The local housing crisis is MY housing crisis. I have a place to lay my head at night, but it's not my home. I have funds to buy a home, but not in this market. I stay because of proximity to my grandkids. As a result I have been observing the intersection of a number of issues: climate change, climate resilience, water use, housing, growth management laws. The most egregious offenders in thinking on these issues are the so-called environmentalists who have organizations with national memberships and the lawyers who serve them. They've never watched an eagle playing in the wind. They have no idea what conditions are required to bring the spring peepers up to sing. They haven't put up a 6' fence to keep the deer out of the garden. Perhaps they should be sued for insisting on the conditions that have caused so much of our forests to burn.
One-crop farms tend to deplete soil. They don't have to. But regenerative farming requires getting grazing animals onto the soil periodically to re-inoculate the soil with the bacteria and fungi required to get that soil to hold water. Hydrogeology is not my topic, but I'm watching with joy and wonder at the results that the thinking of Allen Savory and Dan Dagget have been achieving in every continent except Antarctica.
It's expensive to get into farming. Big corporations have the money. Most of the rest of the farmers out there have inherited the farm, and they love doing it or they would stop.
About half of the land locally zoned 'agriculture' is not being actively farmed. They may mow hay once or twice per year to keep their 'ag' status. Many of those farms don't have a water right to do anything else. Land just sitting is not land that actively regenerates soil. Any farmer will tell you that you cannot have enough dirt.
Growth management laws in most states tend to jam people into steel and concrete. Cities are an ecological disaster! Not one of those towers will last as long as a cedar tree, or contribute as much to the environment. The sewage disposal problem is reaching a crisis in many places, where equipment is aging, or flooding just chooses another way to get rid of the sewage.
Growth management laws that allow development in rural areas tend to require homes to be compacted into a tight space. The consequences of that we have seen in the recent LA fires.
Locally we have about as many acres zoned 'R5' to 'R40', meaning that the minimum acreage on those parcels must be 5 to 40 acres before a home can be built. It was a move meant to 'preserve the rural character' and 'preserve areas for farming', but what it's done is made it impossible for anyone to move to a space big enough to grow a garden. Those 5 to 40 acre parcels aren't enough to competitively farm much of anything. They might be hobby farms, but...
... the folks living on those parcels, 5 - 40 acres, bought them 40 years ago. The families have grown up, and now there's just 2 people living there. Maybe not enough to manage a hobby farm, especially given their age. When they go up for sale they are generally sold to folks with enough money to buy them outright. They live there only part of the year, and don't plan to keep much of a garden.
I think, and this is what I need to see debated, one answer is to open up those parcels to subdivision, and allow young families a chance to get their hands dirty. A third of an acre is enough to grow a garden and have a shop or she-shed. A third of an acre is much easier to maintain than 5 acres or 40 acres, and small contributions to the overall health of the soil is much better than none at all.
People are not a scourge upon the earth. People are the earth's best, most precious natural resource.
Prosperous people tend to like and defend their clean air and water. Impoverished people tend to not have garbage pickup service.
Me, I'd like to buy 800 square feet with space for a 2400 square foot garden. Nothing like that exists here. Less roof. More soil. Perhaps that should be a meme.
Anyone want to live here? You must navigate homeless camps every day. No easy walk to the park with your kids. No backyard for fresh veggies. I doubt the rent is family friendly. This isn’t a place to grow a family. It’s a real estate investment like those towers surrounding Central Park in NYC that are only 1/3rd occupied. We need more free range humans.
I've come back to this essay multiple times in the last few days because I just can't stop thinking about it. You hit the feeling I've been chasing for quite some time now. Thank you for the work you're doing here.
If you like nuts, I'd start with something easier to process than black walnuts! Blight-resistant chestnuts (yes, 1 to 2 percent Chinese genes, but will survive much longer and do no harm) or hazelnuts might be the way to go.
Thanks for this context, so to speak. It can seem quite daunting though!
This is basically the whole idea behind Zero Input Agriculture, which Dr. Shane Simonsen writes about on here.
His whole thing is creating wide hybrid crosses and domesticating new and novel staple crops from a variety of sources, while working with the local ecology, climate, and agrology to grow a greater than subsistence level of food in a post-industrial and climate-resilient way.
Super neat stuff and I figured you’d enjoy it just based on all the overlaps mentioned.
I think you’d like his focus on what comes next after this kind of society (petroleum and extraction based) no longer functions. One of the few non-doomers in this sphere.
His most recent work, besides a host of various kinds of locally adapted vegetable species, is a hybrid native canna crop that has the potential to change the energy economics of future societies. Along with working to cross native bunya nuts with their millions of years separated overseas cousins to make one of the first truly domesticated tree crops. Lots of interesting work he’s done!
Anytime Americans can pick food from their own back yards, share that food with others, process that food without chemicals for later consumption , eliminate lawn from being mowed, unwillingly share fruits and berries with birds and rabbits, and eliminate car trips to the grocery store is a good thing.
Nurturing native plants for landscaping and eating is a worthwhile pursuit but the time spent digging in garden soil is nurturing for the soul.
" he was no closer to ‘self-sufficiency’ than nearly every homesteader " I dont believe any homesteader has been self sufficient ever . Not even when we were all cave men and women. Everyone has traded, borrowed, swapped bartered and bought things . Folks on the little house on the Prairie bough stuff from catalogues ffs Why perpetuate this myth ? It does nothing but put people down and make them feel failures
Not perpetuating any myth and made the same point, just not explicitly, that if a multigenerational farmer cannot be 'self-sufficient', then what more proof do you need that the premise of self-sufficiency isn't viable, and what other ways can we look at homesteading as a useful act for the greater good.
Individuals cannot be self sufficient but communities can be or at least they can get a lot closer. Complexity is the issue . Stone age man just needed some flints etc and he could make everything he needed just about depending on geology :-) . But as time passes things have become more and more complex . No one person could make a car for example from scratch and minerals :-) . So why grow your own food ? For me its about resilience. We grow stuff and cut wood . We earn about $24k, as a couple both working part time between us , little tax even some state help as we earn so little yet the food I grow, the bread I make , the wood we burn the clothes we mend , the exchanges with our community - food and work for services , clothes ,etc subsidised our life to the tune of about $6k a year and allows us to eat 80% organic and play our music .
learn to eat what grows naturally in your yard. I was thinking about this the other day. So much of the "weeds" people in the US are trying to irradicate could actually nurish them if they understood what it was.
I really enjoyed this article, esp comments around our choices of food we grow and the lineages we continue.
I was a bit surprised by how dismissive you were of the idea of home gardening as a way of challenging corporate food industry. It is true that that an individual person’s tomato crop won’t affect demand from commercial growers. But what if you drop the individualistic lense and think of about it more collectively?
I keep wondering if domestic food growing will increase - not as a lefty anti-corporate thing but as food gets more expensive and economic systems decline. The potential is enormous. Have you read sbout the victory gardens in the UK during WW2? I’m a short time huge amounts of food were grown by previous non growers on all sorts of public and private land. It didn’t lead to national self sufficiency but it did dramatically increase it.
I'm quite familiar with Victory Gardens and have written about them in the past. Many claims about the production of victory gardens were vastly overstated, and further, populations in, for example, the UK are 50% higher than they were in the 1940s. That doesn't mean we CAN'T grow our own food, but rather that it's much more complicated than memes suggest about how Victory Gardens provided most of the food consumed during WW2.
Further, there are real issues that weren't considered meaningful in the past as well: lead and other chemicals that have been dumped into soils that simply weren't tested for. And not just this, but increased suburbanization, isolation, and poorer quality soils make food production harder. There are many challenges with thinking we can piecemeal a food system in backyards and community gardens with more people on less developed land while concurrently working more hours not to be homeless than ever before. At the very least, building ecotype seed banks is building a foundation for future food systems that are more resilient and honor our heritage, and that process isn't something we can do overnight.
I'm actually working on a piece about local food that I think will address a lot of the points you're making, and hopefully, it should be out soonish.
Resilience or resistance? Total self sufficiency is driven by a motivation carried deep in our collective memory, famine. That it also might be a reasonable response to a system dead set on total control , a system we know is both killing untold amounts of native life, but I think also sometimes killing the will to resist . The system sells ease. Try self sufficiency at least once in life to learn about how you are addicted to sugar, or what many days without enough calories feels like. Push through the discomfort long enough to get some confidence in your foraging abilities, I suggest learning how to harvest and process acorns.
But unless you are talking personal experience I would suggest it really isn’t difficult feeding yourself for a month or two without depending on a store . If it is difficult then you at least might learn where your calories might come from if you prepared a bit before the lights go out.
It’s garden madness season where I live and I often feel guilty about not wanting to garden. Thanks for the reminder that growing for growth’s sake isn’t a strictly moral, pro-future pursuit.
The local housing crisis is MY housing crisis. I have a place to lay my head at night, but it's not my home. I have funds to buy a home, but not in this market. I stay because of proximity to my grandkids. As a result I have been observing the intersection of a number of issues: climate change, climate resilience, water use, housing, growth management laws. The most egregious offenders in thinking on these issues are the so-called environmentalists who have organizations with national memberships and the lawyers who serve them. They've never watched an eagle playing in the wind. They have no idea what conditions are required to bring the spring peepers up to sing. They haven't put up a 6' fence to keep the deer out of the garden. Perhaps they should be sued for insisting on the conditions that have caused so much of our forests to burn.
One-crop farms tend to deplete soil. They don't have to. But regenerative farming requires getting grazing animals onto the soil periodically to re-inoculate the soil with the bacteria and fungi required to get that soil to hold water. Hydrogeology is not my topic, but I'm watching with joy and wonder at the results that the thinking of Allen Savory and Dan Dagget have been achieving in every continent except Antarctica.
It's expensive to get into farming. Big corporations have the money. Most of the rest of the farmers out there have inherited the farm, and they love doing it or they would stop.
About half of the land locally zoned 'agriculture' is not being actively farmed. They may mow hay once or twice per year to keep their 'ag' status. Many of those farms don't have a water right to do anything else. Land just sitting is not land that actively regenerates soil. Any farmer will tell you that you cannot have enough dirt.
Growth management laws in most states tend to jam people into steel and concrete. Cities are an ecological disaster! Not one of those towers will last as long as a cedar tree, or contribute as much to the environment. The sewage disposal problem is reaching a crisis in many places, where equipment is aging, or flooding just chooses another way to get rid of the sewage.
Growth management laws that allow development in rural areas tend to require homes to be compacted into a tight space. The consequences of that we have seen in the recent LA fires.
Locally we have about as many acres zoned 'R5' to 'R40', meaning that the minimum acreage on those parcels must be 5 to 40 acres before a home can be built. It was a move meant to 'preserve the rural character' and 'preserve areas for farming', but what it's done is made it impossible for anyone to move to a space big enough to grow a garden. Those 5 to 40 acre parcels aren't enough to competitively farm much of anything. They might be hobby farms, but...
... the folks living on those parcels, 5 - 40 acres, bought them 40 years ago. The families have grown up, and now there's just 2 people living there. Maybe not enough to manage a hobby farm, especially given their age. When they go up for sale they are generally sold to folks with enough money to buy them outright. They live there only part of the year, and don't plan to keep much of a garden.
I think, and this is what I need to see debated, one answer is to open up those parcels to subdivision, and allow young families a chance to get their hands dirty. A third of an acre is enough to grow a garden and have a shop or she-shed. A third of an acre is much easier to maintain than 5 acres or 40 acres, and small contributions to the overall health of the soil is much better than none at all.
People are not a scourge upon the earth. People are the earth's best, most precious natural resource.
Prosperous people tend to like and defend their clean air and water. Impoverished people tend to not have garbage pickup service.
Me, I'd like to buy 800 square feet with space for a 2400 square foot garden. Nothing like that exists here. Less roof. More soil. Perhaps that should be a meme.
Zoning is incredibly difficult to overcome, and many times comes from good intentions. So tough!
Anyone want to live here? You must navigate homeless camps every day. No easy walk to the park with your kids. No backyard for fresh veggies. I doubt the rent is family friendly. This isn’t a place to grow a family. It’s a real estate investment like those towers surrounding Central Park in NYC that are only 1/3rd occupied. We need more free range humans.
https://www.archpaper.com/2024/01/graphite-design-group-converted-amazon-office-supportive-housing/
I've come back to this essay multiple times in the last few days because I just can't stop thinking about it. You hit the feeling I've been chasing for quite some time now. Thank you for the work you're doing here.
If you like nuts, I'd start with something easier to process than black walnuts! Blight-resistant chestnuts (yes, 1 to 2 percent Chinese genes, but will survive much longer and do no harm) or hazelnuts might be the way to go.
Thanks for this context, so to speak. It can seem quite daunting though!
This is basically the whole idea behind Zero Input Agriculture, which Dr. Shane Simonsen writes about on here.
His whole thing is creating wide hybrid crosses and domesticating new and novel staple crops from a variety of sources, while working with the local ecology, climate, and agrology to grow a greater than subsistence level of food in a post-industrial and climate-resilient way.
Super neat stuff and I figured you’d enjoy it just based on all the overlaps mentioned.
Not familiar with Dr. Simonsen, but I've written about Vrikshayurveda (the origins of ZBNF) on here's before. I'll check him out!
I think you’d like his focus on what comes next after this kind of society (petroleum and extraction based) no longer functions. One of the few non-doomers in this sphere.
His most recent work, besides a host of various kinds of locally adapted vegetable species, is a hybrid native canna crop that has the potential to change the energy economics of future societies. Along with working to cross native bunya nuts with their millions of years separated overseas cousins to make one of the first truly domesticated tree crops. Lots of interesting work he’s done!
Anytime Americans can pick food from their own back yards, share that food with others, process that food without chemicals for later consumption , eliminate lawn from being mowed, unwillingly share fruits and berries with birds and rabbits, and eliminate car trips to the grocery store is a good thing.
Nurturing native plants for landscaping and eating is a worthwhile pursuit but the time spent digging in garden soil is nurturing for the soul.
" he was no closer to ‘self-sufficiency’ than nearly every homesteader " I dont believe any homesteader has been self sufficient ever . Not even when we were all cave men and women. Everyone has traded, borrowed, swapped bartered and bought things . Folks on the little house on the Prairie bough stuff from catalogues ffs Why perpetuate this myth ? It does nothing but put people down and make them feel failures
Not perpetuating any myth and made the same point, just not explicitly, that if a multigenerational farmer cannot be 'self-sufficient', then what more proof do you need that the premise of self-sufficiency isn't viable, and what other ways can we look at homesteading as a useful act for the greater good.
Individuals cannot be self sufficient but communities can be or at least they can get a lot closer. Complexity is the issue . Stone age man just needed some flints etc and he could make everything he needed just about depending on geology :-) . But as time passes things have become more and more complex . No one person could make a car for example from scratch and minerals :-) . So why grow your own food ? For me its about resilience. We grow stuff and cut wood . We earn about $24k, as a couple both working part time between us , little tax even some state help as we earn so little yet the food I grow, the bread I make , the wood we burn the clothes we mend , the exchanges with our community - food and work for services , clothes ,etc subsidised our life to the tune of about $6k a year and allows us to eat 80% organic and play our music .
I feel the word community has been missed from this article . That is what I find missing from this . I think your grand father may have agreed.
learn to eat what grows naturally in your yard. I was thinking about this the other day. So much of the "weeds" people in the US are trying to irradicate could actually nurish them if they understood what it was.
I really enjoyed this article, esp comments around our choices of food we grow and the lineages we continue.
I was a bit surprised by how dismissive you were of the idea of home gardening as a way of challenging corporate food industry. It is true that that an individual person’s tomato crop won’t affect demand from commercial growers. But what if you drop the individualistic lense and think of about it more collectively?
I keep wondering if domestic food growing will increase - not as a lefty anti-corporate thing but as food gets more expensive and economic systems decline. The potential is enormous. Have you read sbout the victory gardens in the UK during WW2? I’m a short time huge amounts of food were grown by previous non growers on all sorts of public and private land. It didn’t lead to national self sufficiency but it did dramatically increase it.
I'm quite familiar with Victory Gardens and have written about them in the past. Many claims about the production of victory gardens were vastly overstated, and further, populations in, for example, the UK are 50% higher than they were in the 1940s. That doesn't mean we CAN'T grow our own food, but rather that it's much more complicated than memes suggest about how Victory Gardens provided most of the food consumed during WW2.
Further, there are real issues that weren't considered meaningful in the past as well: lead and other chemicals that have been dumped into soils that simply weren't tested for. And not just this, but increased suburbanization, isolation, and poorer quality soils make food production harder. There are many challenges with thinking we can piecemeal a food system in backyards and community gardens with more people on less developed land while concurrently working more hours not to be homeless than ever before. At the very least, building ecotype seed banks is building a foundation for future food systems that are more resilient and honor our heritage, and that process isn't something we can do overnight.
I'm actually working on a piece about local food that I think will address a lot of the points you're making, and hopefully, it should be out soonish.
I talk about Victory Gardens a bit here: https://poorprolesalmanac.substack.com/p/community-canneries-and-collective
Resilience or resistance? Total self sufficiency is driven by a motivation carried deep in our collective memory, famine. That it also might be a reasonable response to a system dead set on total control , a system we know is both killing untold amounts of native life, but I think also sometimes killing the will to resist . The system sells ease. Try self sufficiency at least once in life to learn about how you are addicted to sugar, or what many days without enough calories feels like. Push through the discomfort long enough to get some confidence in your foraging abilities, I suggest learning how to harvest and process acorns.
But unless you are talking personal experience I would suggest it really isn’t difficult feeding yourself for a month or two without depending on a store . If it is difficult then you at least might learn where your calories might come from if you prepared a bit before the lights go out.
It’s garden madness season where I live and I often feel guilty about not wanting to garden. Thanks for the reminder that growing for growth’s sake isn’t a strictly moral, pro-future pursuit.
Чудовий пост!