Now I know why my great-grandmother stepped out of her farm kitchen to pose for a picture looking like she just rolled around in the mud. She didn't smile either. Nobody smiled in those old photos. And all my ancestors couldn't wait to get off the farm. I'm thinking I should hang on to The Whole Earth catalog on my shelf. Thanks, Jessica for giving us the hard truth.
I wrote something similar but not nearly as good for Medium recently - even if we could grow and preserve enough food to survive, a world without vaccines or antibiotics would take us back to 18th century life expectancies pretty quickly. Not to mention the gas would all break down, so kiss your Mad Max fantasies good bye.
First the collapse, the fighting, the dying. Then some kind of rebuilding that will not be like the 1800s or the 2000s but something we can't quite imagine. And very few of us (certainly not me) alive for it.
{Note: Apologies Jessica - I do not in any way mean this to be condescending to you or to anyone....
For others, read to the end. I very much support all of Jessica's conclusions. In the first part I am talking about my own experiences and those of my parents and grandparents. Our generations are longer than most, and I am old. As a result, I am closer to those times. I experienced parts of them. There is an inevitable problem with history. We all of us, myself included, relate from the world we grew up in and live in. We see things as being different than they were and see hardship where the reality was different rom reality as we know it. This is unavoidable. We cannot know their times without living their times. Even recreations that provide a taste of their conditions are inadequate to actually understand their conditions.
I would also note that the emotional and social conditions of today are entirely unlike what they were in the 1960s. And those in he 1960s are utterly different from the 1920s and 30s of my parents, and for them from the 1860s and 1870s of my grandparents childhoods. The social norms of those who grew up in the 1990s and 2000s is entirely alien to those of us who grew up in the 1950s and 60s. In my case, I was an outlier even from my own generation. Despite my best efforts i tend to transgress todays norms. Thank you for pointing it out.}
Jessica, it wasn't nearly as bad as you describe. Well, unless you lived somewhere like Oklahoma or Wyoming, Kansas, or Dakota ... Location was everything - then as now. Pick a place with a gentle climate and giving land like the Willamette Valley of Oregon, or many coastal locations, or the Puget Sound, and things are a lot easier.
For the natives of the Puget sound, when the first white folks arrived and asked them how they get food, the local native Americans looked at them like they were stupid (which they were), and replied that they just go down to the beach and pick it up. Clams, Geoducks, various other bivalves were plentiful. Fishing for salmon or eel was easy. And game was everywhere.
Fresh pure water was everywhere too. Even wells, Where I live, sinking a well means using a 10-20 foot section of plastic pipe and a water compressor to drive water down the pipe as you sink it down the well. Then most commonly putting a well pump down the casing, which can be driven by solar or wind, or even mechanically.
Etc. My father grew up in a home his grandfather built from lumber he cut down and processed by his own hands using axes, wedges, adzes, planes, crosscut saws, and other specialized tools. He crafted most of those himself. I still have his grinding stone that he created.
That house had a solid zinc counter in the kitchen, and a hand pumped well in the kitchen sink. The house was heated with a wood stove, and the freezer (used in winter) was a cabinet in the kitchen that had a screen on the back open to the outdoors. For half the year they had an ice box.
They carved the ice from the creek and stored it in their ice house between alternating layers of straw. When my folks went back to visit in the 1980s, there was still some ice in the ice house that my dad and his brother had put there in the 1940s.
My grandfather ranched and farmed five sections of land. That was mostly in timothy hay. He raised 10,000 head of Rone horses (work horses for ploughing ...) and 15,000 head of sheep.
It was all hard work. Baths were typically once a week. Laundry was done in a wood fired hand stirred pot with caustic lye soap and a hand crank tool to squeeze the cloth, and a wash board to scrub.
The food was simpler, but good, and plentiful.
My father who grew up in that house, and he rode to down in a horse drawn sleigh, went on to build much of the industry that powered the world through to the 2010s.
By age 10, I got to see the inner workings of steel mills, industrial air plants, slaughter houses, industrial bakeries and breweries, chemical plants, fiber board plants, paper mills, and much more. I was trained in all of that - from hand working wood with tools from the 1800s to high end computers of the space age. From laying screeds and pouring concrete to plumbing, wiring, control systems, carpentry, glazing, making high explosives, felling trees, planing, making soap, or candkes, bee keeping, gardening, you name it.
Plus art, writing, poetry, and all the rest.
The thing about living in that age was that it was routine to learn all sorts of skills. They were life. And too working together with others to build or harvest, or play.
By comparison, today we are in so many ways dummer, less capable, simpler in thought, and isolated.
Still, trying to revert from todays world to that one is nearly impossible. The learning curve is extreme. The labor is hard.
But most importantly, there are more than 50 times too many of us to do that. The Earth cannot support the sheer number of people a;live today in perpetuity, let alone in a subsistence mode.
Even just the loss of fertilizer production from nitrogen results in the immediate loss of ability to feed 85% of people alive today.
As we move into and deeper into the inevitable future of catastrophic climate we are driven ever further from conditions that can support more than a small fraction of the population in subsistence mode.
As climate change accelerates that change is driven farther and harder toward lower ability to support us, or many other creatures. Most species alive will perish in the transition, even in the most optimistic scenario.
Add to the environmental calamities coming one atop another at ever faster rates.
My best guess now is that the ultimate calamity in the next century that will change everything almost overnight is the sudden conversion of the atmospheric circulation from a three cell system to a one cell equable climate system. When that happens, agriculture as we know it will become impossible. Species habitats will collapse chaotically.
The ideas of trying to "save" endangered species will become ludicrous as their habitats no longer exist. They key then will become ludicrous to somehow anticipate where usable ecosystem places will be, and then helping plants and animals to get there and adapt there as rapidly as possible. That will be fought fiercely by people unable to grasp the scale and scope of the change and problems.
Do you see the condescending tone at the beginning of your comment? The point of the article, as you eventually seem to admit, is that most people who tried homesteading now would not have the same experience as your grandparents. Thanks for sharing. Otherwise, informative.
Its just realizing not everyone will survive. If the truck stops 90% will be dead in OECD countries. We should have realized this 50 years ago with limits to growth. We saved a lot of lives with the green revolution, but its postponed the hunger.
There are definitely varying degrees of how practical "homesteading" is and yes it is a TON of work to do things by hand such as laundry, busting sod, and so on (not to mention the huge expense of time to do those things manually). However I've found in my discussions with people that even something like hanging up laundry to dry on the line blows their minds, if they can even get past the idea that it's "boring" and they don't wanna do it. That widespread paucity of basic skills (with no desire to learn or do them) is part of the "homesteading is hard" mindset IMO.
And as others have said, there is no way the current global population can all become homesteaders. There will be a huge die-off when grids go down, medications run out, and of course the violence. I've been working for years now to "collapse now and avoid the rush" and have built up a lot of non-tech skills. Will it save me? Likely not. Will I try to live as long as I can? Absolutely.
I could say something about this. I think the point is that people who want to do “homesteading” cannot make it in the real world. They imagine some way they can escape reality.
My father was such a nut job. This was back in the early 1960s. We would go through this drama every time he walked out of a job because people did not talk just right.
He was not going to live in this degenerate society anymore. The Jews made it impossible for an upright and honorable man to live. Someday someone would finally shoot Rockefeller and the world would go back to the ideal state that existed before the 1930s.
We were going to move onto this miserable scrap of land he owned, near his own father’s farm. He was going to finish the shack which he had started several times. My mom was going to grow vegetables and look after some cows and chickens. He was going to do odd jobs for some people who still lived in the area, who were part of this nutty cult he adhered to.
His sister was married to someone with similar beliefs. It was a sort of hillbilly attitude; if you just live on nothing, you do not have to give in to anything. They were still living like that at that time, outdoor plumbing, hand pumps, etc.
It was all loads of fun, especially when we came to visit them over Christmas in the Canadian prairie winter. Bunking up with my cousins in an unheated pig shed, in minus forty weather, oboy!
Needless to say my Mom did not go along with this. She would make clear that he could find another paying job quick, or he could go live in his shack by himself. She and us kids would continue to live in the house in the city which her own parents bought and paid for.
Mom and her family could not get their heads wrapped around the idea of divorce.
Even my Aunt and her Husband did not think my parents would be able to make it at that kind of style. They were astute.
Even they gave up on that lifestyle. As his manure business succeeded, they knocked down their old shack and put up a modern, prefab house. Indoor plumbing, so swanky!
As for Wildfire’s vision of apocalypse, with everyone just starving to death as systems collapse, I do not think it will work that way. More likely, systems serving certain populations will be simply shut down.
It might look a bit like Gaza, with a militarized state trying to exterminate a population they have lost control of.
Great Article. Kind of hard to read through the realities.
We have a bit of land and try to grow some of our food, but every year something different throws us off. We plant too late and don't have as much as we need of one thing or the plants aren't harvestable when we think they will be. Eight years in to our garden, the only thing we have kept going long enough to feed us was Kale and collards, and honestly, they kept themselves going.
It would be nice if we really were working together with our neighbors to feed each other.
Tidbit. In a wet place, like northeast US, to dig a well about 15 ft deep, you would dig a hole about the size of 1-car garage (or more). Then, staring at the spot you hit adequate water, you build a tube (circular wall) a few feet tall, then the dirt back in up to the height of the wall. Then continue build wall/filling in dirt until you're back at the top.
Using every spare minute when not doing daily survival tasks, you could start in spring with the black flies, work through the humid summer, and you might have something reliable by the time your hands were freezing to the shovel in November.
If it collapses at any point, just dig back down and start over.
I welcome this article on prepping and homesteading. You are correct about the likely, ultimate exhaustion and futility of those methods, and of subsistence living. The TV series "Alone" makes it clear that "experts" from developed societies can't last more than two, maybe three months of subsistence hunting, fishing and foraging. With no human competition. At best they slowly starve from lack of food and companionship.
I choose to believe that there is a sustainable, equitable path for civilization. The likelihood of humans embracing it, let alone achieving it, becomes worse every day.
Hate to be a Debbie Downer, but we also need to factor in challenges such as:
--folks experiencing brain damage, diminished immune systems and damaged systems/organs due to the pandemic;
--environmental fallout from abrupt climate change: unpredictable weather, catastrophic events such as fire and smoke, drought, floods--AND even earthquakes & volcanic eruptions due to the shifting tectonic plates from glacial melt
I don't see anything wrong with a homesteader renting an excavator for a weekend or having solar panels and cell service. The inevitable end of collapse entails the end of that sort of industrial capacity, but for now it's still there. The great bulk of work involved in homesteading is building the property to begin with. Everything from the physical infrastructure like fencing, housing, toilets etc to the capacity of the land like regenerating soil, planting orchards, etc.
Instead of putting these people down, we should be asking what lessons we can learn from them. You're right in that it's absolute nonsense to simply tell the urban poor to homestead. However I look at the privileged people homesteading as pioneering processes which may inspire future resilience. For example, as collapse accelerates they are a model for A WAY of adapting. Yes, I cannot afford to rent an excavator, but my community can. When the time comes that the community finally sees that this way of life can't continue I'll have real life examples to point to and say "hey guys, let's do something like this."
Will it save the world? No. Is it a good idea. Yes.
Peasant grandparents knew how to do a lot of this, parents some of it, we know none of it. Community is everything.
Great work reality-checking some of us idealists/optimists, and painting a portrait of what this could look like in practice.
Do you feel like there is a way to implement something like this, on a community/collective level?
Now I know why my great-grandmother stepped out of her farm kitchen to pose for a picture looking like she just rolled around in the mud. She didn't smile either. Nobody smiled in those old photos. And all my ancestors couldn't wait to get off the farm. I'm thinking I should hang on to The Whole Earth catalog on my shelf. Thanks, Jessica for giving us the hard truth.
I wrote something similar but not nearly as good for Medium recently - even if we could grow and preserve enough food to survive, a world without vaccines or antibiotics would take us back to 18th century life expectancies pretty quickly. Not to mention the gas would all break down, so kiss your Mad Max fantasies good bye.
First the collapse, the fighting, the dying. Then some kind of rebuilding that will not be like the 1800s or the 2000s but something we can't quite imagine. And very few of us (certainly not me) alive for it.
It's going to be a weird fusion of different time periods.
This is amazing, essential even. I'm insulin dependent so very interested in the cooperative, sustainable, moderate option -- like, yesterday.
Lol.
{Note: Apologies Jessica - I do not in any way mean this to be condescending to you or to anyone....
For others, read to the end. I very much support all of Jessica's conclusions. In the first part I am talking about my own experiences and those of my parents and grandparents. Our generations are longer than most, and I am old. As a result, I am closer to those times. I experienced parts of them. There is an inevitable problem with history. We all of us, myself included, relate from the world we grew up in and live in. We see things as being different than they were and see hardship where the reality was different rom reality as we know it. This is unavoidable. We cannot know their times without living their times. Even recreations that provide a taste of their conditions are inadequate to actually understand their conditions.
I would also note that the emotional and social conditions of today are entirely unlike what they were in the 1960s. And those in he 1960s are utterly different from the 1920s and 30s of my parents, and for them from the 1860s and 1870s of my grandparents childhoods. The social norms of those who grew up in the 1990s and 2000s is entirely alien to those of us who grew up in the 1950s and 60s. In my case, I was an outlier even from my own generation. Despite my best efforts i tend to transgress todays norms. Thank you for pointing it out.}
Jessica, it wasn't nearly as bad as you describe. Well, unless you lived somewhere like Oklahoma or Wyoming, Kansas, or Dakota ... Location was everything - then as now. Pick a place with a gentle climate and giving land like the Willamette Valley of Oregon, or many coastal locations, or the Puget Sound, and things are a lot easier.
For the natives of the Puget sound, when the first white folks arrived and asked them how they get food, the local native Americans looked at them like they were stupid (which they were), and replied that they just go down to the beach and pick it up. Clams, Geoducks, various other bivalves were plentiful. Fishing for salmon or eel was easy. And game was everywhere.
Fresh pure water was everywhere too. Even wells, Where I live, sinking a well means using a 10-20 foot section of plastic pipe and a water compressor to drive water down the pipe as you sink it down the well. Then most commonly putting a well pump down the casing, which can be driven by solar or wind, or even mechanically.
Etc. My father grew up in a home his grandfather built from lumber he cut down and processed by his own hands using axes, wedges, adzes, planes, crosscut saws, and other specialized tools. He crafted most of those himself. I still have his grinding stone that he created.
That house had a solid zinc counter in the kitchen, and a hand pumped well in the kitchen sink. The house was heated with a wood stove, and the freezer (used in winter) was a cabinet in the kitchen that had a screen on the back open to the outdoors. For half the year they had an ice box.
They carved the ice from the creek and stored it in their ice house between alternating layers of straw. When my folks went back to visit in the 1980s, there was still some ice in the ice house that my dad and his brother had put there in the 1940s.
My grandfather ranched and farmed five sections of land. That was mostly in timothy hay. He raised 10,000 head of Rone horses (work horses for ploughing ...) and 15,000 head of sheep.
It was all hard work. Baths were typically once a week. Laundry was done in a wood fired hand stirred pot with caustic lye soap and a hand crank tool to squeeze the cloth, and a wash board to scrub.
The food was simpler, but good, and plentiful.
My father who grew up in that house, and he rode to down in a horse drawn sleigh, went on to build much of the industry that powered the world through to the 2010s.
By age 10, I got to see the inner workings of steel mills, industrial air plants, slaughter houses, industrial bakeries and breweries, chemical plants, fiber board plants, paper mills, and much more. I was trained in all of that - from hand working wood with tools from the 1800s to high end computers of the space age. From laying screeds and pouring concrete to plumbing, wiring, control systems, carpentry, glazing, making high explosives, felling trees, planing, making soap, or candkes, bee keeping, gardening, you name it.
Plus art, writing, poetry, and all the rest.
The thing about living in that age was that it was routine to learn all sorts of skills. They were life. And too working together with others to build or harvest, or play.
By comparison, today we are in so many ways dummer, less capable, simpler in thought, and isolated.
Still, trying to revert from todays world to that one is nearly impossible. The learning curve is extreme. The labor is hard.
But most importantly, there are more than 50 times too many of us to do that. The Earth cannot support the sheer number of people a;live today in perpetuity, let alone in a subsistence mode.
Even just the loss of fertilizer production from nitrogen results in the immediate loss of ability to feed 85% of people alive today.
As we move into and deeper into the inevitable future of catastrophic climate we are driven ever further from conditions that can support more than a small fraction of the population in subsistence mode.
As climate change accelerates that change is driven farther and harder toward lower ability to support us, or many other creatures. Most species alive will perish in the transition, even in the most optimistic scenario.
Add to the environmental calamities coming one atop another at ever faster rates.
My best guess now is that the ultimate calamity in the next century that will change everything almost overnight is the sudden conversion of the atmospheric circulation from a three cell system to a one cell equable climate system. When that happens, agriculture as we know it will become impossible. Species habitats will collapse chaotically.
The ideas of trying to "save" endangered species will become ludicrous as their habitats no longer exist. They key then will become ludicrous to somehow anticipate where usable ecosystem places will be, and then helping plants and animals to get there and adapt there as rapidly as possible. That will be fought fiercely by people unable to grasp the scale and scope of the change and problems.
Do you see the condescending tone at the beginning of your comment? The point of the article, as you eventually seem to admit, is that most people who tried homesteading now would not have the same experience as your grandparents. Thanks for sharing. Otherwise, informative.
almost funny, actually...
Its just realizing not everyone will survive. If the truck stops 90% will be dead in OECD countries. We should have realized this 50 years ago with limits to growth. We saved a lot of lives with the green revolution, but its postponed the hunger.
There are definitely varying degrees of how practical "homesteading" is and yes it is a TON of work to do things by hand such as laundry, busting sod, and so on (not to mention the huge expense of time to do those things manually). However I've found in my discussions with people that even something like hanging up laundry to dry on the line blows their minds, if they can even get past the idea that it's "boring" and they don't wanna do it. That widespread paucity of basic skills (with no desire to learn or do them) is part of the "homesteading is hard" mindset IMO.
And as others have said, there is no way the current global population can all become homesteaders. There will be a huge die-off when grids go down, medications run out, and of course the violence. I've been working for years now to "collapse now and avoid the rush" and have built up a lot of non-tech skills. Will it save me? Likely not. Will I try to live as long as I can? Absolutely.
Yeah I like that mindset. We can't guarantee 80+ years of life, but there is plenty we can do to make living longer more likely.
I could say something about this. I think the point is that people who want to do “homesteading” cannot make it in the real world. They imagine some way they can escape reality.
My father was such a nut job. This was back in the early 1960s. We would go through this drama every time he walked out of a job because people did not talk just right.
He was not going to live in this degenerate society anymore. The Jews made it impossible for an upright and honorable man to live. Someday someone would finally shoot Rockefeller and the world would go back to the ideal state that existed before the 1930s.
We were going to move onto this miserable scrap of land he owned, near his own father’s farm. He was going to finish the shack which he had started several times. My mom was going to grow vegetables and look after some cows and chickens. He was going to do odd jobs for some people who still lived in the area, who were part of this nutty cult he adhered to.
His sister was married to someone with similar beliefs. It was a sort of hillbilly attitude; if you just live on nothing, you do not have to give in to anything. They were still living like that at that time, outdoor plumbing, hand pumps, etc.
It was all loads of fun, especially when we came to visit them over Christmas in the Canadian prairie winter. Bunking up with my cousins in an unheated pig shed, in minus forty weather, oboy!
Needless to say my Mom did not go along with this. She would make clear that he could find another paying job quick, or he could go live in his shack by himself. She and us kids would continue to live in the house in the city which her own parents bought and paid for.
Mom and her family could not get their heads wrapped around the idea of divorce.
Even my Aunt and her Husband did not think my parents would be able to make it at that kind of style. They were astute.
Even they gave up on that lifestyle. As his manure business succeeded, they knocked down their old shack and put up a modern, prefab house. Indoor plumbing, so swanky!
As for Wildfire’s vision of apocalypse, with everyone just starving to death as systems collapse, I do not think it will work that way. More likely, systems serving certain populations will be simply shut down.
It might look a bit like Gaza, with a militarized state trying to exterminate a population they have lost control of.
Great Article. Kind of hard to read through the realities.
We have a bit of land and try to grow some of our food, but every year something different throws us off. We plant too late and don't have as much as we need of one thing or the plants aren't harvestable when we think they will be. Eight years in to our garden, the only thing we have kept going long enough to feed us was Kale and collards, and honestly, they kept themselves going.
It would be nice if we really were working together with our neighbors to feed each other.
Excellent informative, as always.
Tidbit. In a wet place, like northeast US, to dig a well about 15 ft deep, you would dig a hole about the size of 1-car garage (or more). Then, staring at the spot you hit adequate water, you build a tube (circular wall) a few feet tall, then the dirt back in up to the height of the wall. Then continue build wall/filling in dirt until you're back at the top.
Using every spare minute when not doing daily survival tasks, you could start in spring with the black flies, work through the humid summer, and you might have something reliable by the time your hands were freezing to the shovel in November.
If it collapses at any point, just dig back down and start over.
I welcome this article on prepping and homesteading. You are correct about the likely, ultimate exhaustion and futility of those methods, and of subsistence living. The TV series "Alone" makes it clear that "experts" from developed societies can't last more than two, maybe three months of subsistence hunting, fishing and foraging. With no human competition. At best they slowly starve from lack of food and companionship.
I choose to believe that there is a sustainable, equitable path for civilization. The likelihood of humans embracing it, let alone achieving it, becomes worse every day.
Excellent analysis as usual, Jessica.
Hate to be a Debbie Downer, but we also need to factor in challenges such as:
--folks experiencing brain damage, diminished immune systems and damaged systems/organs due to the pandemic;
--environmental fallout from abrupt climate change: unpredictable weather, catastrophic events such as fire and smoke, drought, floods--AND even earthquakes & volcanic eruptions due to the shifting tectonic plates from glacial melt
to name a few... :-(
I don't see anything wrong with a homesteader renting an excavator for a weekend or having solar panels and cell service. The inevitable end of collapse entails the end of that sort of industrial capacity, but for now it's still there. The great bulk of work involved in homesteading is building the property to begin with. Everything from the physical infrastructure like fencing, housing, toilets etc to the capacity of the land like regenerating soil, planting orchards, etc.
Instead of putting these people down, we should be asking what lessons we can learn from them. You're right in that it's absolute nonsense to simply tell the urban poor to homestead. However I look at the privileged people homesteading as pioneering processes which may inspire future resilience. For example, as collapse accelerates they are a model for A WAY of adapting. Yes, I cannot afford to rent an excavator, but my community can. When the time comes that the community finally sees that this way of life can't continue I'll have real life examples to point to and say "hey guys, let's do something like this."
Will it save the world? No. Is it a good idea. Yes.