Depletion and Abundance : Life on the New Home Front (9781550923735) by Astyk Sharon

Author:Astyk, Sharon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: SOC026000
ISBN: 9781550923735
Publisher: Perseus Book Group
Published: 2008-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

PART

Four

•

[Home Economics,

Home-Land Security ]

NINE

•

Little House in the Suburbs

Who has not found the Heaven below

Will fail of it above.

For angels rent the house next ours,

Wherever we remove

— EMILY DICKINSON

I’ve never loved any earthly thing so much.

— BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Home is Where You are Now

ONE OF THE THINGS THAT HAPPENS WHEN PEOPLE REALLY GRASP THE implications of our coming collective crisis is that they immediately think, “I have to grow all my food, cut all my own wood, mine salt from my backyard, grow flax so I can weave my own underwear and blacksmith my own automatic weapons!” The first reaction we all have is to try and protect our own, and to imagine that the right solution is to claim as much land as humanly possible on which to do it.

Speaking as someone who did move out of an urban location to begin a farm, I think for some people that’s a really good response. If you love growing food, have some experience with it (although even that isn’t wholly necessary—I didn’t have very much), want to live the country life and don’t have ties keeping you in the city, then moving to a rural area and becoming more self-sufficient can be a good idea, and far be it from me to discourage you. (But you can probably reuse your current underwear for some time to come, and even if you have the forearms for blacksmithing, maybe start with a nice trellis instead of an automatic weapon.) We are going to need more farmers if we’re going to have real local food systems. Living in the country can be much cheaper than living closer to cities.

On the other hand, a big chunk of land often costs a lot of money, and not all of us have that. And living in the country has its downside. You may be more car dependent because it is harder to walk or bike to things and there are fewer public transportation options. There isn’t always a large selection of jobs. And not everyone is cut out for a life in the woods.

That, however, is no bad thing. Because the simple fact is that there isn’t enough land in the world to give everyone 20 acres, or even 10. And even if we could, it isn’t necessarily a good idea—the “use what you have” thinking that this book is based on suggests that people should mostly live in the houses we’ve already built and adapt existing communities rather than building new houses in new places. We’ve already covered an awful lot of our precious arable land with housing — we can’t afford to do much more of that.

Estimates suggest that over the next few years, Americans are going to have to produce more and more food on less and less land. In a 1994 paper, Cornell Professor David Pimentel and Mario Gampietro demonstrate that by 2050, most Americans will have only 0.6 acres of arable land available to grow their food. At the time of the study, the average American’s basic diet used 1.

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