The Owner Built Home & Homestead
(Page 14 of 15)
More and more, retired and semi-retired people are looking
to the small acreage. They are literally driven there by
urban sprawl, noise, smog, high taxes, and inflation. The
chaotic political state of the world stimulates many people
to search for a more meaningful and natural value system.
RELATED CONTENT
Buying or building a small home is a great way to significantly reduce your energy use, and you don...
The Healthy Building Network’s Pharos Project aims to tap the collective knowledge of green buildin...
There are thousands upon thousands of abandoned farmhouses scattered throughout the U.S., at bargai...
I'm renting an old Finnish homestead near Nolalu, Ontario....
A community canning center is the answer....
There is another and more significant group of fresh
recruits for rural living: The countless college students
who have become disillusioned with their professional
college training, shocked by our murderous war machine and
alerted to the money-grabbing, life-negative forces within
the establishment. I speak of the intelligent and able
drop-outs, the turned-on, do-your-own-thing generation. It
is chiefly for this dynamic and thoughtful generation, as
well as for the mere refugees from the city, that I write
this book on productive homesteading; an integral
arrangement of earth, plants, animals, buildings and
utilities.
In basic terms, I'm setting out here to promote the
post modern way of country living. It is a life of
self-reliance and at least partial economic
self-sufficiency, but in a social and ecological
context. Naturally, I'm attempting to sell these ideas
to any and all. But the prospective buyer must have minimal
emotional and technical potential and be in good position
to leave the city. He must be fairly intelligent and have
strong motivation and drive as well as ability to do manual
work.
These requirements—especially being up to manual
work—are, of course, seldom met by current youth.
Their reaction against intellectualism is strong enough;
but they just lack the manual skill and discipline-training
necessary to satisfy their most basic needs. It is really
tragic to observe so many mentally qualified young couples
failing in their attempts to live on the land. In starting
out they have no concept of step one—actual
work—much less the whole complex of plant-animal-soil
relationships, plus production-storage-processing, which
takes the most knowledgeable and experienced farmer. Their
failure disillusions them with the homestead scene, and
they may react this time against the materials and
tools and skills associated with living on the land. Thus
the escapist talk nowadays about segregated tribal
communes, primitive living, etc. They hate the computerized
urban existence, and can't make it in the all-round
homestead life; so the next step is to live isolated with
fellow-failures.
This book, then, is an attempt to bridge the gap between
primitive inability and a wholesome use of
science, technique, and civilization. After answering the
why and the where of homesteading, I intend to analyze into
its components a balanced homestead environment
—from human and animal shelter forms to crop
production and utility functions.
Page:
<< Previous 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 |
7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 | 14 |
15 |
Next >>
