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Four decades ago I dreamed of self-sufficiency: a cow in the back paddock, a spinning wheel by the fire. Western society would crumble and communities with love and peace and extremely good apricot jam would take over the world. It didn’t happen. Western society grew even more obsessed with self and possessions; I remembered that I don’t like milk much and I never did manage to spin a decent thread. For a while, if I didn’t grow it, make it or harvest it from the bush, my son and I did without, but that was poverty, not choice. I still found joy in growing most of my own food, adding bits to the house and power system, but no longer felt guilty buying a case of mangoes. I left behind the dream of total self-sufficiency. I was wrong. The world needs the dream of self-sufficiency more than ever. As I write this, communities across our region are without power after a not-very-bad storm. We sit here snug and I’m tapping on the (solar powered) computer. (We are also, for the first time, considering — just considering — getting connected to mains power, though we may not actually use it for years or even decades, as a back up for a time when neither Bryan nor I may be up to looking after the system for a while.)
As we become less self-reliant, we lose contact not just with the earth, Self-sufficiency means you get redundancy. Redundancy is that wonderful technical term that means if one thing fails, something else is going to work. One engine fails in a plane but if the other engine keeps going the plane doesn’t fall from the sky — redundancy. In a community that is self-sufficient — or even just self-reliant — there will be many ways to generate power. If one fails, others will keep going. Self-reliance in this community meant that in the Depression everyone ate: there was rabbit for the pot or kangaroo, crops of spuds and corn and pumpkin to share. If the frosts got the peaches then you all ate plums. Redundancy. Our world is getting more centralised. Cities have about three days’ worth of food. No trucks for a week and people begin to starve. But there is another reason to be self-sufficient, too. Every time I turn on a tap or the computer here I am subconsciously considering the state of the water tanks and the batteries in the powerhouse. Every meal I pick from the garden or orchard makes me aware of the world around me — the real world, of rain and wind and birds. I am part of the earth, forced to keep learning it, cherishing it. You can’t grow your own tomato and basil soup with chilli cornbread without a bit of earth and garden cherishing. You can’t keep kidding yourself, either. If you are trying for self-sufficiency, even if you are far from achieving it, you have to watch the land around you. No one who watches the clouds for forty years or smells the new bushfire winds can kid themselves that the climate isn’t changing, that the world isn’t steadily growing more polluted, more depleted by too many people taking far too much. That, perhaps, is the greatest gift of self-sufficiency — truth. A self-sufficient or self-reliant community has to look at the world around them, and to share their knowledge as well as their potatoes. So many people today only ever see the world through the false worlds created by TV, the spin of PR. A community, of course, doesn’t have to be a village. Earth Garden magazine is a community, even if we have mostly never met. Earth Garden tells the truth We’re cranky and we’re kooky, grubby sometimes and ooky… but EG is a magazine without spin. As the rest of the media rotates to the sound of PR chants, EG is created by those who are doing what they write about. I don’t mean that the other media are full of lies. There may be a few porkies, where PR has spun just a bit too far into “a slight discrepancy with what actually occurred on the ground”. But mostly what we see and hear and read is just not quite the truth, because it has been filtered through people who are writing about things they have not experienced. The journalists do their best, but it’s still not the same. |
Mostly, I have come to believe that we need self-reliant communities if we are to be fully human. What is it to be human? Being a wombat means grass and dirt and other wombats, high spots to tell the world about your doings with your droppings and good smells in the night. Take these away, and the wombat is no longer living a wombat life. It’s the same for humans. We are animals too — and we evolved to do certain things. We evolved to walk … but now we go to gyms instead, and spend our days sitting … a posture that isn’t natural for humans for too long. We evolved to speak … maybe it was our ability to talk that meant we survived the Ice Ages, when our Neanderthal and other cousins failed. When you can talk (and walk) you can compromise with the next tribe, work out how to cooperate to get things done. So we evolved to cooperate, too. But these days most of the ordering of society is done for us, not by our own community, but by orders from governments or the businesses that increasingly rule our lives. (You don’t think business rules your life? How about the way you use your phone … your electricity … the way you travel from place to place? All of these were decided by large companies, not us). We had a table full of young people here last week, and I was reminiscing about the house raisings around here, decades ago — twenty, thirty people gathering to pour a slab, put up the walls or roof, bringing plates of food as well as muscles, babies passed from hand to hand as we raised roof beams or trimmed timber. Even today — thank goodness — Australians still form communities in the face of disaster, bringing out barbecues to share after a cyclone, or giving with our hearts and pockets. But steadily, too, this is changing. As we become less self-reliant, we lose contact not just with the earth, but also with each other. Roos and wallabies know when to stop breeding, when to move. Humans don’t, or at least not any more in the developed world. How many kids, these days, have their closest relationship with a TV or a computer? Change is happening, and for a host of deep and powerful reasons, we need to go back to the dreams of homemade jam and homemade power systems. We’re going to need them. The spring garden And speaking of food: this is the time to PLANT. In all but tropical climates two thirds of the year’s growth will happen now. Dig up the lawn and put in spuds or sweet potato or Quinoa; plant Warrigal spinach between the wheel strips of the driveway; cover the house in lattice and plant climbing perennial beans, choko, snow peas, Chilacayote melons — they’ll help insulate against the heat and your windows will fill with green shadows in mid-summer. Cover fences with hops, grapes, kiwi fruit, Chilacayote melons. Put in a perennial vegie plot with garlic chives, perennial capsicum and chilli, Warrigal spinach, red Italian chicory, asparagus, artichokes.
Hop vine. Planting vines to climb over fences is a good way Add a hedge of apple trees, edge the footpath with tea camellias or coffee bushes, so strollers can still get by and no one can accuse you of spoiling their duco and only the cognoscenti will know how to harvest them which means that when they do they can turn out to be good mates. Water while you can, and mulch. And if it looks like it does in mid-summer, don’t oik them out. Wait till it rains and cross your fingers, and more than half the time the ‘dead’ stuff will sprout again. |
