Vegetarian Apostasy

I am not a vegetarian. Not anymore.

For a time, I self-identified as a vegetarian, and then for many years, after I had incorporated fish and fowl back into my diet, I identified myself as someone who did not eat beef or pork. Then, shortly after the turn of the century, when I was doing a lot of foreign travel, I made a deliberate effort to start eating meat again. It was distasteful and kinda creepy at first, and on a few occasions, a mouthful of meat went back onto my fork rather than down my gullet after a bout of chewing because the texture threatened to invoke my gag reflex, but over time I worked my way up to the point where I could eat a steak and keep it down. I haven't put that to the test recently, but I'm pretty sure I could pass for normal at any sit-down meal with mainstream industrial eaters.

Why would I endure discomfort in order to adopt a less healthful diet; one that is harder on Gaia than was the  vegetarian diet it replaced? Simply put, I never wanted to be an ungracious guest and reject home-cooked food that had been prepared for me. I cannot overstate the importance I place on food rituals and food traditions for creating and nurturing the bonds of community and family. I never made it to Provence or to any of the Mediterranean food havens, but I did partake fully of some home-cooked meals which, in an earlier dietary phase, I would have sampled selectively while rattling off my usual schpeel about grain fed to cattle and the correlation between meat consumption and heart disease. That's all good information, and I would like to see more people incorporate it into their understanding of how the world operates, but I've done my tour of duty spreading that gospel and repaying hospitality with indiscriminate ideological spillage and implied moral criticism. No more.

Earlier today, I followed a link from the Facebook page of a C-Realm listener to an essay by Daniel Vitalis in which he explains how he went from being a fervent vegan and raw foodie to someone who signed up for and attended a class in “hunter safety.” The first of the user comments included the following:

I am sure you are sincere, however how sustainable would it be for 7 billion people to eat wild animals? There are simply not enough to go around! In neanderthal times, it was perhaps appropriate however for today's world we cannot afford to continue eating any kind of meat. We are eating the planet to death. An environmentally conscious person would never recommend eating animal products for this reason, irrespective of whatever health benefits you claim from your animal diet.

Groan. Would that we could eat righteousness. I'm reminded of the interview I conducted with Colin Tudge, author of the book Feeding People is Easy.

Colin: Now a lot of people would draw a line there and say, “Well you can, in fact, feed people completely on plants,” that an all-plant diet is best, and that an all-plant diet is very efficient. And many people say, “We should just be vegetarians if we really want to feed ourselves.”  And I say, and a lot of other people say, “No, this just isn’t actually true, because however much, however efficiently, you can farm just using plants, you can always farm even more efficiently if you put in some animals somewhere.”

And basically you break the animals down into two classes. There are those that eat grass and browse, which means the leaves of trees, and you can raise them on places where you wouldn’t normally be growing arable crops or horticulture; in other words cattle and sheep and things like that, you grow on grass in places including up mountains, where you can’t really practice arable farming and horticulture. And then in the places where you can practice arable farming and horticulture, you also have pigs and poultry which feed on the leftovers and surpluses and so on.

So if you are really trying to feed people well and provide a maximum amount of food easily, you finish up focusing on the arable, fit in the horticulture in the best places, and then you just fit in the animals where you can. If you do that, you finish up with a lot of plants, not much meat and maximum variety.”

Collin Tudge describes this style of feeding people as “Enlightened Agriculture.” I imagine ideologically-motivated vegetarians taking offense at that. To them eating animals  probably seems about as “enlightened” as infanticide or counting coup, and I have no interest in disabusing them of that notion. My only interest here is to point out to you, my broad-minded reader, that people interested in feeding all of Gaia's humans and keeping them healthy and minimizing the toll that doing so takes upon Mother Earth will reject fundamentalist vegetarianism along with industrialized factory farming.

Given that I mostly practice, but do not endorse, vegetarianism, mine is a curious circumstance. At present, I'm living at the Ecovillage Training Center on the Farm in Summertown, Tennesse. The Farm was founded in the early 70's, and vegetarianism was one of the primary tenets of the shared belief system held by the original Farm residents. The goals and sensibilities of 21st  Century, ecologically-informed, “enlightened agriculture” and 1970's Hippie idealism (to the extent that I understand either worldview) seem to co-exist happily in some places and to rub each other the wrong way in others. I see vegetarianism as a potential source of friction between the two worldviews.

This kitchen here at the ETC is a vegetarian kitchen (no meat allowed, though dairy and eggs are okay), and the food co-op which feeds me and the permaculture apprentices provides only vegetarian fare, and yet none of the people living on site here at the ETC are vegetarians. Most every time the apprentices and I seek a meal off the Farm, everyone takes the opportunity to grab a meat fix. Everyone but me.

Again, I'm not a vegetarian, and I do love the taste and texture of chicken, but I can't bring myself to order chicken that I know was raised under industrial conditions, so even when I leave the Farm, I maintain a de facto (but not an ideologically-motivated) vegetarian diet. While I love chicken, I also love chickens, and I suspect that my experience of keeping backyard chickens has highlighted the connection between the mental category 'chicken,' which refers to a standardized industrial food product that is measured by the pound, and the mental category 'chickens,' which matches up with an image of living domesticated birds.

Here at the ETC, we have four hens and one rooster. We keep the hens for egg production, and we keep the rooster for the hens. The Farm, on which the ETC is located, does not allow the raising of chickens for slaughter but does allow Farm residents to eat chicken. A cockerel who spends six months scratching in the dirt under the sky in a backyard flock, following his mother at first but quickly gaining confidence and striking out on his own to explore his environment, and then gets the ax after six months and, as Michael Pollan quips, “Has one bad day,” lives a sweet life compared to a cockerel raised for slaughter under industrial conditions. I won't dwell on the details. Suffice it to say that life for animals raised for slaughter at the human scale is much kinder than for animals raised at the industrial scale.

So long as humans continue to eat chickens, I want to see more of those chickens living their (admittedly short) lives at the human scale in backyard flocks and fewer of them suffering in factory farms. The ban on raising chickens for slaughter does the opposite. Every chicken raised in a factory and then purchased and consumed by someone prohibited from raising their own might have lived a kinder life but for the prohibition.

My point is not to criticize a particular policy of a particular community. I use it to illustrate the blowback that seems to accompany any effort to force people to conduct themselves with morality, decency and good sense. This is because people disagree about what constitutes morality, decency, and good sense. When faced with this sort of disagreement, people in positions of authority can try to persuade or try to mandate. Neither guarantees success. Requiring people to behave as if they believed what you believe, even when they don't, inevitably produces negative unintended consequences. Persuasion requires more time and attention than legislating morality, but it 's worth the effort.

I think. Maybe. Isn't it?

I sure hope so, because I don't want to live in a universe where forcing people to do what you want them to do really just does produce better outcomes than trying to win them over to your way of seeing things. Wouldn't that suck?

ETC Voices Podcast 003

http://www.archive.org/details/EtcVoicesPodcast003

In this third installment of the ETC Voices Podcast, KMO and permaculture apprentice, Nilsa harvest shiitake mushrooms after two days of torrential rain. Later, Doug Lain of the Diet Soap Podcast joins the conversation to compare contrast high-energy municiple waste water treatment practices with the low-energy alternative of humanure composting.

Music by Luke Who

May Day

It's a rainy first of May here in rural Tennessee. I went to a May Day celebration which took place under the newly covered dome next to the Farm store. There, Farm residents and visitors wove ribbons around the Maypole to celebrate the end of winter and the beginning of new growth and vitality in the spring and summer seasons. Today is the ancient Celtic festival of Bealtaine which sits opposite the autumn commemoration of Samhain which has worked its way into American consciousness in the form of Halloween.

Alayne, one of the ETC staff, started the festivities off by reading the Song of Bealtaine:

I am the calm, I am the quickening,

... I am the intoxication and the force
I am the silence, I am the singer,
... I am the stallion galloping to its source.
I am the bright pavilion and the feasting,
... I am the wedding couple and the bed,
I am the morning chorus and the heartbeat,
... I am the goal to which all paths are led.

After the festivities, I asked her to tell me more about the traditions surrounding this day, and then I asked her if she knew about its political associations. She did not. To her, May Day is entirely wrapped up with the Earth, the ancient traditions, and the changing of the seasons.

I called my fellow podcaster, Doug Lain of the Diet Soap Podcast, and asked him about his associations with this day. He has a different take on the day. Here is a bit of our conversation:

Doug: May Day is an interesting holiday that has both elements that I try to highlight on the Diet Soap podcast. It's this spiritual pagan holiday about rebirth, but to me it's the political holiday that comes first.  It has to do with the Haymarket affair... the Haymarket riot, which itself was part of the struggle for the 8-hour work day.  After the riot there was a political kind of show trial where eight anarchists were charged with the murder of a policemen.

Basically, there was a protest. On the third of May there'd been a strike outside a factory in Chicago, and the police had fired into the crowd. Two workers were killed. The organizers called for a rally at Haymarket square to protest the actions of the police and to demand the 8-hour work day.  Someone threw a pipe bomb there, at Haymarket.  When the police marched in formation to disperse the protesters somebody threw a pipe bomb at them.  That's where the idea of a bomb throwing anarchist comes from actually.

I don't know how many people were killed.  I know one policeman was killed, and maybe a dozen workers were killed.

Then they took eight anarchists who were organizers and put them on trial, and I think four or five of the people who were charged with the crime... not really for throwing the bomb. They never made any strong case that there was any connection between the people they put on trial and the bomb thrower, but just for being anarchists really, were eventually hung by the neck until dead.  They executed four people pretty much for having the wrong political ideas.

KMO: And they were protesting for an 8-hour work day? What was standard before that?

Doug: I think anything they could get away with. I don't know. Let me look.

Doug reads from Wikipedia:

The eight-hour day movement or 40-hour week movement, also known as the short-time movement, had its origins in the Industrial Revolution in Britain, where industrial production in large factories transformed working life and imposed long hours and poor working conditions. With working conditions unregulated, the health, welfare and morale of working people suffered. The use of child labour was common. The working day could range from 10 to 16 hours for six days a week.

KMO: Wow.

Doug: Yeah. So, they were struggling for something they really needed; some sort of cap on how many hours a week they could be asked to work by the new bosses of the industrial revolution.

The conversation turned to the topic of population overshoot. I summarized a portion of a conversation that I had recorded the previous day with SF author David Marusek.

David: I do believe that we are, at this point, already over-populated. We've exceeded the carrying capacity of the globe, and it's only a matter of time. (…) I just saw Paul Ehrlich, the author of the Population Bomb on TV the other day. When the book came out in the late sixties, Ehrlich was predicting that by 2010 society would already have collapsed because we wouldn't be able to feed everybody. That hasn't proven to be true... yet. Agriculture as a science has matured quite a bit in the meantime, and we are feeding a lot more people. Not everybody. What is it? A billion people who go to bed hungry every night? But we're doing it. We're feeding people at the expense of the Earth, and I believe that we are living on borrowed time.

(…)

So, yes, I believe we must be at Peak Oil, but we're also at the peak use of this planet. We are living not just on borrowed time but on borrowed resources.

I summarized David's comments for Doug, and he responded with:

Doug: When I think about overshoot, I think it's really unfortunate that we've come to this time where so many problems that require the best of us and the most intelligent and humane aspects of us are facing us at the same time the intensification of the current system is happening where we have less and less control and less and less ability to address those problems. So, rather than hunkering down and trying to protect as many people as we can, trying to put as many people in charge of solving technical problems and social problems as we can and dispersing power out and using our best selves, we are seeing more and more power and money going to fewer and fewer people and getting more and more concentrated.

And that process itself has a horrible impact on people's everyday lives, and it's seen as murder in the Third World because people are starving. It's hard to parse out what's real resource depletion and what's just this process of the intensification of private power and wealth. And that's why the story of Haymarket is important even now to remember because if we're going to have any hope of adequately and humanely dealing with overshoot, the principles that you see at work behind the Haymarket riot and it's aftermath and the memory of May Day are going to have to be a part of what we do.

---

As much as I admire that sentiment, I think that Bealtaine has a much better shot at an enduring place in human consciousness than does Haymarket. The seasons will continue their cycle, and when the Earth starts to stir from its winter torpor, people will perform rituals and ask the source of fertility and renewal for the gift of Her bounty. I hope that humans will remember and honor those of their ancestors who resisted coercion and rebuffed the efforts of the Machine to mine the cantankerous human spirit  like an ore. I don't have any confidence that the names of the fallen will be remembered or that their contributions will be appreciated, but I'm pretty sure that humans will be clued into the change of the seasons for as long as there are humans on this planet.

ETC Voices Podcast 002

http://www.archive.org/details/EtcVoicesPodcast002

KMO talks with Ecovillage Training Center staff and visitors about the Ecosoaker program whereby people can participate in the Permaculture Apprenticeship without a two month commitment. Site manager, Jason Deptula talks about advances in battery technology and about much deeper topics, and Apprentice Garrison calls out for a contact in Ashville, NC.

Power Down - Trade Up

The daughter of one of the Ecovillage Training Center staff arrived home from the Farm school last week and exclaimed, “I HATE Nonviolent Communication!”

According to Wikipedia:

Nonviolent Communication is a process developed by Marshall Rosenberg. It is a way to communicate with greater compassion and clarity. It focuses on two things: honest self-expression— exposing what matters to oneself in a way that's likely to inspire compassion in others, and empathy — listening with deep compassion.

The girl had been studying honest self-expression and empathy at school, and apparently it's tedious stuff. Even so, if you plan on living with other people, and if you imagine that the day may come when you cannot or choose not to rely on authoritarian institutions to resolve disputes and ensure domestic tranquility, then expanding your communicative repertoire might be just the thing.

I see myself as living a little ways into the future here at the ETC. Compared to how I was living just a short time ago, I use far less energy and engage in far fewer economically quantifiable activities on most days. Yesterday, I broke that pattern and spent a couple of hours driving to and from the town of Spring Hill where I lingered in a bookstore, ate in a restaurant, and got my hair cut. That's a lot more travel and commerce than I engage in most days here at the ETC, but yesterday would have seemed like a normal day for me as recently as last December when I worked nearly an hour's drive from where I was living. Now, I live on a reduced energy budget that might soon be the North American norm. It turns out that a seemingly modest amount of energy can power a rich and fulfilling existence, particularly compared to the quality of life of a corporate debt-serf.

Here in the ecovillage pseudo-future, I use cars, computers, and the internet. I'm recording podcasts and writing for blogs. I'm also packing shipments at a mail-order business and doing household and outdoor chores, but more than anything, or so it seems to me, I'm living and interacting with people far more than I'm accustomed to doing.

When I arrived here, I was accustomed to eating alone while reading a book or listening to a podcast. Now, I eat at a table with other people where we have a formalized arrangement concerning who was to prepare the meal and who will clean up afterward. I'm coordinating with people to get chores done and to pick up the mail in town.

In the past, when I kept chickens, if I didn't put them up at night, they didn't get put up. Not so at the ETC. Here, several people share the chicken-care duties, and that requires communication. Some of that communication has become routine and is accomplished with logs and sign-up sheets, so it's not a matter of constantly having to be tuned into someone else's pyschological needs, quirks, and tics, but being here shows me the degree to which mainstream life enables and encourages us to run on emotional autopilot.

Having to marshal my psychic energy to deal with the people around me can be a drain, but in the absence of the normal standardized roles and scripted exchanges of life in the mainstream mode, there's no getting around it. Working stuff out with people can be a pretty complicated affair, and most of us are out of practice. Formalized techniques like Nonviolent Communication would have us say things that we would feel more comfortable leaving unsaid, at least in the short term. It might have us talking about feelings and judgments when really the other person just needs to get some facts straight. It can seem absurdly touchy-feely or new agey, but it beats Mad Maxy, and it beats getting your doctor to write you a prescription for a pharmaceutical aid to get you through one more cycle of scripted interaction with other alienated debt-serfs.

When I interact with a person as a person, I have to summon up more psychic energy than I do for an automatic exchange with an anonymous stranger playing a standardized role. Who deserves the benefit of my full emotional engagement and consideration? Are there times when it is morally permissible to deal with some people according to a role they play?

When I think of the people I deal with on any given day here at the ETC, I understand that some of them, like the ETC staff, will be here indefinitely. The apprentices have been here a month and will be here for a month longer. Then there are the eco-hostel guests who stay overnight or a few days at most.

The people who will be gone in a month seem like members of my community; people with whom I really need to stay tight, but not so people who will only be here a few days at most. I don't want to say that I ignore or tune out the itinerants, but at the same time, I make no effort to remember their names. I know that some other congenial but equally temporary face will occupy that same role shortly.

I wonder if this mix of practically permanent, short but significant, and largely ephemeral relationships will prove typical in an energy-descent future. I can imagine a scenario in which some people have found their workable, long-term living arrangement, and a lot of other people are still looking for their own long-term gigs and are traveling around checking out the various arrangements on offer.

This scenario comes in two distinct flavors. One is the “just how it all shakes out” flavor in which the old way of life becomes increasingly unworkable for more and more people who do what they have to in order to survive while corporate and governmental entities continue the program to sustain the unsustainable and continue doing everything in their power to deny the need for new modi operandorum. This makes for an exciting period of historic transition, but its the sort of excitement that is the acquired taste of the war correspondent or disaster first-responder.

The other, more quixotic flavor is the “let's see what we can do if we decide to do it right” flavor. In this possible future, corporations and governments recognize that a spontaneous, bottom-up, phase change is inevitable and decide to help people explore the space of possible alternative living arrangements without desperation driving people to accept whatever marginally livable situation presents itself first. It may smell a bit like hobbit holes and unicorn horns, but I can see a future in which people have the leeway to sample a variety of post-petroleum lifestyles before committing themselves.

This second flavor is definitely within our technical means, but it's not anything you can vote for. It's not a message that a politician can use to get elected, but it is a message that people can nurture and share and use to inspire each other. There are different ways of living both sustainably and within our means. Seeing a diversity of living examples, hearing about them, trying them on to see how they fit, all help to erode the facade of conditioned expectations that keeps us going through the stressful and alienated motions. The transition is upon us. What's needed is the understanding that in powering down we can trade up.

ETC Voices Podcast 001

http://www.archive.org/details/EtcVoicesPodcast001

KMO talks with the other folks who live, learn, and work at the Ecovillage Training Center in Summertown, Tennessee. This week, KMO talks with Merry Moore, the ETC innkeeper about the kitchen co-op she conceived and continues to refine, then comes a walk and talk with Cliff Davis, ETC Head Gardener, about collecting and using local micro-organisms to make compost tea, and finally Garrison, an ETC permaculture apprentice, shares some surfer lingo.

I've set up an ETC Journal Pix group on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/groups/etcjournal/

If you have photos of the ETC to share, let me know via email and I'll add you to the group.

If you are looking for images of the Hippitat, check out this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LT6NIj4kEbQ

The Short Happy Life of Bobby McGee

Last week, I wrote of buying four hens and a rooster at a local Mennonite store and bringing them back here to the Ecovillage Training Center to inhabit the cob henhouse that has stood vacent since my arrival here in late February. Chickens generally don't like a change of scene and require an adjustment period before settling in and going about their regular barnyard business. Not this group. They hit the ground happy and instantly started acting as if they felt at home. The rooster in particular seemed quite pleased with his change in circumstances.  I closed that blog post with, “I'm typing these words on my ancient laptop computer at the kitchen table, and every couple of minutes as I've typed the rooster has crowed, voicing his approval and enthusiasm for his new situation. I concur.”

That rooster, named Booby McGee by one of the apprentices, died that very day. He spent one night and two glorious days at the ETC after spending a month in a small wire cage by the side of the road and before meeting a violent death. We found a scattering of feathers about a hundred yards from the henhouse near the edge of the woods. The modus operandi of snatching the prey and carrying it swiftly away to make the kill indicates a fox, according to Albert Bates. In all likelihood, death descended upon Bobby McGee around dusk but before the chickens put themselves to bed (or roost) in the henhouse.

Bobby McGee was a different breed from the four hens he came with. He was the same size as the hens themselves, and he had tufts of feathers on his feet. I took many pictures of those hens that first day, but Bobby shows up only as tail feathers or as a red blur in amongst the hens. Cliff, the ETC gardener brought us a replacement. The new rooster has lived on site before, and while these hens are new to him, the gig is one that he performs with authority and aplomb. His name is Gordon Lightfoot, and he is about one and half times the size of the hens. According to Cliff, Gordon is an Americana. He looks a lot like the Aracana rooster I used to own and whose crow you can still hear at the end of each episode of the C-Realm Podcast. He has long silver feathers that stream down his neck and back, and he has formidable spurs on his ankles. Gordon the rooster is no joke.

Click photo to enlarge

During Gordon's first night in the henhouse a raccoon pried open the henhouse door and got inside. The sounds of chicken panic woke Merry, the innkeeper, who lives on a school bus quite close to the henhouse. She got there in time to prevent any casualties and send the raccoon packing, but not before he had taken a chunk out of the thigh of one of the hens. That hen stayed close to the henhouse for the next couple of days, but now she follows Gordon and her sister wives around the ETC site. She can't keep up and must take frequent rests, but then she will get up and hobble in the direction of Gordon's continuous crowing to rendezvous with the group.

What lessons come from these experiences? The obvious and practical lesson is 1) to count the chickens in the hen house before securing it for the night, and 2) to remember that EVERYBODY loves the taste of chicken.

The fate of Bobby, who spent long weeks in unpleasant confinement, was placed into chicken paradise and shortly thereafter died a violent death raises (but does not beg) the question of whether it is better to live safely in drab confinement or to live dangerously in a paradise that answers to your every natural inclination, including the inclination to beware of predators.

I may dwell on that question in future posts, but for now I'd like to return to the question of the Changeover; the process by which the Farm re-organized and transformed itself from an idealistic religious movement under the charismatic leadership of a spiritual teacher into an economically viable community which accommodates the sink-or-swim moral assumptions of modern capitalism.

A lot of the people who come through here have visited other intentional communities, some of which operate as collectives. The one that comes up most often in conversational contrast to the Farm's Changeover is Twin Oaks, an intentional community in Virginia founded in 1967. Twin Oaks started out as, and remains, an economic collective. The example of Twin Oaks leads some folks to question the official Farm narrative of the Changeover which casts it as an unavoidable realignment needed to keep the community viable in the larger context of a money economy. In a previous post, I shared a portion of a conversation with Frank Michael in which Frank provided an alternative take on that official narrative, and I'll close out this entry with a transcript of part of a conversation that I recorded with Albert Bates and Joe of the Occult Sentinel Podcast. I used a different portion of this same conversation in episode 201 of the C-Realm Podcast. The transcript starts in mid-sentence because that's when I turned on the recorder.

Albert: ...fourth generation family here on the Farm. My mother died in 2003. She had been living here for 15 years. I'm now 63 years old. My son has 80 acres just outside the Farm where he's doing an edible landscaping nursery, and my granddaughter is just turning three. So, that's like four generations of family right here, and there are several families on the Farm that are that way.  

So, you know, you can't, on the budget that we're talking about, turn every house into this kind of utopian landscape, but you can start, and you can get the ideas passed down through our alternative school to the next generation, and they can pick up and run with it for themselves. 

Joe: So the goal, probably, if you had too much funding, would be to just become totally off-grid, self-sufficient solar...

Albert: I don't think there's any such thing as too much funding for a project of this type. If we had too much funding we would probably spend a lot more time on activism. And we're kind of Buddhist in the sense that we're not feathering our own nest. We're looking at the big picture. Insofar as we can make ourselves more harmless than we are right now, that would be great. 

The other thing is to try to create a scene where people can come through and have the hospitality and a sense of what it is we're trying to do, so maybe it spreads that way too. 

Back in 1980, or there'bouts, eighty, eighty four, somewhere in that region, The World Bank gave a grant to [the village of] Gaviotis in Columbia of $8 million, and he [Paolo Lugari] was able to use that to create this meme  of sustainable living and sustainable production in a very rough and rural area, in the middle of a civil war, out in the middle of nowhere, [with] very poor soils, [and a] wicked hydrological cycle, and he created a forest system and an industry for making pine tar where eventually it was able to pay for itself and generate its own income, but in the interim, it began as this grant that enabled him to build community facilities: this kitchen, housing for his scientists, a shop for making windmills, [and] different kinds of things like that. 

Well, if the Farm had gotten an $8 million grant in 1984, this would be a much different place today, because in 1984 we were just starting a solar car manufacturing company. We had ambitions to have a sailing fleet that would go through the Caribbean on a fair trade circuit. We had two thousand acres, and about a third of that was under cultivation, and, you know, it was a beautiful vision, and what happened instead, because we didn't have that external input was that we came up against bank loans, the Regan recession in building trades—the things we made our money from—and we ended up going into a different system. We de-collectivized. We had to say, “You know, okay, well, no longer can we just have an economy of love; a gift economy, where somebody does this job and they can go to the store and get everything for free.” Instead we had to exchange pictures of dead presidents between people, and that was the economy, and if you wanted to send your kid to the Farm school, you had to come up with the tuition. 

Well, that changed the way everybody started doing things, and a lot of people actually left at that point. Some left because we didn't change fast enough, and some left because they thought we were selling out the Revolution, and the Farm population went from over a thousand to down  250 or so, and leveled off at that point, and it's been like that for 15 or 20 years now. 

Those that stayed, curiously enough, were a lot of the people that had been in the original caravan that arrived here. So rather than selling out the Revolution, they were sort of like the people who stayed and washed the dishes after the party, and paid off a million dollars in debt to the banks, [and thus] bought the land a second time, and have been risk-averse ever since, and [they have grown] conservative in progressing the thing very slowly, in stages, so as not to become vulnerable again. 

In future posts I will return to the question of creating community within the confines of a capitalist society that would rather see ersatz community sold as a commodity than real community arise spontaneously and organically as people work collaboratively to fulfill their own needs.