Beginnings of the project

This project feels like, to me, the meeting of many small streams meeting to form one broad river.

Stream: Employment, Supply Chain

When I was a truck driver, the shortest delivery I had was still over 300 miles. There’s fundamentally something broken about how we produce food and home goods if things need to be shipped out that far away.

The longest routes are ones I can’t even fathom. I was just one leg of massive relay races that span continents and oceans. Beef from Kansas going over to California, over to Japan. Cheese from Sacramento going to Maryland. Avocados from Mexico up to Boston.

During the government restrictions in response to COVID-19, we saw the inevitable failure of a supply chain that’s always one emergency away from falling apart. Just barely, our current system breaks even. But when supply increases, there is complete failure.

In response to the food shortages during the government restrictions, I began buying food in bulk. But, I knew that this was simply a stop gap, and was not a full solution to the problem. And it was also only a solution for me, it didn’t provide any benefit for anyone else.

There was also some frustration, because I knew locally there was a flour mill that held something like 50 million pounds of flour, but in the grocery store there was no flour to be had. That does not make sense to me.

What I least want for the eventual and destined collapse is a society of hoarder hermits each on their own mountain top.

Stream: Clothing

11 years ago, a video was posted about Rebecca Burgess and her wardrobe.

Her project for making a wardrobe out of locally sourced materials struck me. Being able to touch a piece of clothing and name who grew the cotton, who spun it into yarn, and who wove it into fabric was amazing. The ability to pick up a wool sweater and know the name of the sheep who grew it, the woman who spun it, the plant used to dye it, it’s an incredible concept. It left with me a deep feeling of loss.

It’s something I’ve thought about. If I sew a shirt, the fabric came from Indonesia. It was woven by a person across the globe. It was dyed by another faceless unknown person. The cotton may have even been grown in the US and shipped there to be processed. It’s not just the waste of the shipping, but the total lack of a human connection. If someone’s hands made something I wear against my skin, I should at least like to know their name.

It’s not just an alienation from people, but also an alienation from nature. Well, people are nature, but I mean alienation from non-human nature. This isn’t unique to clothing, but I’ve had several conversations with people about wool. These individuals are so divorced from the natural world that they did not know that sheep weren’t killed for wool.

Rebecca Burgess is currently involved in raising awareness of what she’s termed the Fibershed, an analogous term to watershed, and she’s made great steps towards making more locally produced clothing. Others have also started local fibersheds after being inspired by her video.

However, one thing I can’t seem to get over is the idea that 150 miles can be considered local. I also have some concern about the expense of the clothing coming out of these fibersheds. Many of the participants say that people need to just get used to spending more money for better quality clothing. I can understand the desire to be compensated for time, labor, and resources, and I understand the intention of valuing these local piece of clothing highly. But, I have serious concerns about the lifespan of projects like these. Currently Rebecca Burgess’s Californian wool is being used by the company The North Face to construct luxury clothing. This will not reach the people it must most reach. It will reach people with excess cash who like the story. That’s not a bad thing. But, it’s not as good as it could be.

Money is devalued more and more. A person with no excess cash cannot buy The North Face, cannot spend $60 on a wool beanie. If she needs a hat, she can afford Walmart or less. There must be a way to offer her the opportunity to have quality clothing that isn’t dependent on a failing value system. A poor person does not have the time to think about their environment, does not have the time to consider much more than making ends meet. One cannot expect a truly poverty stricken person to have those resources, and we must meet them halfway in these projects if we want to reach anyone but the comfortably rich.

Stream: Observation of Other Lifestyles

I’m fairly poor. Most of that is by choice, I can go back to truck driving and make a stupid amount of money whenever I want. It’ll only cost 100 hours a week, and my sanity. To some people, it may be a good trade. But, I just can’t manage such a thing again. But, I have noticed many homestead projects start out with money. They’re able to build large structures within the space of a year. I’m unable to do that.

There’s a similar phenomena with vanliving, carliving, rvliving, and other similar projects. At one point, I did live in my car, and I was shocked at the suggestions offered online. “Buy a prius, they’re great to live in”, “Buy a $40,000 van and spent another $10,000 making it liveable”, and “Buy this RV that costs the same amount as a house”, “buy this tiny house on a trailer” are not viable options. Neither is “buy this cheap junker that you’ll spend the rest of your life fixing”.

I was extremely frustrated. I didn’t have space to build my own trailer. I didn’t have the tools. I am and was in deep poverty, with few resources. It seemed like everyone else was way richer than I’d ever be.

Sadly, I can’t say that my current project is any more accessible or possible for people in that deep poverty. All I can say is that trucking made this a possibility and that anyone can drive a truck. It’s becoming easier all the time. Most fleets don’t even have manual trucks anymore. So, trucking, living in the truck, and saving everything one can, is my best advice for building the resources to buy land.

Once the purchase of land is done, then my projects may be better able to help. This is going to be a very slow, very cheap set of projects. I just can’t afford for it to be anything else. I have full time, minimum wage employment and full time college. But, that’s also a more reasonable, realistic situation for many people to be in. And it’s a situation I haven’t witnessed in popular homesteading projects.

Stream: Observation of Consumption

Consumption seems nearly impossible to escape.

A person can sew and say, I made a shirt. I made a skirt. I made some pants. But they mean they bought imported fabric, bought plastic thread. In many cases, it’s more expensive to sew a garment than to simply buy one.

A person can knit a sweater. They buy the yarn from an unknown source, most likely with a high plastic content. Wool, alpaca, and even fine cotton yarn are all prohibitively expensive for single garments.

A person can spin yarn. They buy the raw material, or processed material in battings. Most likely from unknown animals. Wool is expensive, even more so when processed into battings, but ranchers also claim there is no market for it, and don’t even bother selling wool. There is a severe disconnect here.

A person can make soap. They buy the commercial lye, they buy the oils to saponify, they buy fragrance oils, colorant mica to add to it. At the end of the day, it becomes more expensive than a bar of dove soap.

If I want to reduce plastic in my kitchen, and replace plastic scrubbies with cotton scrub pads I crocheted, I know it will cost significantly more to do so. Instead of 33 cents per plastic scrubbie, it will be about $2-3 dollars per cotton scrubbie. Cotton grows out of dirt! A plant! What is plastic? Where does it even come from? It drives me insane!

Have we really come to the point where making things by hand is too expensive? Where natural products are too expensive?

When the Zero Waste project first became popular, I was very hopeful for its success. But, I still saw it focus mostly on consumption. “Zero Waste Starter Kits” were sold. Most egregious were a product called “reusable paper towel”, as though fabric towels haven’t existed since dirt was young. The expression of this befuddlement is met with anger more often than not. The mantra of “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism” is one I’ve heard a million times. It still doesn’t make sense to me.

Stream: Domestication of Humans

A domesticated animal no longer has the instincts to provide for itself in the wild. I believe a similar process is happening with humans.

The concept of relatively normal living conditions are now scary and frightening. Women inquiring about where I live often say how afraid they’d be in the middle of nowhere. They’re afraid of a boogeyman lurking somewhere. Meanwhile they live in suburbs, cities, or towns. Statistically places where murderers are more likely to lurk. So, what’s the real source of the fear?

Is it just the unfamiliar territory? I see a similar irrational fear when people are faced with not having running water, A/C, a furnace for heat. It’s even a deal-breaker for a lot of people. It’s my belief that acclimating a person to not having these luxuries, or eliminating them by choice, is much better than having them be eliminated by force.

For example, the snow storm in Texas in 2021 which knocked out the electric grid. Many sad stories of people losing fridge-fulls of food because they didn’t understand that the food could be kept cool outside. Other sad stories of people asphyxiating in their garages because they ran their cars in enclosed spaces. People not knowing they could start a gas range with a match. We are losing skills and knowledge by depending on our luxuries.

This isn’t the only form of domestication. I’ve asked two food service businesses if I could have their food waste to compost. I don’t personally make much food waste, so I have basically no compost. But, I know food service produces a massive amount of food waste, and that it doesn’t rot into proper dirt when in a landfill. It’s a win-win, right? No, that’s not how it’s done. That’s now how me-human is supposed to approach that-human. He’s very important and he needs some papers with specially formatted sentences. And, anyway, me taking the food waste will incentivize workers to create more food waste for me. Somehow.

How did things get more complicated than this:
“Can I have your trash?”
“Yes I’m not using it, it’s trash, thank you for taking it.”

What has happened to us? How can we let this be done to us?

Final

Is it possible to make everything on site? It must be. I feel like I’m going to be driven insane otherwise.

A full overview on my plans can be found here.