Our Right to Self Reliance

     The term “self reliance” seems to conjure up images of rough-clad, weather beaten people living off grid in the hinterlands, drawing water from a well with a bucket and rope hand-over-hand…no electricity, no electronics, no internal combustion engine vehicles.  Well, maybe a beat up old farm truck.  A hard existence focused on hanging on to the ragged edge of survival; limited options and little entertainment and joy.  Or maybe those crazy “back-to-the-landers” that seems to be all that’s left of the hippie movement of the sixties.  If you parse the phrase, tho, you’ll discover more of a philosophy than a set of circumstances.  Anyone can strive for self reliance in all sorts of venues.  Becoming self reliant for the food you eat is a large undertaking—but see it also as a path, with degrees.  If you only raise the herbs you use regularly in your kitchen, that’s a degree of self reliance.  If you also raise all the vegetables you eat, that’s a larger degree of self reliance.  Add in raising your own grains and even livestock for meat, milk and eggs and by golly you’re almost there.  Now, if only you had a salt lick somewhere on your property….  Then start adding skills; baking your own bread, making your own pasta, canning fruits and vegetables,  freezing your own t.v. dinners, brewing your own beer or other libations.  The path for becoming self reliant for your own electricity can be started just by cutting back on things that use electricity, or at least changing them out for similar items that do the same thing that use less electricity.  A next step might be to rig a passive solar panel that collects warm air—maybe to send into your small greenhouse.  Or picking up a small solar panel and appropriate battery to run something small…just a porch light or a yard light.  You can expand from there.

This blog will focus on a path of self reliance no matter where you lay your head every night—an apartment, a house on a lot, your “rural estate”, or enough acreage that you can call yourself a small farm.  You’ll find discussion of and links for gardening, small livestock, getting free of the electrical grid, herbal medicine, self education, working from home, fixing things and doing things yourself…and whatever else seems to apply as we go along!