Since beginning our blog and the projects associated with it, we have been doing a lot of thinking about what it is, exactly, we are doing. Today, we’d like to go into a little more detail about what this means and how it can be applied on a larger scale than one home in Portland, Oregon.
Ostensibly we are doing what we set out to do, that is, freeing ourselves of the need to depend on outside resources for our basic needs. We took a look at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and decided to take on the majority of the base of the pyramid. This resulted in collecting rainwater and filtering it for domestic and other uses. It resulted in a prototype aeroponics system to supply a portion of our food year round. It will result in more tooling so that we can fix and create more of our required infrastructure.
But that word right there, ‘infrastructure’, is exactly what we are creating for ourselves. We are developing our own point-of-use infrastructure for our most critical systems. This is in stark contrast to the old way of thinking about systems of infrastructure which holds that they are developed and deployed nationally by large companies or governments. This method works perfectly well until something in the system breaks or is some how thrown out of wack. The system shuts down.
Often, in these sorts of situations we have no ability to back-up the system and provide safety in redundancy. It isn’t economically viable to provide two municipal water systems in every town and city. But, it was exactly this lack during Hurricane Katrina that left so many people without their basic needs being met.
So, what is an answer to this problem? Local, sustainable, point-of-use systems controlled and maintained by those who depend on them. This idea is touched on in a TED talk here by Michael Pritchard.
We’ve been working toward this goal without knowing the implications of it’s application on a wider scale and to some extent, this is reasonable. Sure, everyone would be better off if we all provided wholly for ourselves. We get that, but, for all intents and purposes, this just isn’t practical with the way people live today. Not because it can’t be done, but because people are so disconnected from those things that keep them alive.
We are raising chickens now. Some of these chickens are going to be slaughtered to provide food for us to eat. We will do this butchering ourselves because it is cheap, economical, and really fairly easy. The reactions we get to this idea from those around us usually tracks along the lines of “OMG!”. There is almost universal disgust that we would do such a thing to some poor chickens. And not just from vegans and vegetarians. We get this from meat eaters as well. Why?
The fact is, we are not only disconnected from our food sources as we often hear repeated, we are disconnected from just about EVERYTHING that keeps us alive today. We don’t have to really work for or think about our clean water, it comes straight into the house for us. We don’t have to think about our food production, it is stored on nice neat shelves at the grocery store. We don’t have to think about ANY of the systems that help maintain our lives. It is all taken care of for us and as a consequence, when the system breaks, we are helpless.
How to fix this? Simple. Localize your most immediate life-support systems. Food and water. This does two things: reduces your dependence on others for your basic life necessities and insures your safety if anything should go wrong. There are also corollary benefits such as eventually freeing up tax dollars for other things that cannot be brought down to a point-of-use production paradigm yet.
If we all take responsibility for our selves and how we maintain our own lives, the whole world benefits and becomes greater. Stay safe and sustainable!
P&S
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