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  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] What is a homesteader?
  • Date: Sun, 18 Nov 2007 09:49:51 EST



> ...but really don't consider myself a homesteader in the true sense of the
> word.

Just as well, Franklin, because there is not true sense of the word. Not now
of days at any rate.

And as Bev pointed out, although you mightn't think it, a homestead list is
the last place to bring up the question because it has been the source of
some
really good dust ups.

One often hears, well, we're not REAL homesteaders are we, after all we have
computers. As if the only definition of homesteading, PURE homesteading, is
to pay for every single good and service from primitive agriculture and
husbandry from the homestead.

The thing I like to point out is to say, where's the paradigm for that?
Where in all of time and space is an example of anyone raising a some
vegetables
and chickens and buying computers with the proceeds? Often then the
aspiring
homesteader views this as a "matter of degrees" and where one cow would more
than fulfill the needs for a homesteading family, in order to be a PURE
homesteader they might feel obligated to get eight cows to pay for the SUV
and
computer. Again, look about and find the successful paradigm for this (which
I will
suggest doesn't exist).

The best definition of homesteading I got from a book about the perennial
homesteader Scott Nearing who said, "We grew our food and ate it, we cut our
fuel
and burned it, we built our house and lived in it." That is, a direct use
economy. Provide as much for yourself in your circumstances as you can
without
the inefficiency and insecurity of translating the goods and work into money
first.

Isn't this what you are doing already?

If there is a matter of degrees, suggests I, it is in this: converting the
lifestyle to a direct use economy to the most urgent needs first. You have
to
have food. If you could not or preferred not to buy food, the need would
press you pretty quick, eh? So converting your lifestyle over to your own
food
production takes the first urgent need for outside involvement away.

What about stoves? We've just been talking about that. The main heat in our
house here in the cool (but not so cold) part of the year is old cookstove
that Herself's grandmother bought in 1925. There's no urgent need for us to
consider buying another one. So trying to produce an iron cookstove as a
fucntion of a direct use economy makes no sense. In fact, we could go our
entire
lifetimes and never need to consider buying a stove, and this one will pass
down
to one of the children and continue unabated. Some of the farm tools I use
are 100 years old, and even when I buy new ones (this spring I will get an
additional scythe and perhaps a new wheelbarrow) it is never an urgent
expense nor
one that is repeated more often than every twenty or more years.

So, says I, first there is food and water (and beer). Those are the urgent
needs and the thing that gives you the most independence and self
determination.

Then fuel.

Then clothes. Almost all our clothes are used although we do have a sock
knitting project going because real wool socks are so expensive and you don't
buy
them used.

Then housing and buildings.


As for the rest, we are under paradigm of "Render unto Caesar the things that
are Caesar's." Computers are part of Caesar's world, not the homestead. If
we want a computer, we participate in Caesar's coin enough to get it. Same
with vehicles (although even there we are bottom feeder vehicle users),
radios,
bicycles, and all other such things. Decide what you want, how you are going
to persuade Caesar's world to give it to you, when you have it, bow out and
there you are back on the homestead with your direct use economy. In the
case
of this homestead, the finger in Caesar's pie is wood working and horse care.

James </HTML>




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