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  • From: "Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>
  • To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Livingontheland] Relearning how to live as voluntary peasants
  • Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2007 19:43:46 -0700


No, I won't fall for the intentional community trap. Never wanted to.
Community is something you create where you are. Congregating with people
we like and keeping out those we don't like misses the point completely.
It's not that it doesn't work; it's the wrong idea to begin with. My own
opinion.

The point of the excerpt below has nothing to do with that. The guy is
claiming that small-scale sustainable farming is now impossible. Yet he
isn't qualified to draw any sort of conclusions since he knows less than
nothing about his subject.

paul tradingpost@lobo.net

*********** REPLY SEPARATOR ***********

On 2/14/2007 at 6:15 PM mtncats wrote:

>Paul and all,
>
> I'm pleased to be uncounted. Even the last census missed us. Not that
>much of anybody would describe me as a "farmer", but somehow I much prefer
>to live below the searchlights. Seems to keep our life much less
>complicated.
>
> I would take exception to that assumption about "willing to live in real
>poverty (the Farmies of the 1970s lived on the equivalent of a dollar
>fifty per day per person)". It ignores intentional living. Something I
>learned a long time ago was that you only need to earn as much money as
>you want to spend (plus a cushion). We have considerably less income than
>any of our siblings, perhaps live in "poverty", yet live better. Better
>food, better house, better environment. And, no surprise, healthier.
>
> Then the IRS told us that we qualified for earned income credit and
>needed to file. There's something wrong with this picture. This "working
>poor" couple really doesn't need financial help. Not that I won't
>complain about our property tax bill.
>
> Paul, you're more interested in "community" than I am. Not that I don't
>have a relationship with some neighbors, but it's far smaller than what
>you apparently envision. I have nothing against communities, seriously
>considered joining one many years ago in another country. But what works
>better for us is taking care of ourselves, perhaps setting an example, and
>certainly offering to share what we've learned. I turn down requests to
>bake or garden for profit. Prefer to give away surplus. Was pleasantly
>surprised to see an ad for a new CSA here.
>
> Have I missed your point entirely?
>
> Tom (in central Va)
>
>
>
>TradingPostPaul <tradingpost@riseup.net> wrote:
>
>Reactions to this part of it?
>
>By the same token, however, there is no farming being done in the United
>States of America -- not on a local, sustainable scale, that is, not to
>any degree worthy of official attention. In fact, the U.S. Bureau of the
>Census stopped counting farming as an occupation in 1986 -- the number of
>actual, self-employed, traditional farmers had become statistically
>insignificant. To be sure, there are some non-corporatized farmers still
>around, but they exist only because they have either a reliable source of
>non-farm income (as I had), or because they are willing to live in real
>poverty (the Farmies of the 1970s lived on the equivalent of a dollar
>fifty per day per person).
>
>But the bottom line is that our corporatized, industrialized,
>government-subsidized mega-scale methods of petro-food production have
>made small-scale farming virtually impossible. And that is the
>heartbreaking story of American agriculture in the twentieth century,
>whether you're talking about grandma and grandpa's forgotten old farm or
>whether you're talking about The Farm.
>----------------------
>
>paul tradingpost@lobo.net
>
>
>
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