Farming for self-sufficiency
(Page 10 of 18)
January/February 1974
By the Mother Earth News editors
This, you may say, is the beginning of specialization, and the beginning of the road back to Birmingham. I do not think it need be. I believe that if half a dozen families were to decide to be partially self-supporting, and settle within a few miles of each other, and knew what they were doing, they could make for themselves a very good life. Each family would have some trade or profession or craft, the product of which they would trade with the rest of the world. Each family would grow, rear or produce a variety of goods or objects which they would use themselves and also trade with the other families for their goods. Nobody would get bored doing their specialized art or craft, because they would not have to spend all day at it, but there would be a large variety of other jobs to do every day too. This partial specialization would set them free for at least some leisure: probably more than the city wage-slave gets, after he has commuted to and from his factory or office. A more organized community than this-such as the Americans call an intentional community, or the Israelis a kibbutz-might work even better. There is room for endless experiment. The New England village community of the eighteenth century, if you forget the witch-hunting, must have been a very good place to live in.
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I can imagine, one day in the future, a highly sophisticated society, some of the members of which would live in towns of a humane size, others scattered about in a well-cared-for countryside, all interdependent and yet in some ways very independent, the towns contributing to the country-the country to the towns. This would not be a very mechanized or industrialized society, but a society in which the real arts of civilization are carried on at a high level, in which literature, music, drama, the visual arts, and the crafts that lead to the good life, are all practiced and appreciated by all the people. This would not be 'going back', whatever that means. It would, if you like to think in terms of such imaginary progressions, be 'going forward', and into a golden age. Periclean Athens wasn't such a bad place, give or take a few slaves. If we could find a way to achieve the same result without slaves, we would have achieved something very worth while.
LAND
To live well to enjoy all things that make life pleasant, is the right of every man who constantly uses his strength judiciously and lawfully.
WILLIAM COBBETT
Give any man, anywhere in the world, his fair share of the earth's surface, and-if he survives one harvest-he and his family need never be hungry again.
There are 860 people per square mile in England. There are 640 acres in a square mile, so this makes something like two-thirds of an acre for every man, woman, child and baby. But Eire has only 105 people per square mile, and Wales and Scotland are pretty under-populated too so the figures are not as bad as they seem, and the British Isles is one of the most highly populated places in the world. I traveled in a train over a thousand miles in southern Africa, from De Aar to Outjo in Namibia, and hardly saw any human dwellings at all, and yet nearly all of the country over which I passed was potentially very fertile. The Israelis would make it blossom like the rose. According to last year's June the Fifth Returns there is about half an acre of farm land per human soul in England and Wales, plus of course some rough grazing, mountain grazing and woodland, and, again, England is one of the most populated countries in the world.
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