Growth is a double edged sword. Unchecked, growth can be cancerous and destructive. It is this type of ceaseless expansion that has put our society into the precarious environmental and financial positions in which we currently find ourselves. On the other hand, growth can be regenerative and life-giving. Following a forest fire or a bitter winter, the first green shoots to emerge from the earth bear witness to the earth's ability to restore life in the wake of disaster.

My goal for this blog is pretty simple and open-ended: I want to document and share with family and friends my efforts to incorporate an ever increasing degree of self sufficiency, voluntary simplicity, and environmentally-conscious design into my life as a would be urban homesteader.


Saturday, December 10, 2011

Thoughts on Liberty

One of the things that appeals to me most about homesteading is the way in which it offers people the opportunity to gain some measure of independence from the corporate and governmental systems that regulate so much of our modern lives. So many people now days are completely unaware of myriad ways in which the choices in their lives are controlled. They have internalized the values of their masters, and as a result they want what they are told to want - even when they think that they're exercising their own free will. Goethe had it right when he said, "There are none more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe that they are free." Here is a blog post and a speech that both deal with how the modern political and economic structure keeps us in cages, and conversely, what it means to be truly free. Read, listen, and THINK.

The first is from "The Downward Spiral", a fantastic blog that documents the ongoing decay of America.

The second is a speech that Lew Rockwell recently gave at a Casey Research Summit. He does a great job of getting past false notions of left-wing/right-wing, Democrat/Republican nonsense, and gets at the heart of our national political system - it's really fascism

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