Farming for self-sufficiency
(Page 7 of 18)
January/February 1974
By the Mother Earth News editors
Teach these people to read, though, and you immediately get a completely different situation. The children grow up no longer content with village self-sufficiency. They must have books, and books cannot be produced in the village (although I have seen paper being made in an Indian village in a mill; the chief constituent was a cow walking round in a circle providing the power), they wish to see the other parts of the world that they now become aware exist, they long for the sophisticated clothes, the machines, the gadgets and the other things that can only be produced by a city-based civilization. The Indians have two useful words: pukha and kutcha. Pukha means with a civilized finish on it. Kutcha means rough-made in the village without outside help. The man who has learnt to read, and been to town, comes back and wants a pukha house—one that makes use of glass and cement and mill-sawn timber and other materials that cannot be produced in the village: his old kutcha house is no longer good enough for him. He also wants white sugar instead of gorr, which is the unrefined sugar of his own sugar-cane, tea instead of buttermilk, white flour instead of his own wholemeal. He—and eventually his whole village with him—are forced into a money economy, crops are grown for sale and not for use, the village becomes part of the great world-wide system of trade, finance and interchange. In Africa what happens is that the young men of the village are forced to go and work in the white man's mines.
RELATED CONTENT
SELF-HEATING, SELF-COOLING HOUSE
July/August 1971
By Wendell Thomas
In 1948...
Medical Self-Care: The Seven Rules of Self-Care
Seven laws for better health, including home...
From North America to Italy and back again, heirloom grain corn ‘Floriani Red Flint’ packs a rich, ...
The commercially grown vegetables, fruits and grains that we are eating today are significantly les...
The following tips by a specialist in extension farm businesses may give you better understanding t...
Now, the sort of self-sufficiency which I wish to treat of in this book is not the old, pre-industrial self-sufficiency: that of the illiterate peasant or hunter who has never heard of anything else. That kind of self-sufficiency is, for better or for worse, on the way out. What I am interested in is post-industrial self-sufficiency: that of the person who has gone through the big-city-industrial way of life and who has advanced beyond it and wants to go on to something better.
If the findings of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council of the United States are correct (see their report Resources and Man —W.H. Freeman and Co., San Francisco), we will be forced into this kind of self-sufficiency whether we like it or not. For, according to these findings the fossil fuel supply of the earth will be exhausted long before we can possibly develop atomic or solar power to take the place of more than a tiny fraction of the motive power that our big-city civilization requires to make it work, and there are, apparently, insuperable obstacles to the really widespread global development of atomic power. After all, the existing electricity-producing power stations of the earth, no matter how they are driven, could not power a tiny fraction of the road, sea and air transport of the world, and if the latter ground to even a partial halt the whole great fragile edifice of global interdependence would collapse.
Page:
<< Previous 1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 | 7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17 |
18 |
Next >>
