Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

(From Bev)

>I think we are all talking, as James says, at cross purposes with you. >You 
talk of maintaining wealth, we talk of maintaining life and lifestyle.



At the end of Tolkien’s "The Hobbit" Bilbo comes before the dying Thorin 
Oakenshield and Thorin’s parting words are, "If more of us valued food and 
cheer 
and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.  But sad or merry, 
I 
must leave it now. Farewell!"

Our economy, if not our very reality, focuses on something  or the other out 
of habit, custom, indoctrination, and ultimately choice.  Now of days in this 
culture and society that focus is money.  It is so strong a focus that we 
tend 
to think of and evaluate everything in terms of currency.  It’s inescapable 
and automatic.  But it need not necessarily be so.

My own taxonomy puts the label "homesteader" as being applied to three 
distinct groups.

1.  Homesteaders for whom subsistence living is their economic basis.

2.  Homesteaders to choose to spend the money designated for their sustenance 
on the homestead and then use homestead produce rather than buy it directly.  
Such homesteaders could just buy some chicken to eat at the mart, but instead 
they choose to use the money to buy chicken feed (etc) and raise their own 
chickens.  Rather than living directly on a money income, they live on that 
same 
money income indirectly.

3.  Those of the camouflage suit who sit on their stack of MRE’s and look out 
for black helicopters.  Unlike either of the above two groups, they are 
always calculating how long the cans of chili beans will hold out and how 
many gold 
coins it would take to survive the next two years.  For them homesteading is 
not a way of life, but an escape, a safety valve, a temporary refuge until 
things get back to normal.  Oddly enough, the quintessential homesteader 
himself, 
Scott Nearing, would be numbered among this third group.  I always found it 
incongruous that he was a strong advocate of communism and yet pioneered the 
modern homesteading lifestyle which required holding real estate privately.  
It 
was the excellent book by John Saltmarsh, "The Making of a Homesteader"  that 
put the Nearing quotes and writings all in one place to settle the paradox.  
Nearing called the Vermont homestead "A Cyclone Shelter in New England."  He 
said that the ideal economic arrangement was Soviet style communism, but in 
the 
mean time individual homesteading was an inferior substitute, inferior but 
better than participating in the political and economic system he abhorred.  

All three groups have a lot of superficial aspects in common and this might 
lead us to lump them all as a common philosophy.   But the focus is not the 
same, especially for group #1.

Very often in discussing homestead affairs someone brings up that we all have 
to have money.  Someone will issue the challenge and ask if there is anyone 
who can live without a source of money. No?  See how important it is, then!  
Just try to convince us that you run a homestead day to day, month to month, 
and 
don’t "need" money.



This is because the focus of their reality is money.  And small wonder, it is 
the glue that binds our common modern philosophy and orientation.  Everything 
is though of first and foremost in terms of money.  Money it the one thing 
that is nailed down, fixed, the epicenter and definition of all else.  All 
other 
things in their lives are viewed as variable, mutable, and circling and 
drifting about the fixed central reality of money.



But it’s just a habit, a mindset.  We might shift that focus to something 
else.  Let’s view our world in terms of wood.  No matter how non-wood and 
existence you may think you have, you still "need" wood, do you dare deny 
it!??  Oh, 
maybe you don’t heat with wood and your house might not be primarily made of 
wood, none the less, if you eliminated wood entirely from you life, where 
would 
you be?  Betcha there’s some wood in your house!  And like as not there is 
some wood trim somewhere on your car, the handles of you kitchen knives, your 
furniture.  And what about all the things you buy at the mart?  Odds are they 
arrived on wooden palates.  And your electricity and phone hookup, somewhere 
in 
that circuit no doubt there’s wooden utility poles.



Does this not prove that your life is inexorably bound up in wood?  

No.  Because as a matter of day to day focus you largely ignore it.  It’s 
there.  You probably DO depend on wood far more than you think.  But you can 
concentrate on money as the central reality of your economy and ignore the 
wood as 
real but relatively inconsequential peripheral factor.



When someone asks those of us living by a subsistence, direct-use economy to 
account for our use of money, if falls on our ears much as if someone asked 
you to account for your use of wood as if it were the end-all, be-all of 
everyone’s world alike.



The central focus of the subsistence homesteader is his land.  It is the 
fixed unmoving focal point of his reality and all other matters, including 
wood 
and money, waft and float about that fixed point.  They are there, wood and 
money for examples, and we recognize that we make use of them from time to 
time.  
But we do not think about our existence, our prospects, or our success in 
terms of those things.

For example over the past ten years the "market value" of my farm has been 
modest, risen to a ridiculous and unsupportable figure, and now is falling 
rapidly again to something that takes reality into account.  I haven’t really 
much 
noticed it and I am altogether unconcerned.  I am neither in the market to 
buy 
or sell a farm, so a figure representing the number of hummingbirds per acre 
has about as much meaning as the market value of the place.

The value of this place is twenty years of composting, liming, overseeding, 
and otherwise augmenting its ability to produce.  It is the availability of 
water in abundance.  These things do not enter into any appraisal of the 
place as 
far as market value. And this is the kicker that makes my point, when the 
‘agricultural use value’ of the and is determined for use portion of the real 
estate taxes, it is valued the same whether the gardens and grain fields are 
deep, black compost or they are bare blue clay.



As Bev suggested in the above quote, those whose primary focus is the value 
of their homestead land completely without reference to money -- and those 
whose primary focus and measuring stick of everything is money -- will 
inevitably 
be talking at cross purposes.





James