Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

Yes, that lone survivalist thing is bunko. Outfits teach survival in the wild 
and take your money, and not one of them realizes six months disaster 
survival is useless in the "long emergency" (Kunstler's term). Yes, people 
need to work together. Family tribal units were the model for eons and they 
worked. Larger groups worked. In the Middle Ages a lone individual on his own 
was considered insane or an outcast. Villages survived.

But more than gangs or militias consider the existing power structure of 
government and military and the money elites. They aren't too keen on giving 
up control. We will deal with agencies and powerful people who control 
property, transportation, and commodities. Look at the proliferation of 
private security outfits now; they're everywhere. I don't see a breakdown of 
high finance and the military anytime soon, and money and power can be abused 
and used to control the masses far more than we've seen in the past. In my 
view violent crime, food stealing etc., is peanuts.

Rather keep an eye on the powers that be. My instinct is to get outside the 
system far as practical. In other words food security, income, the 
necessities, should ideally be independent of government and corporate 
involvement. Someone coined the term "inactivism" which is the flip side of 
activism. You don't fight the wrongs in the system; you do a workaround (I 
use that word a lot); you refuse to support an unsustainable system by not 
being part of it. Protesters may protest with one hand and support what they 
protest with the other. Leave the demonstration and drive back in a car 
financed by big money to the mortgaged home and then go work in the corporate 
cubicle. Think about it: it's all the corporate wage slavery and debt 
consumerism. And state-granted corporate charters have no mandate except 
shareholder profit. Nothing else counts, nothing else can be allowed to get 
in the way of profit, legally airtight - anything about earth friendly is 
greenwashing crap. And it's that whole mess that eats away at civilized 
society and ultimately the Mother than sustains us all.

I say as far as practical. We refuse to finance a home or car or pickup. No 
usury paid to enrich the 1%. We grow food and sell locally and bypass all the 
corporate middlemen. Still, the shovel and wheelbarrow come from corporations 
- sometimes through China-Mart.

Your last part bears repeating:

The skills being developed by people on this list are going to
>be crucial to a viable future particularly n the "developed" countries. In
>the under developed countries there is at least a reasonable number of
>people who remember how to live outside the cities and who can teach
>others how to do so.  This list is a loose community and can make
>significant contributions. Strong communities are needed and IMHO will be
>the saving grace if one exists.


paul tradingpost@lobo.net

Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes.
--Henry David Thoreau

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On 6/22/2010 at 6:16 AM pbunch@cox.net wrote: