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Self-sufficiency, part 1
Rather unexpectedly, a friend and colleague of mine started talking with me about self-sufficiency, which has long been an interest of mine. In response to that conversation, I wanted to organize my own thoughts on self-sufficiency.
To begin, it's probably worth defining self-sufficiency. For me, it's an ideal that's probably never fully reachable, but toward which it is worthwhile to move. So I suppose I'll start with the ideal and move from there: self-sufficiency is the ability to provide for all of one's needs without reliance on others. In this ideal version, it would mean raising one's own food, providing one's own clothing, shelter, and food, and making do with such luxuries as can be provided for oneself. It is not difficult to imagine expanding this level out to the family unit: under this broader definition, self-sufficiency would occur not at the level of each individual providing for himself or herself but the family unit providing for oneself. While still virtually impossible to achieve, we can probably come closer under this conception. If we look at self-sufficiency at the level of a community, the possibility is greater, in that more specialization is posisble, but at the same, with every person added over one--and this objection is also valid on the level of the family as the unit of self-sufficiency--the reliance on others becomes greater: if the person who specializes in a particular skill leaves, dies, or is incapacitated, something suddenly becomes unavailable or the lack must be made up by someone else who may not have the same skills. So, I've defined self-sufficiency at whatever level as the ability for the individual or group to provide for all of its needs without outside input.
A related concept here has to be sustainability, a word that has suffered somewhat as it has come into more common usage: it has started to mean something more like "green" or "environmentally-friendly" (words which have similarly suffered from a loss of precision). By sustainable, I mean processes that can be sustained indefinitely. Thus, any use of fossil fuels, for instance, is inherently unsustainable, and true self-sufficiency would not include them (though, practically speaking, they're hard to avoid given the state of things). Processes that destroy the things upon which they rely (for instance, agriculture that doesn't put nutrients back in the soil or allow sufficient time for natural processes to do so) are unsustainable, and thus ultimately not within the province of self-sufficiency as I am defining it.
One further element of self-sufficiency seems to me to be resliency: for self-sufficiency to be valuable, it needs to be able to weather the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. It isn't possible, of course, to account for every contingency, but a plan for self-sufficiency should take into account difficulties that could arise, with some kind of framework for assessing what those dangers might be. Realizing as well that, practically speaking, probably only an approximation of self-sufficiency will be possible, the degree of self-sufficiency aimed at will be different depending on the context in which it finds itself. One degree of self-sufficiency might be adequate for a future in which the main features of contemporary society continuing more or less in perpetuity compared to one in which economic conditions continue to worsen for years on end, which would also be different than one in which environmental degredation results from climate change or the effects of industrial society, and these likewise differ from what self-sufficiency would look like in the event of a major terrorist or state-sponsored attack against the country in which one lives. The ideal self-sufficiency would be basically proof against any circumstances short of those that lead to direct destruction of the persons involved (at which point, presumably, such concerns become rather less pressing for the person or persons in question). Practically speaking, resiliancy is simply being able to weather any reasonably foreseeable challenge, I suppose.
I think that's enough for today--tomorrow I'll offer some thoughts on what I think would be needed to attain some level of self-sufficiency. In the meantime, your thoughts on these issues are welcome.