My new favorite book is The Urban Homestead: Your Guide to Self-Sufficient Living in the Heart of the City. I think most of us tend to picture “homesteaders” as folks who buy some acreage out in the boonies, then set about creating a self-sufficent life off-grid miles from the nearest town.
It’s a nice image but not a very practical one in an era of climbing gas prices. Here’s why.
A couple years ago, I attended a workshop on calculating your carbon footprint. The instructor had provided everybody with a simple spreadsheet, and we had to plug in our own personal numbers from utility bills and other records: annual miles driven in a car, do you heat with oil, natural gas or wood, do you own a riding or push lawn mower, how many miles do you fly annually? That sort of thing. Well, one of the attendees impressed us all when he stated that he lived in a house that didn’t have a conventional heating system. It was passively heated and cooled, built on a massive slab with a lot of sand underneath to absorb heat during the day and then release it at night. (The process reversed itself during warm weather.) We certainly thought that he’d be the greenest guy in the room. It turned out, however, that my carbon footprint was much smaller than his even though I heat with natural gas and live in a house with good, but not great insulation. The difference was, his house was out in the middle of nowhere so he had to drive quite a distance for everything he needed. I’m in the ‘burbs, about 3 miles from the nearest drugstore, grocery store and more and only about 7 miles from my job (compared to his 30 miles).
Moral of the story: homesteading in the city or the suburbs makes a lot of sense.
The Urban Homestead‘s authors, Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen live in a little house in Los Angeles but they grow and preserve much of their food, have a compost pile, clean without toxic chemicals, practice urban foraging, keep chickens and more. Based on their own experiences, the book is a down-to-earth instruction manual loaded with simple projects for things like building garden beds, making yogurt, building a vegetable storage mound, making a rain barrel, and using a solar cooker.
The book begins with basic urban gardening in raised beds, eliminating your lawn and self-watering containers, followed by almost two dozen projects to get you started. The chapter on urban foraging covers everything from harvesting invasive wild edibles and gleaning fruit to dumpster diving for clean edible food behind grocery stores. City livestock such as chickens, ducks, rabbits, pigeons, quail and bees are discussed followed by an extensive chapter called Revolutionary Home Economics. This deals mostly with food preservation (canning, drying, fermenting), brewing up a little moonshine (mead sounds really intriguing), and non-toxic cleaning (source of the cleaning solution recipe I’m now using). Chapter 6 looks at water and power for the homestead and Chapter 7 covers urban transportation options including cycling. The book also includes an extensive resource section to help you track down more information.
Along the way, you’re given the rationale for adopting this life design (resource depletion, climate change and all) but it’s not a doom-and-gloomer epic. Overall the tone is optimistic, and I particularly like this passage in the conclusion where the authors discuss possible future scenarios: More of the Same, Apocalypse, and Consciousness Shift. About this last option, they write:
This is what we hope for, and what the activities profiled in this book are geared to jump-starting – the rise of a new urban agriculture and home economics along with a growing concern about where our food comes from and how we use energy and resources. The good thing is that if you and your neighbors pick up a few skills in this book you can ditch the crystal ball and be ready for any of these [scenarios]…Community building is the next step beyond this book. Share these skills with your friends, family and neighbors. Share your time, you crops, your knowledge – build a community of urban homesteaders.
Build community, and we’ll stick our necks our and make a prediction – everything’s going to be all right.
I love this book. Rather than doomer discussions about TEOTWAWKI (The End Of The World As We Know It), this is a roll-up-your-sleeves-and-lets-get-to-work guide to simple changes we can make now to help ensure resilience and self-reliance in the years to come.
So what steps are you taking on the road to self-reliance?
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