> If we want to survive . . . each and every family as much as possible needs to be > able to produce it’s own food for itself, and as many other people > as possible.
I don’t need to grow my own food. I need to be part of a healthy network that does. While I’d love it if everyone gardened, a coordinated community food system is more resilient and allows more diversity than individual dachas, and fits better with American culture and land ownership patterns. The US has a very different history from Russia. And most yards are too small to produce “all our own food.”
A single 18th-Century farmer could feed 50 people. Making the household, instead of the farm, the neighborhood or even the town, the core unit of a food system atomizes the community. Let’s not default to “go it alone.” It reduces the many options for reaching a goal–meeting our food needs–to a single tactic: grow it all yourself. It means that this critical function is done only one way, with all the attendant hazards (what if you get hurt?) and reduces most people to serfs farming for a banker. It’s part of the mix, but not the solution.
The dachas are well worth looking at. But severe food and economic disruptions tend to be brief in developed countries (see Argentina, Iceland, Weimar Germany, Mexico, etc.), stabilizing soon at a simplified level. So to redesign as though the unstable period will be permanent is unwise.
While Russians were busy farming their 2.5 acre dachas all day, the oligarchs were seizing control of everything else. They still have it. Let’s learn from that. We need to organize at a higher level than the household.
Toby
http://patternliteracy.com
On Aug 6, 2012, at 7:35 PM, Lawrence F. London, Jr. wrote:
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> Do we need an American permaculture dacha movement, 20th century > back-to-the-land homesteading & biointensive agriculture movements > revisited? Yes. – LL
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