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  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Intentional Communities
  • Date: Thu, 21 Jun 2007 12:45:21 EDT

I've read the histories of many intentional communities and seen a few first
hand. Two kinds, says I, endure much beyond the pipe dream stage. I call
these the Amish-type and the Benedictine-type.

The Amish-type are communities where everyone independently owns their own
means with the other members of the community assuring that each independent
person's assets and opportunities are protected and maximized. In the
Amish-type
community decisions are made by consensus.

The Benedictine-type community is where all things are held in common. No
one owns anything peronally. The members of the community work to protect
and
maximize the assets of the community which in turn supports each member. In
Benedictine-type communities decisions are made by one authority (the abbot)
and
all other members are subordinate to him (or her, the abbess).

As far as I have seen, the mixing of the metaphors of these two types of
communities sows the seeds of its own disaster. A community where everyone
owns
his own assets and yet a guru intends to dictate how those assets are managed
is just blow-up waiting to happen. Likewise a community where all things
(most
things, even some things) are held in common and yet decisions are made
independently or by vote is just a thin prelude to fisticuffs.

There is a koan and a paradox about communities, and the same thing could be
said for most apprenticeship programs. It's like the old one-liner
commedians
used to employ, "I am highly suspicious of any club that would have me as a
member!" People who have the perseverence, work hardness, intelligence, and
turn of nature to succeed in a commune are in all likelihood already
succeeding
on their own. Likewise, the person who is likely to wash ashore on your
homestead, given their current circumstances, is unlikely to contribute the
120% of
the effort needed to meet their own share of the needs of a homestead.

I have always urged those contemplating homesteading to sort out the two
components of a small holding:

1. The direct use component
2. The money economy component

The direct use component is what I refer to when I use the term
'homesteading' (so long as I let you know that ahead of time). It is the
production of
food, fuel, buildings, clothing, tools, fencing, etc. with as little input
from
outside the homestead as is possible or practical. Food is the most obvious
so
in those terms the direct use economy is producing the food you eat. Once
that's done and you barter or sell any other food that is produced, your
'farming' now has a market component, or money economy component beyond the
direct
use component.

Times and our conditioning being what they are, it is all too easy to slip
over into the mini-agribusiness model when dealing with the market component
of
our farming. And yet, I must needs ask myself, can I find an example
anywhere
that this has worked? I meet the cash needs of this homestead selling
things made of wood. Can I find examples of people who (being more
industrious
than I) have accumulated cash assets or paid off tens of thousands in debt
making
wood products and selling them? Yes. I know quite a few of them. Realty,
banking, construction, lawn care, day care, auto repair, cooking or catering,
.... list could go on and on .... do I know of people who have done these
things and made money, a living, and/or paid back substantial debt with them?
Yes.

But what about someone who has four acres of raspberries, or sixty head of
cattle, or three acres of market garden. Do I know or know of anyone who has
ever paid off a mortgage with these enterprises? No. Not one. Many people,
like the Nearings, paid their property taxes, bought seed and a few tools.
But
that's about it. In a film documentary of the Nearings Helen is picking
blueberries in their planting of over 1000 bushes. She said selling the
blueberries paid the taxes and incidentals, but adds as an afterthough ....
'It wouldn't
pay for a truck.' How much less then would it pay a mortgage?

Therefore I have always said that expecting a smallholding to pay a heavy
indebtedness such as a mortgage is unrealistic and unprecedented. It is an
economically dangerous mix of metaphors.

Which leads me round about to what I really want to say. In my view there's
no such thing as being too old, too alone, to decrepit, too anything to
homestead. That is, as I look here on Solstice day at the remainder of the
agricultural year, I have X amount of garden (pasture, orchard, etc.) land, Y
number
of weeks, and the willingness to ability to do Z amount of work about it.
Whatever I get done, that's what we get. If I had twice the space under
cultivation, was half my age, had two more adults to help work it, and it was
March
instead of June, I could get more produced. It isn't. I'm not. They
aren't.
So what we get is what we get.

If you are 93, in poor health, and have 50 square feet of garden, you can
homestead it. Use it to directly provide as much of your sustenance as you
can.

But if one's idea (or ideal) of a homestead is fixed with the homesteader
having to expand to fit it, rather than the homestead shrink to fit the
homesteader, then I suppose it's possible to not be able to do it. </HTML>




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