bury their premature baby, siblings begging for money to bury their sister who died from pregnancy complications, wives begging for money to replace their husbands income- cause he died from sepsis, a single mom
Begging for money as she is 30 and dying from aml. The list goes on. Covid is still killing people, but they don’t know that it is Covid that is killing them.
It would break me if I were not already broken 😞
Yes, I get frustrated by the homesteading glamour posts. I'm Australian and have been attempting to live in reciprocity with the living world for 25 years, (and I'm still a beginner) and yup, the woodpile is a source of angst. We rely on it for everything... and we rely on the chainsaw. I bought a crosscut saw, but we have hard wood down here, it's called that for a reason. I call American woods 'butter-wood.' But at least we don't have bears. What I do think we should be doing is adopting a lot more appropriate technology. Using our ingenuity to make stuff that can be easily repaired, replicated and recycled and that augments the human body rather than replaces it. If we did that and adopted a collaborative local approach to everything we do and need (and by need I mean, need) - I believe we can live lives better than those of our ancestors. But they'd still be a lot harder than they are now. Says me, almost functionally exhausted at 56. I wrote about this in The Quiet Revolution: Debt Free & Working Less, How Our Species Survives.