Homesteading Part 3: What is Sustainability?

This is part 3 in an ongoing series. Other parts include:

• Homesteading Part 1: Introduction
• Homesteading Part 2: If You Eat It, You Should Grow It

my toddler catching up on the latest Mother Earth News, picked up from the “libary”

Almost everything we do has consequences – for ourselves, our surroundings, and our children’s future. When we act mindlessly on our own desires for comfort, convenience and luxury we are, in effect, making mindless decisions for our children. At some point someone must pay the penalty for our generation’s wastefulness, laziness and greed. That baby you rock to sleep at night may be that somebody.

The only way to prevent major negative consequences to future generations is to start living mindfully, sustainably.

How do we do that? We have to start evaluating every aspect of our life – especially our consumption – and ask ourselves is this sustainable?

Let me give you a couple of examples…

• Buying food that is mass produced by large corporations. You had to know that would be first on my list, right? I get funny comments like this a lot: “Why don’t you just buy it at the grocery store?” It’s a fair question, right?The problem is that these huge corporations farm in ways that destroy the soil, making it difficult to grow anything containing real nutrients. On top of that they rely heavily of a finite resource – oil – to ship, process, and package their foods. Is that sustainable?
• Creating and buying products made from non-biodegradable materials. Does anyone else remember the “plastics make it possible” campaign? Plastics have aided in many medical discoveries, but somehow it also ended up packaging everything else.From food storage to water bottles to toy packaging – plastic is everywhere. Most of these materials are made using petrochemicals. Not only can these products be harmful to our health, but they also take up a lot of space in the ocean. Instead of asking ourselves where all of our “stuff” will end up, we can conveniently pay someone else to take it away.  Is that sustainable?
• Existing as a “work and pay someone else to do it” society. I believe we have become a society of paying someone else to do and think for us. This has allowed us to work longer hours, have a bigger everything and give our children “more”. More leisure, more trash, more debt and more problems than any previous generation has ever seen. Is that sustainable?

Perhaps the “more” our children really need is more learning to grow their own food, more creating things that are truly useful and more working alongside of us to perform every day tasks such as laundry and basic food preparations. They need more of our time – working with them – and less of our time working for stuff.

That is sustainable.

This kind of sustainability, involving both time and goods, can only be found in an agrarian society. One in which families grow their own food, live off of their own land, and work side by side with their children in order to provide the basic necessities of food, water and shelter.

If you want to practice sustainable living, then the logical conclusion is to practice homesteading.