Survivalist News

Casaubon’s Book » Blog Archive » Fannie, Freddie, Subsistence Farming and You
Those who know me well can perhaps guess the bit I’m going to argue with - the observation that subsistence farmers will probably not be needed in this future, or not for a long time yet. Now it is quite possible that the emphasis here should, in fact, be on the rural “ecovillages” and that I’m misunderstanding Greer’s point. I’m actually in complete agreement with Greer’s many statements that ecovillages are extremely unlikely to be the dominant - or even a significantly useful - component of future community modelling. I say this not to criticize those who live in ecovillages, but because as Greer himself has observed, they are simply expensive, involving a lot of economic self-sorting that is increasingly unlikely (if you prefer, you may say that we just spent the money we might have spent on ecovillage infrastructure instead of wind turbines ;-)), and a model unavailable to all but the rich. Ecovillages also involve discarding the enormous build-out of housing we have just used our wealth for (many, many millions of units more than a society that doesn’t require so much personal space and doesn’t have so much money) and demand lots of credit, which is unlikely to be available. It simply isn’t going to happen.