Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> ...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>