[GJM] Fw: Relearning how to live as voluntary peasants

Thu Feb 15 16:04:44 MST 2007

FYI.   

-------Original Message-------

From: Culture Change
Date: 02/14/07 15:25:13
To: culturechange at lists.mutualaid.org
Subject: Relearning how to live as voluntary peasants

John's Peak Oil Odyssey - Six months into it:
RELEARNING HOW TO LIVE AS VOLUNTARY PEASANTS

by John Siman

"Part of The Farm's original vision was to build a village for a thousand
people using alternative energy systems that were economically and
ecologically responsible. We believed that we could design a graceful
standard of living which would be attractive to large numbers of First
World people, while also being within reach of all Third World people."
  - Gary Rhine on living as voluntary peasants, "So Close Yet So Far", from
Voices from the Farm (1998)

Just before the Fourth of July, I left my life as a tennis-playing,
wine-drinking, spoiled rich white guy to begin this radical eco-odyssey.
And in the six months which have ensued, I have watched the sun rise over
the Atlantic and set over the Pacific, joined Peak Oil groups in three
time zones, and visited ecovillages as far apart as North Carolina and
Oregon.  Plus I spent a couple of months training with the Permaculture
Army in Berkeley.  But it is to The Farm, the thirty-six-year-old
intentional community in Tennessee, that I keep returning.

I didn't hear good things about The Farm when I was on my way to visit.  I
had participated in the Earth First! Rendezvous in the Appalachian
Mountains.  There I saw former mountains apocalyptically sliced down to
nothing to yield up coal which will be called "clean" to perhaps be
liquefied for toxic methanol -- marketed as something disingenuous to shut
Americans up about Peak Oil and Global Climate Chaos.  The Farm was
beckoning as a bastion of back-to-the-land activism in one of the
mountain-top removal states.

At the Rendezvous I had met a young farmer who lives at The Farm.  Her old
VW van had broken down somewhere east of The Farm and west of the
Appalachians, and she needed a ride back to it.  I had still not yet given
away my car (I would do so soon enough -- to firm up my eco-cred), so I
was glad to help her out.  "At The Farm," she told me on the way, as the
big-box-bound tractor-trailers and the super-sized SUVs whooshed past,
"there is no farming."

I would hear similar reports about The Farm as far away as the Left Coast.
  "It's a gated community now," a teacher of urban gardening in Oakland
said.  "It's like the suburbs now" said a permaculturist in Oregon, "and
nobody wants to get their hands dirty by farming."  "It's a retirement
community for old hippies," said a rich young hippie in Berkeley, on his
way to India.

And, well, there is no farming being done on The Farm.  As I drove in, I
saw thirty-year-old apple trees and thirty-year-old horses.  Hundreds of
acres of fields lay fallow.  It turns out that a lot of Farmies drive the
seventy-some miles up to Nashville to buy hyper-priced U.S.D.A.-certified
organic goodies at Wild Oats (a Corporate Clone of Whole Foods, where the
PR.-savvy system does not allow the cashiers to unionize, but does
encourage them to wear tie-dye).

By the same token, however, there is no farming being done in the United
States of America -- not on a local, sustainable scale, that is, not to
any degree worthy of official attention.  In fact, the U.S. Bureau of the
Census stopped counting farming as an occupation in 1986 -- the number of
actual, self-employed, traditional farmers had become statistically
insignificant.  To be sure, there are some non-corporatized farmers still
around, but they exist only because they have either a reliable source of
non-farm income (as I had), or because they are willing to live in real
poverty (the Farmies of the 1970s lived on the equivalent of a dollar
fifty per day per person).

But the bottom line is that our corporatized, industrialized,
government-subsidized mega-scale methods of petro-food production have
made small-scale farming virtually impossible.  And that is the
heartbreaking story of American agriculture in the twentieth century,
whether you're talking about grandma and grandpa's forgotten old farm or
whether you're talking about The Farm.  [To read the rest of this essay,
go to:
http://culturechange.org/cms/index
php?option=com_content&task=view&id=100&Itemid=2#cont
- make sure all the address is pasted into browser.]

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