So You Want To Be Self-Sufficient

Exactly what is self-sufficiency and how is it achieved?  That question led to many lively debates among us back-to-the-land types.  Even a narrow focus on just the material aspects of self-sufficiency such as water, food, warmth, shelter, tools and transport, leads to the realization that no-one achieves self-sufficiency on their own.  We begin life, live it and end it fully embedded in social networks: family, friends, classmates, roommates, co-workers, co-religionists, political parties, economic groupings, clubs, cults and on and on.

It seems that material self-sufficiency actually begins and ends with community.  So what is the minimum size of a truly self-sufficient community?  The family? The clan?  The tribe? The bioregion?  The nation-state?  The continent?  One important parameter is the technology being used.

A clan of hunter-gatherers using stone tools, spears and the bow and arrow can be self-sufficient, if there is enough game and food available within walking distance.  But they do have to be ready to move on to unexploited habitat when food runs out locally.  And there were times when they went hungry.  A few remnants of this stage of society still existed when I was young, but in my lifetime they have all been ‘discovered’, disrupted and engulfed by industrial civilization.

The next level up is quite a leap: settled agriculturalists and herders living in cultures with complex language, writing, social classes and castes, law, organized religion, property rights, specialization of crafts, kings and urban centers.  Some of these groups thrived for thousands of years all over the planet.  Many examples still exist, but all of them are enmeshed with the dominant global culture to some extent.

When we get to industrial societies, it seems nothing short of access to the resources of the entire planet is sufficient to sustain the current level of development, and even that may not be enough, given the primitive technologies currently in use.

My desire to be self-sufficient came with a parallel wish to live in community.  As I moved away physically, intellectually and spiritually from the Jewish, middle class, suburban, Toronto community that I had grown up in, I searched for a new community that would reflect and support my hunger for new experiences. 

My first communal experience was with my partner, a recent refugee from that hotbed of alternative living, Berkeley California.  We hooked up soon after I had returned from my mind-altering journey to India.  Jane was three days older than I.  She was staying at the house of friends of mine, with her 3-year-old daughter.  On our first meeting we talked long into the night.  I never left.  Soon we departed from Toronto and flew out to Vancouver Island on the west coast of Canada.  The search for community had begun.