Why are we homesteading?

About four years ago we became more aware of the tragedies of the world around us. Today, these issues are impossible to ignore. Climate change, peak oil, terrorism, wars, Monsanto, GMO's, poverty, slavery, the list goes on and on. The catalysts for this awakening came from watching the documentary Zeitgeist, the 2008 recession, and my own personal health problems. These overwhelming issues made me feel depressed, helpless and hopeless. They gave me a viewpoint of the world that was negative, pessimistic, and apathetic. I would oscillate between being a wannabe prepper getting ready for the zombie apocalypse to thinking, "What's the point?" This way of thinking came from a place of FEAR.

Then one day, synchronicity (I will discuss this concept in another post) led me to a video called Greening the Desert. It showed that yes, climate change is man made, but that with the right practices, we can reverse and regenerate the damage that we've done. Not only that, but we can do it in decades as opposed to the centuries that it would take for Mother Nature to do on her own if people stopped interfering! There are even fungi that eat radiation! This was such an epiphany moment for me since for the first time in a long while I finally had HOPE. And hope and optimism feel so much better than fear and pessimism. So I jumped in and started researching the practice of permaculture or regenerative agriculture. Below is a photo of the Loess Plateau another example of reversing climate change.

So I went on to take Geoff Lawton's Online Permaculture Design Course (PDC) and learned about concepts like the problem is the solution, working with nature instead of against it and everything gardens. Then for hands on experience and to get José on board (he's a hands on fast learner), we both took the Whole Systems Design PDC in Vermont. While the information was massively overwhelming, the more I learned, the more I realized that EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED and all of our problems really can be solved by a garden as Geoff Lawton likes to say.

Climate change - Desertification is caused by humans. The Fertile Crescent, the Dust Bowl, and even the Syrian refugee crisis were all partly due to our actions of conventional agriculture. Currently we are dealing with the drought in California. (On a side note, when learning about the Dust Bowl in school, it was spoken about as this uncontrollable event of Mother Nature that just happened. I had no idea that it was because of farmers tilling the soil and taking nutrients without replenishing them and that it could have been prevented if we knew better.) In most places if you cut down all the trees you get a desert. Not so in Vermont, all the trees were cut down for logging and because of the right amount of humidity and precipitation, after time the forest grew back. Not as healthy as the older forest and with different species, but it grew back none the less. This is just one of the many reasons we chose to live in Vermont. But in general, deforestation, tilling the soil, and extracting and burning fossil fuels all put the carbon that causes climate change into the air and kills the soil life that we need to keep it from turning into desert. Now our food has no nutrition and we clear cut healthy diverse forests to grow a monoculture of GMO corn or soy (which is mostly fed to our unhealthy antibiotic ridden livestock) when what Mother Nature thrives on is diversity. For more information and a better more scientific explanation than my stream of consciousness writing on how we can grow food in regenerative soils without the need for fertilizers, pesticides and GMO's please look into the amazing Dr. Elaine Ingham's work.

Food system - As soon as I turned 30, I started to have heartburn everyday and then also hives randomly. I have been tired ever since I could remember. If we ate real food grown in real soil then we wouldn't be experiencing all of these chronic illnesses, our grandparents didn't. Our food and soil have been so degraded and are lacking in nutrients that we would need to eat so much more of the same plant to get the same amount of vitamins and minerals as we did in the 1940's with lesser amounts. Monsanto says we need their GMO's to feed the world but studies have shown that the yields aren't that different and we now have "superweeds" that withstand their pesticides and are actually edible by the way. So their answer is to just create stronger and more poisonous pesticides! And when people tell you that we've been modifying plants for thousands of years and that our domesticated foods would taste horrible if we didn't genetically modify them, they are either ignorant or purposely trying to confuse you. There's a big difference between genetically modifying or engineering a plant in a lab to withstand poison and the natural methods of selective breeding. GMO's are made by inserting genes into a plant that would never have occurred naturally, and they basically just want to spray more pesticides and sell their poison from the Vietnam War. And to also get you sick to then sell you their pills. Follow the money! And to the people who say that it uses less pesticides or is healthy please research Dr. Ingham's work. If you till the soil and kill the biological life and try to grow food, yes you will need more pesticides because the plants are not healthy and it sends signals to diseases and insects to take them out of the gene pool. But if you restore the soil life by not tilling, good compost and a diversity of plants, those plants will be healthy, free of disease and invisible to insects. Spraying pesticides kills all life as well as the beneficial insects that eat the pests that would eat your crop. It's the same as using antibiotics that wipe out all the bacteria in your gut including the good ones. Or using chemo to get rid of cancer cells. Please also look into Vandana Shiva where she discusses why the "Green Revolution" was unsuccessful and how Monsanto is responsible for the famines in India as well as the mass suicides of farmers.

Health system - We keep walking for a cure that never comes. Instead, just pills for the rest of your life to manage the symptoms, that eventually lead to other symptoms that need to be managed by even more pills. Modern medicine is great for emergencies and broken bones. But cancer, diabetes, heart disease, depression and other chronic illnesses, not so much. There's no money in healing people. No money in emphasizing prevention with healthy food choices as opposed to just masking the symptoms. Monsanto and Bayer merged. Big Food and Big Pharma combined. That should tell you something. This is why I will be trying to focus on food as medicine and herbalism like TCM and Ayurveda that have been around for thousands of years. By switching to organic food as much as possible, I no longer get heartburn or hives, but I still lack the energy I want. I'm also weary because organic has become a trend and it's possible the USDA and EPA have been compromised. So you can't really be sure what's in a food unless you grow it yourself or know your farmer really well. I've done a bunch of trends and I'm struggling on what will be sustainable for me. I've experimented with being vegetarian, vegan and raw vegan and I have lost weight when I kept up with it, but normally around the holidays I cave into temptation and start to eat poorly and gain all of the weight back. It is said that sugar is more addictive than cocaine and that the withdrawals are bad. I guess that's why most people would rather pop a pill to mask symptoms than to actually heal. When I was raw vegan for a few weeks I think I felt the best and very close to getting my energy back, however the issue I have with this lifestyle is that it depends on fruits and vegetables year round from far away places. Meaning deforestation in other countries and a bunch of fossil fuels to fly them over. So it's not sustainable or practical for me. So my goal is to try organic, seasonal and local whole foods which will be much easier once the garden gets going. Although there will be some exceptions like bananas, plantains and coconut oil. We'll see how it goes.

Education - I spoke of education before. The only thing I really learned was how to be a good employee. On top of that, it took a lot of money for college to basically not really know anything. I feel useless and it's an uphill battle. It amazes me how many things I didn't and still don't know. I didn't know a pineapple grew from the ground, I thought it was a tree. I didn't know that a banana plant is not a tree either. For the longest time I didn't know that plastic was made from oil but it could also be made from plants instead. I thought that water and electricity came from turning the faucet and flipping a switch like magic. And there are so many things I didn't know that I didn't know. It takes me longer to learn things because I feel have to learn the "right" way when I know there is no one right way but years of programming are hard to break out of. I suffer from an extreme case of analysis paralysis and feel I need to keep learning and be perfect before I take any action. But I feel I am finally ready to put my knowledge into practice this year and I just have to remember that making mistakes is the best teacher.

Prison system - A privatized prison that makes money from the amount of prisoners it has is an incentive to keep it at full capacity no matter what the crimes. This doesn't make sense.

Modern slavery - 40+ hours a week at a job you hate, always looking forward to Friday dreading the "case of the Mundays". Yearning for your 2 weeks of freedom a year called vacation. When I worked in NYC as a construction accountant, one day I had a realization on the subway of this rat race. Everyone sitting quietly in their suits, miserable and tired because the sun wasn't even up yet and just rushing to get to a place that they hated. Just to do the same thing all over again the next day. The free time you do have is for chores or the gym and then you're too tired to do anything else. In my head I thought, "Am I the only one who thinks this is absolutely insane?" Or is ok because everyone else is doing it? 40+ hours at a job you hate and for a lot of people it's still not enough to live above the poverty line.

Economics - I actually majored in Economics. I memorized the formulas and concepts like the "Invisible Hand" and other BS. But being the good student I was, not once did I question the assumption that it's based on. That for the economy to succeed we need infinite growth. How the hell can there be infinite growth on a finite planet? Plus we now know it's obviously rigged from the 2008 recession. Bailing out banks that are "too big to fail" wasn't in any of the textbooks. Globalization makes it possible to not see the damage our modern lifestyle is causing. We need an economic system that is based on regenerative management of local resources and not made up fake currency that is paper or now just a bunch of 1's and 0's. This video sums up conventional economics pretty well.

Consumerism - This leads to a taker or extraction mindset. Read Ishmael by Daniel Quinn for a good explanation of this mindset and how we got to where we are. Planned obsolescence, dependence on oil, keeping up with the Joneses. This is necessary for the economy to grow. And they keep us wanting more and more with their brainwashing advertising telling us we are not good enough but we will be if we just go shopping. But it never makes us happy or fills the void. So we get medicated either with anti depressants to keep us from realizing that our body is trying to tell us that this is not how we're supposed live or self medicate with alcohol to numb the pain and stress. And all the while we are quickly killing our only planet which leads to...

Climate change - And rinse and repeat

The way the systems are set up we get screwed from every angle and it's on purpose. Being uneducated and dependent on the corporations to take care of us keeps us working until we are too sick, and they profit every step of the way. And I'm tired of being taken advantage of and feeling helpless. While social issues like race and gender equality are important, I feel like they are just distractions to divide us and take our attention away from the main cause of all of our problems and unhappiness. They shouldn't even be issues, it should be a no brainer that we are all equal and are all one. And don't get me started on the Russia distraction. Did no one read 1984? We shouldn't allow the entire world to suffer just because of a few selfish, greedy psychopaths in power who are experts at dividing us.

Every single one of these issues can be resolved if we took back control of our lives and relearned how to grow our own food in a regenerative way. The UN states that it's small farms, not GMO's are what is going to feed the world. If companies aren't making money, they will stop selling what we aren't buying. It is evident in the fact that big companies are now selling organic (McDonald's is now using fresh beef!) however, as I stated before, that has been tainted as well.

NO POLITICIAN IS GOING TO SAVE YOU. I was fooled by Obama and once again by Bernie. I'm done putting my faith in anyone but myself and what I can actually have control over. This will not be an easy task since my generation and younger lack the real skills and basic knowledge of how to build a shelter, grow food, and access clean air and water. If the great depression happened now, we would not survive. We have to overcome habits and addictions, going against what society deems normal. Not having children, not keeping up with the Joneses, and devoting our time and money to develop our skills and homestead are choices we have made to have real freedom and resiliency. I recognize how fortunate we are to even be in this position but there's still sacrifice, hard decisions and hard work ahead of us. Most days I am overwhelmed with all we have to do and learn and I fear I won't have what it takes to live this lifestyle, but then I really don't have a choice because the alternative is not an option. To most, I probably sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist, but in this Twilight Zone era of Trump maybe not as much.