Courtesy @cognazor
“This year I’m planting a lot of potatoes because I want something that stores well and is a good staple over the winter.” —Jason Snyder
I’ve been wondering lately about homesteading.
The word conjures warmth and ease for me (which I know is wrong), and doesn’t at all conjure “back to the land” or prepping or communal living. This is important because I have emotional allergies to those things. And yet, I can’t help thinking that it may be necessary to draw on some of these traditions as I look toward a future for my family. “Homesteading,” relative to those things, has a ring of baggageless-ness to it.
This subject came up because, in my investigation of what the fuck I am going to do, I spoke with Peter Limberg of The Stoa and expressed that I’m uneasy with the idea that I might force a non-mainstream lifestyle on my young son, that he will grow to be conscious of my choice and how its meaning for me was (literally) existential; and that he will feel undue pressure to live a life that he would not have otherwise chosen. Put another way, the world feels super serious right now and I don’t want to violate my child’s autonomy by making him someday feel like he has to carry on a cause of mine.
Peter then mentioned Jason Snyder, a reformed academic, recent homesteader, and self-described “Metamodern localist” pursuing permaculture and bioregional regeneration. And — the important bit for me — he has a young son.
Jason considers himself a doomer optimist which means he thinks societal collapse is happening, but it may be happening on a long enough timeline that during the collapse, perhaps there’s room for his wife and 3-year-old son to become increasingly self-sustaining, on their own for now, but eventually with others who will help form a village.
But also, maybe not. Even the best-case civilizational reboot would not be a rosy scenario. With each successive shock there’s going to be real human damage. Take COVID. While many of us feel like we dodged a bullet, a lot of people also became diseased or died. Even with shocks that are not TEOTWAWKI, the doom is real.
“There’s light at the end of the tunnel — for some of us. And it might not be me,” Jason says with a stoic deadpan.
Society is likely going through a multi-decade decline according to Jason, and he anticipates the sustainability runway for his family’s project to be 10 years, at which time he’ll have cultivated chickens, eggs, livestock, and a food forest.
“I choose 10 years because that’s when most of the trees I’m planting will begin bearing fruit. At that point, I’d be happy if we produced say 50% of our own food, sourced 40% locally, and the remaining 10% non locally for items like coffee, salt, and olive oil.”
There will always be dependencies. The true goal, he says, is to become more resilient as a household but also locally interdependent. And this is where the vision draws on those past traditions that make me, in my admitted ignorance, cringe. Many important factors will depend on the people that he associates with and lives near. In other words, “it takes take a village.”
“And some important goods like this computer that I'm typing on will be decidedly non-local.”
What I keyed in on most during our conversation, though, was how they transitioned from their prior life to what they have now. It was reasonable to me. His wife had taken a tenure-track faculty position at Appalachian State University, so they moved near the school. As they were looking for homes to buy, one with some acreage happened to pop up in their price range, and they bought it.
And that’s how it started. Of course, since they are both academics in salient fields it was perhaps an easier intellectual shift for them than it might be for someone like me. But it was relatable because they just sort of said, fuck yeah, let’s do it. They don’t live remotely, though they are of course rural. They didn’t “join a commune,” though they want to build a bottom-up community. Their son enjoys being “helpful” as he takes the plant starters in at night, uses his kid-size shovel to move mulch or soil, waters flowers. He likes feeding the chickens but is a little hesitant nowadays after a rooster put him in his place. Jason explains as much to him about what they’re doing as he can, but is also sensitive to the reality that often his son sees the homestead activities as competing for his attention. So he does the conscious parent thing and balances it with trips to the park and other activities that are purely for him.
It is curious that Jason is doing what he’s doing and that his parents met on a commune. But he himself never lived there. He was raised “nature adjacent” both out-of-town and in the suburbs of Taos, New Mexico. The only homesteading-type memory Jason has of his early days is his mother’s garden, which he helped her with but never took an active interest in.
While Jason follows their progress, he’s not sold on the eco-village or intentional community models.
“The other approach is to just situate yourself in a place that you think has potential,” he says. “And I think this place does, with the history and the geography. Beyond that, I’m just trying to get to know my neighbors. Perhaps in the longer-term, bait some of my friends to come, you know? Live nearby and just see what develops.”
The idea is to build something he can pass on to his son, or whatever other kids he might have. He hopes that the pandemic trend of re-ruralization continues, that people are drawn to a more resilient, regenerative, sustainable lifestyle, and that it would build up over time.
“And maybe I can be a kind of seed, or help shepherd that. But a lot of it is out of my hands.”
There’s no way for me to assess the likelihood that Jason and his family are inoculating themselves from the looming collapse of everything. But his Twitter feed is a clear window onto what it’s like to face hard truths about the world, and then act, as a family. He and other homesteaders on Twitter like Ashley Colby and Joe Norman, scattered across the globe, are all playfully rivalrous and supportive with each other. Jason is deeply and actively inspired by them.
I have no idea if homesteading is in the cards for me and my family. But if it is, it will have been inspired by Jason and his. It certainly does not appear that their project presents any kind of challenge to their son’s autonomy. Integrating with cycles of the land on a five-acre playground?
The looming prospect of societal collapse notwithstanding, that sounds like a kid’s dream come true.