Homesteading Simplicity

Reader Contribution by Anneli Carter-Sundqvist
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A few weeks ago I was house sitting for some neighbors just up the road from us. It was a big house, with all the modern conveniences: kitchen appliances, running water, several bathrooms and oil furnace heating. These were also selling points when they asked if I could spend a week there – I could do my laundry, each room had a separate thermostat, they had wi-fi, TV and a freezer full of food I could eat.

And on a day to day level, it was easy living over there, in the sense that most of my needs were taken care of by merely pushing or turning a switch or tap. Unlike at home it was no going out to get water or wood and no wood stove to tend. I could shower in two minutes and pile up the dishes in the dishwasher; chores were carried out swiftly with the least physical resistance and with little need for any thoughts beyond the pushing or turning.

It was easy, but not simple since all of these so called conveniences depended entirely on sources I had no control over and the easy actions most always set off a chain effect: every time I turned the thermostat in that house, an easy way to stay warm set off a complex reaction far past my bedroom – through the lines and posts in power grid that needs regular maintenance, through the clearing in the woods where the lines to come in, to the dam or plant where the power is generated. The effects of my action also rippled through the oil furnace in the basement to the local delivery truck and its driver and on to the previous delivery truck and its share of increased traffic on our rural roads. On and on through landscapes and communities to an oil field or a tar sand location somewhere, touching on hundreds if not thousands of human lives who are in some ways affected by the oil infrastructure. Billowing over all this is the exhaust, not only from the furnace in this particular house, but from the trucks, the factories who built the furnace, the pipes, the plants, the heavy machinery involved in pumping or fracking the oil. And someone has to pay the bill, which will yet again set off a complex chain of actions – the house owner made its money somewhere, probably by providing a service or a product. That service or product, whatever it was, most likely set off another chain through materials, transport, buildings, fossil fuel, investments, tax money, corporations, interests, stocks. It did seem easy right there and then, didn’t it, to turn the heat up just a little bit?

Here at the homestead we face the difference between easy and simple on an almost daily basis. So many times the lumberyard seems like such an easy option – we need a few boards to finish a project, rafters for a roof or a few studs just to fix something fast. If we would choose a narrow view and look only at what we want to accomplish today, with the least resistance, we would ignore the many processes the lumberyard would involve: clear cuts done with heavy machinery on land unknown to us; the transportation of the lumber onto the island and that we’d have to make the money somewhere, money that before it came to us was made somewhere, somehow, and before that, somewhere, somehow.

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