I could quote specific news items triggering my rant but nearly any news item qualifies anymore.
One post here about someone being sick in their homestead did trigger it though, as did a response "Yeah, I get tired of telling all the people who want to live alone with no support network, that getting ill or breaking a necessary bone, or even just needing to get to a hospital when you can't drive (or bike) yourself is a problem. If your outhouse doesn't have grab bars and a very secure path to it, now might be the time to consider remedying that!"
So an open rant for anyone listening. Maybe i'll say something useful to one of you or maybe you'll just get a better insight into my headspace if you read far enough. I debated whether to post it but hopefully it's useful to someone and I doubt i'm the only one thinking thoughts like this with how our world is going.
If you know what a Venn diagram is, it's those circles where things overlap but not exactly. Permaculture is one thing, something like Prepping is a term that has some overlap (but not exactly) yet is probably of interest to people here, but so is Rural Living. Most of this stuff is hard to do in the city, is hard to do where everyone can see your front door.
Yet it's hard to live alone.
Are you a prepper? No I dont mean food and firearms, have you ever prepped for if you might become disabled? Imagined what it would be like if you got maybe a welding UV injury to your eyes and you were temporarily blind for several days? Could you navigate around your house and still cook some food, do some laundry for yourself to get dressed later, find the phone to call a neighbor if you hear a prowler outside?
What if you broke a leg and it takes months to heal, are you going to be chopping wood all winter then? Can you get up the stairs in your split level? Do you regret ever HAVING a split level now that you're healing? (ask me why I now hate split-levels, go on ask me) Will it be easy to hand stoke that money saving stove that's not fed by a machine cuz you wanted simple and lasts a century pioneer style?
Are you prepared for serious financial upheaval in the outside world? What if your property tax triples because the local or state government is trying to drive you out of the area, or your house insurance company first quadruples your forest fire insurance and then wont insure your house at all, and now you can't even sell it for what you got in it because its uninsurable in a fire zone?
Did you build decades or even multigenerational family and friend ties in your rural neighbors, but then because of something you didn't plan or want, were forced to move and have to start over new friendships and neighbors where nobody knows you and nobody will come to your aid for years to come?
It can be hard, can't it? : P
I'm not trying to be depressive, or morbid, or give anyone a gut punch... to me this is just a rant about what I think people really want, and need, and how some of my own trauma has affected my own perceptions of "what I thought was smart" in terms of a social investment. I've been forced to start over life in several ways finding out I was less than fully physically able, financial savings stolen by people I trusted whose lives I previously saved, leaving neighborhoods and networks where I had social support, and fate chance and circumstance is forcing me to find out none of the things that were sure in my head were sure at all and now I have to re-evaluate life.
To me it's clear intentional community is one of the answers because we need people like us who can support us in mutual aid when things aren't going quite as planned. The problem is always who can we trust that much, who is really like us (can be hard for someone not the majority religion or denomination to find close connections sometimes for instance, let alone political disagreements) and people needing the freedom to come and go if things aren't working out for them.
What am I really saying here? I guess it's something i've said already in similar fashion in another post or two before. There are answers for the PHYSICAL problems here at permies - all kinds of ways of working with instead of against nature, growing food high density per acre, far greater energy efficiency with less pollution and waste, alternative building methods with many advantages including cost. That's why i'm here - I don't know those solutions, others are way ahead of me, and i'm fascinated by this stuff - I need to integrate it into future plans, no question. I also know I don't have full time to learn and impliment it all because i'm a product of a modern society where i'm trying to get a good paying degree which will keep me not too far from the city. Even if I wanted to leave the city I couldn't - I need at least alternative medical services, access to markets I generally only find in a large city, and similar things that I think some people are delusional to believe they will never again need even if I share the desire for "getting away from it all". Yet often you can't. A few visits to the emergency room usually clears that up.
Our biggest world problems are not lacking physical solutions - these boards are full of physical solutions. To me it seems our biggest problems remain political (on the big scale), social, and economic. Even the threads where were talking about crimeproofing and theftproofing that's a social problem from people in govt not doing their jobs but now we increasingly pay the cost. Things are changing and not in a good way and we have to adapt.
IN THE WORLD OF THE NEAR FUTURE I see no alternative but some kind of intentional community as being an almost necessary goal for most people, stronger neighborhoods if youre stuck in one, realizing that were going from a high trust society to a low trust society and i'm not sure quite how to reverse it or how long it would take even started immediately. Some discussions were had in my crimeproofing thread about how things are in places like south america or africa - we seem to be going in that direction and being like that in the outer world and people treating security as a collective responsibility to share as a necessity.
I'm trying to figure out ways to survive without that - at the start - but I recognize ending up like that is the goal, and if I had any life advice to give anyone it would be to move in that direction wherever you are because it seems inevitable.
IN THE WORLD OF THE NEAR FUTURE I see a need to be in rural-ish areas where you can grow your own food, where youre not on the immediate evacuation corridor in event of some large bad event in the nearest large city (ie the swath of crime that followed Hurricane Katrina as an example), where youre not within convenient range of serious social unrest ending up in your backyard.
Rural-ish - but not too far away from a large city because you just might need a Tier 1 Trauma Hospital to save life or limb within the golden hour. Do you know the difference of the Tiers 1 through 5? Have you ever wondered whether an ambulance can even get down your rural road or navigate to your plot of land that you picked off an unmarked road for security reasons? Any clue whether you are in the flying radius of an AIR ambulance and where a medical helicopter would land on your property if they couldn't drive you there in time? They can apparently land in about a 75 by 75 foot open area which could include a field of cut wildgrass or with snow plowed off in winter and some lighting so they know they aren't getting tangled in wires or your ham radio antennas in the dark. Am I too paranoid thinking about this? This is how you think when you've had more than one near death experience and multiple life threatening traumas in your life.
Even just for alternative medical care I couldn't be too far from the big city - you might find an acupuncturist but not necessarily a good one in small to medium sized communities unless there's a chinese immigrant population or something. Chiropractors? They are everywhere, but can you find Gonstead chiros, the gold standard? There are some other alternative therapies and modalities that you can travel for because you only need them infrequently, but anything you might need frequently if it's not offered in your nearest decent sized city makes life really hard. I had to drive 500 miles a week for multiple years to get weekly care I couldn't get where I lived for problems no western doctor could do anything for - it wears you out.
Are these really permaculture topics? I think yes - permaculture of sustainable health and wellness. Of community health and wellness, social support, living in a group of people you can trust who help each other out. This matters more and more as you get older, or if you have any kind of permanent medical condition, or even an extended healing period to recover from something. I just had a surgery that a month ago I didn't know i'd need and I can't lift more than 10 pounds for a month and more than 20 for several months now. All plans to do certain work before it got too cold just got sh__canned the whole winter and i'm set back months. Nobody is available to help me besides my GF I mean, and there wasn't the last few times this happened either, it's how I got this far set back in the first place.
Is talking about prepping type topics related to permaculture? It can be, maybe we need new terms. Resilent intentional communities? It overlaps in my mind. Everything overlaps. Prepping-type things. Where the hospitals are and ambulance radius services out of the big city. Handicapped or/and assistive technology so I wouldn't have to abandon a rural living dream and go spend later years right back in what I was trying to get away from in the first place. Access to markets not just to buy but sell - the kind of work i'd like to do for others sells better in a big city than some tiny small one. Alternative health. Keeping an eye out for people I might want to build an intentional community with long term, as well as networks of people of like mind I could drop in on or visit while traveling. I think in the not-far-off future were increasingly going to need it as society continues to devolve. Permaculture answers for food and energy are important but so are increasing insights into building functional communities, alternative health, and mutual aid networks.
Rural living in an off grid house with no bills is what i've ALWAYS wanted, but i've had to make both compromises, and expansions, reconsiderations, reinterpretations, and reanalysis of the plans in my head of what I thought it would be. I've heard of people who "ran to the country" whether as a retirement plan or a survivalist fantasy and ten years later ran out of money or needed medical care or realized they had no good neighbors and were right back in the city they came from alot poorer, their retreat for sale at a discount. I originally thought i'd have about 80k to get to a rural retreat, and then had to cut down to 50k, then 40k, then 30k, and now it's looking maybe I wont have much over 20k to start and I hope still that to do anything. Trying to get land and have something to live in for 20k in the modern world without being in the middle of absolute nowhere is pretty darn hard.
Yet there are good things that only come from cities of a given size that I don't want to be too far away from, I just want to limit the bad things from the city while still being able to access the good things as much as possible. I find myself wanting to expand conversations in directions that I suspect... are beyond the norm on this board, because when I put out feelers I seem to be... how should I say... maybe a bit extreme? Because i've had all this trauma and bad stuff in my life happen showing me how many ways things can go wrong and I almost overcompensate trying to think my way into preventing it from going that way ever again.
The only thing that I think is a given is that although I hope my own personal life and world to finally hopefully start getting better once I go rural, because financial issues are the lifeblood of one's ability to do anything at all in this society, I am expecting the outside world over the next 1-3 decades to have more and more difficulty and challenges. Even if I were rich that only solves some things, it can't buy good neighbors (I mean neighbors who if the power is out and the looting was out, would be checking on you if you're on crutches and keeping an eye on people who don't belong in the neighborhood), it can't buy services that aren't within convenient distance of your community, it can't buy products that are not for sale because of social unrest or lack of production, all the problems outside of money are potentially getting WORSE in our world and seem to require better and better thought out answers. People with 10-100x the money that I have for their own rural retreat have in some cases painted themselves into corners they can't readily back out of because their thinking was not as advanced as their ability to write checks and hire people to do certain jobs.
So i'm sharing this to see who else is pushing thinking this far. It's like Paul has his ten levels of where people go from thinking youre smart to wierd with permaculture, sometimes I feel like i'm somewhere between level 4 and 10 in a number of related overlapping areas that in my mind are related to permaculture yet i'll bet even most permaculture fanatics are probably in the first 1-3 levels of some of those related topics. To those who aren't and who actually read this super long rant this far feel free to comment or reach out. Sometimes I feel a bit crazy with some of the trauma i've had that's led to this point, but i'm motivated by love and a desire to not have it go to waste or fail to be a learning experience. So many negative things that I see in the world seem preventable if people were to think, plan and act with greater insight and understanding.
