The Blended Lifestyle

If not capitalism, then what?

2011-10-26T04:12:00.000-07:00

I passed the Occupy London protesters at St Pauls on the bus yesterday. On the street was a board reading, 'If not capitalism, then what?'

For me, a central question in post-capitalist thinking is: which models of business ownership are most conducive to social flourishing? I put the question to Simon Zadek when he was a fellow of the Harvard Centre for Business and Government. He replied that it was a "really leading edge question/issue... worthy of a major conference."

My central observation is fairly obvious. PLCs - publicly limited companies, which are owned by shareholders who buy and sell their ownership shares on the stock market, are, to put it simply, bad. Other ways of owning and financing companies are better.

The problem with PLCs
PLCs are a really great mechanism for taking wealth from the many and amassing it with the few.

They receive money from the consumer and time from the employee - the many, the 99% perhaps.

From that income, they maximise surplus (profit) as much as possible.

Then they give that surplus to shareholders - the few. The more shares you have (ie, the richer you are), the more you receive - the richer you get.

It's just fantastic. I really couldn't think of a better way of taking a little bit from everybody, systematically, every day, piling it up, and giving it to wealthier people.

Let's compare, for example, the plc Thames Water with the 'no-shareholder' Welsh Water. In 2007-8 (sorry, did this research a while ago but it's still relevant), Thames' profits of £419 million (overcharging?) were taxed and distributed among shareholders - a mixture of European pension funds and private equity firms in Australia and Canada. (1)

In the same year, Welsh Water's profits of £41 million were taxed, some were re-invested in the company, and the remaining £27 million was sent back to customers who each got a £21 deduction on their next bill.

£21 isn't a lot, but if we were to combine the impacts on wealth distribution of plcs providing water, gas, electricity, housing, insurance, banking, food, clothing, sport, leisure and so on, we would start to see vast, consistent swathes of wealth moving daily from the '99%' to the '1%'. And I haven't even started on banking. Where do you think the interest on your mortgage, if you have one, goes? (3)

To be fair, it's not entirely one way. The authors of The New Capitalists argue that more than 75% of the shares in the UK stock market are held through collective investment vehicles like pension funds. So we are all owners and potential beneficiaries of stock market gains, they say.

The problem is, the more you invest in your pension, the more shares you own, and the greater slice of the pie you usually get back (unless the value falls.) The overall effect remains: the rich get richer and the poor stay poor through our current pension and stock market systems.

Personally, I have a pension with The Co-op bank which is "ethical," which means they invest in pharmaceuticals instead of arms. I set it up when I was 26 because my Dad told me it was time to get one. But I'm not happy about my future security being entirely reliant on a volatile, unjust and unsustainable stock market. I'm thinking about stopping payments and perhaps trying to buy land instead. It feels more... grounded.

Anyway.

What's better than a plc?

Lots of things.

Waitrose, part of the John Lewis partnership, is a great example. It's entirely employee owned. That means you don't get this problematic distribution of wealth effect that plcs create. There's also another important benefit: the localisation of power - ie, employees make the decisions - leads to more ethical company behaviour. Waitrose for example frequently takes a chunk out of profits and does something cool with it, like creating the Leaf scheme that supports farmers in the transition to organic.

The employee-owners have an enduring relationship with the company they own, so they take pride in using its power for good. It's very different when a company is owned by shareholders who have no connection with the company, and will sell shares in an instant if they lose a little value. It puts all the focus on a single bottom line. And we know clearly that single bottom lines don't serve present or future generations. Tomorrow's Company also argues that they don't serve the employees of single bottom line focused companies, who tend to have a bit of a horrible time at work.

Some also argue the plc model is also a nightmare for leaders. It's a nightmare for everyone! Let's leave it behind!

“How can anyone run a business when hedge funds trade big chunks of their equity every day?” asked C4s then Chief Executive Luke Johnson in 2008. “There is another victim of the credit crunch: the publicly traded model of ownership. The near-collapse of many of the large banks in perhaps a dozen countries shows that such corporate structures do not work.” (4)

So. Employee ownership is one great model that, I think, has a place in a post-capitalist economy.

The second is the co-operative model. This is where employees and customers own the company. That's good too for similar reasons.

The third is small businesses. Again, these avoid the wealth distribution problems that big plcs create.
It was, famously, part of Adam Smith's vision of capitalism - a nation of shopkeepers, an abundance of small businesses trading with each other, competition between them keeping prices low and quality high for the customer.

Further reading about good company ownership models:

Kelly, M and White, A (2007). Corporate Design: The Missing Business and Public Policy Issue of Our

Time. Boston, Tellus Institute, Corporation 20/20.

Tomorrow's Owners: Stewardship of Tomorrow's Company. London, Tomorrow's Company,

2008

What this means for us
Most people have three obvious roles in relation to plcs.

1) we are customers - eg of Boots, Sainsbury's, HSBC etc (all plcs)

2) we might be employees

3) we are investors, perhaps. Often through pension funds, sometimes more directly.

What we can do as customers
Don't buy things from plcs.

Where's good:

Food
Waitrose, The Co-operative, local shops and markets. I'm not sure about food box schemes. I think Abel and Cole, eg, was recently bought out by a bigger company and I don't know how they're owned. You could enquire if you have a veg box.

Banking
The Co-op, Building Societies like Nationwide and Cheltenham & Gloucester, Credit Unions

Others
I don't really know! Let's find out. I know that about half of British pubs are owned by very big pub companies. I guess it's nice to try to drink at independent pubs. We can find out by asking. I think I'm going to become more vigilant about this.

What we can do as employees
If you work for a plc, quit! If you're looking for a job, don't get a job with a plc!

What we can do as investors and pension holders
Really tough one. Requires some good social innovation I think. My gut feeling is that investing in land is better than investing in the stock market. 70% of Britain is owned by less than 1% of the population. We could probably address that alongside addressing the pension reliance on a stock market that doesn't serve us, if we developed land-based pension schemes. Let's think about that one.

References

(1) Thames Water Utilities Limited, Annual Report and Financial Statements for the year ended 31 March 2008.

(2) Welsh Water gives £27m back to customers. The Guardian, 12th June 2008

(3) A few years ago I considered doing a PhD on sustainable models of business ownership and finance. I spent a few days in the British Library to see if anyone had calculated in any kind of mathematical way the impact of plcs on the distribution of wealth. The closest thing I found was an article identifying the dynamic and describing the insight I was looking for as "a major challenge for future research." Perotti, E and von Thadden, E.L (2006). Corporate Governance and the Distribution of Wealth: A Political Economy Perspective. Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, Vol 162, No.1, p217

(4) Johnson, Luke. Why public ownership is a failed model. The Financial Times, 14th October 2008

Allotments

2011-10-05T01:59:00.000-07:00

"In the late 1940s, there were 1.4 million allotments, falling to around 500,000 in the 1970s. Today there are 300,000 plots." The Independent 19.2.2009

Thanks to Millfields Allotment Association for the pic

Can the UK feed itself on ecological agriculture?

2011-09-21T14:54:00.000-07:00

No-one really knows. That's why the Ecological Land Cooperative is commissioning research to find out, so that campaigners can have crisp, rigorously produced facts to hand when they go for it.

They're crowd fundraising for it and I've just chipped in. You could too! Go on. What else have you done this week to help transform our little island? I haven't done much, this particular week :) You've probably done much more. Chip in nevertheless! As little as £10 would really help I'm told:

https://prod.buzzbnk.org/ProjectDetails.aspx?projectId=19

The ELC's MD, Zoe Wangler (a gem of a lady), writes:

Our first piece of research Small is Successful: Creating Sustainable Livelihoods on Ten Acres or Less was done on just £1,300 and yet was selected for the Research Council UK’s report Big Ideas for the Future: UK research that will have a profound effect on our future. Our report was endorsed by organisations representing thousands of members such as the Soil Association and Sustain. I know that with £5,600 we will produce something of even better quality and relevance.

Open Hardware Technology

2011-09-21T07:16:00.000-07:00

It's easy to think about a household or community being self-sufficient in food, and perhaps some aspects of clothing and building - but what about hardware?

is this the answer?

Though I'm not sure we need tractors. I helped out with the annual garlic pull (lots of nice people + 1 field of garlie + 1 day = a barn full of garlic that will supply the farmers market for a year) at CSA farm Earthly Mirth in New York a few weeks ago.

Here are the tractors they used:

thanks Ryan for the picture

Honestly, this picture doesn't really capture how awe-inspiring Sara and her horses were, and the implications of her use of them.

It was easy to find horse-farming machinery - different things to attach to the horses to do different aspects of farming - because of the significant mormon and amonite farming communities nearby, all of whom use horse-drawn farming techniques, I am told.

Sara had a really beautiful relationship with the horses - she was a kind of a horse whisperer I guess. Which is simply to mean that she found a way to connect with the animals in a way that was not about domination but connection and cooperation.

It was Cool.

Beth Tilston is my new hero

2011-06-28T06:17:00.000-07:00

Can non-friends on Facebook view her mouthwatering 'Mobile Uploads' album?
And I think this wins the prize for the most interesting facebook conversation I've ever read.

Beth Tilston
Grrrrrrr
June 21 at 2:16pm · ·

Christiane Lechner what happend?
June 21 at 3:45pm ·

Beth Tilston Things are not happening fast enough...
June 21 at 4:15pm ·

Christiane Lechner i know what you mean. a friend of mine texted me the other day "hast du es eilig, gehe langsam" - "are you in a hurry, walk slowly" (kind of :)
June 21 at 8:09pm ·

Paul Kingsnorth When Greece collapses in a few weeks, things will start happening pretty fast ;-)
June 21 at 9:35pm ·

Beth Tilston Just watching that on the news. They're going to take everyone with them, aren't they. If they don't collapse, the alternative is to sell all their public services and basically be sucked into a black hole of (even more) debt. Learnt the word peonage the other day, seems appropriate.
June 21 at 10:31pm ·

Paul Kingsnorth This is the north being structurally adjusted, the way the south has been for decades. The people of greece have to pay for decades for the fuck-ups of bankers and for the obsession with the Euro that the EU's leader's have. It's a fantasy coming up against the buffers of reality. They have to default, because their people refuse to become peons. The century is just starting to get interesting!
June 21 at 10:51pm ·

Beth Tilston http://m.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/13/greek-crisis-athens-rural-migration?cat=world&type=article

http://democracystreet.blogspot.com/2011/05/back-in-midlands.html
June 21 at 11:36pm ·

Paul Kingsnorth Good links. I wonder what the possibilities are for a new ruralism? When the banks collapse again this question may become more urgent:

http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2011/06/22/its-time-to-plan-for-the-imminent-banking-collapse-and-its-aftermath/
June 22 at 9:50am ·

Beth Tilston It'll be interesting to find out... My feeling is that we are more fucked than most in this respect given that we're an extremely populous country, we have little left of rural skills and culture, the land is owned by toffs who have had it since Biblical times and it is largely occupied by the people who caused the crisis in the first place (at least it is down here).
June 22 at 8:47pm ·

Paul Kingsnorth Yes, quite agree - and we also have far less contact with the land than others, given that we were torn from it first. We were the first modern landless nation. Also, I just found out that England has 9% tree cover, while the EU average is 44%! Christ.
June 22 at 10:09pm ·

Ian Lawton we're also more fucked than most because what little revolutionary spirit we have has been asleep for longer than everybody else's ... gonna have to learn to farm again very fast i guess - we will have to run to the country when the state finances collapse along with a couple of 'too big to fail' banks ... this is all quite mad isn't it!?
June 22 at 11:27pm ·

Beth Tilston
I think people will just starve in the cities for a bit as they're starting to now. Or perhaps they'll move out of the big cities to smaller ones where it's cheaper. I don't think people will get 'back to the land' until we see the end of industrial agriculture. Industrial agriculture doesn't need people. I reckon there will be a growth in people working in woodlands before there is in people working in fields. Wood is a fuel, after all. Though if we only have 9% tree cover left - maybe not...

June 22 at 11:49pm ·

Paul Kingsnorth
I think land prices are the biggest issue actually. I think there would be a flood of back to the landers if it were affordable. the internet has put info about how to work land and grow food at all our fingertips - we're all started from nothing, after all. The demand for allotments would have been unthinkable ten years ago. If the land were not all locked up by landowners and yuppies - which is an issue of population density, history and economics - things would be different. But also, yes, I think the cities may start starving first. Must go and buy that farm ...

June 23 at 9:28am ·

Ian Lawton
nevertheless i'm hoping we get desperate enough that the landgrabs start. I've always thought that the thirst for allotments is probably driven by a half conscious intuition that we are likely to starve to death in the near future ... landrights are going to become a major issue that's for sure ... i recently bought 'this land is our land' by marion shoard, not read it yet, have you read alastair macintosh's 'soil and soul' beth? ... anyway here's hopin for some Diggers radicalism... ""The power of enclosing land and owning property was brought into the creation by your ancestors by the sword; which first did murder their fellow creatures, men, and after plunder or steal away their land, and left this land successively to you, their children. And therefore, though you did not kill or thieve, yet you hold that cursed thing in your hand by the power of the sword; and so you justify the wicked deeds of your fathers, and that sin of your fathers shall be visited upon the head of you and your children to the third and fourth generation, and longer too, till your bloody and thieving power be rooted out of the land." Gerrard Winstanley

June 23 at 9:57am ·

True for me some days

2011-04-11T08:04:00.000-07:00

Joanna Macy workshop 3 April

2011-03-18T05:42:00.000-07:00

doing some promo for the fella...

The Work That Reconnects

What’s Possible?

When: Sunday 3rd April 1-6pm

Where: Angel, Islington

What:

A series of interactive activities, meditations, rituals and practical tools inspired and developed by visionary deep ecologist Joanna Macy, encouraging us to express our feelings and find new ways of seeing our place and purpose on this planet.

The Work That Reconnects is a framework that helps people connect to ourselves, each other and the natural world. It offers skills and strategies to nurture the emergence of creative responses and transform our concerns and worries into collaborative action.

For more information visit www.joannamacy.net/

Facilitators

Kevin Frea is a trained and experienced facilitator of the Work that Reconnects. He is an environmental activist, teacher, life coach and vegan with a Masters degree from the Centre for Human Ecology in Glasgow.

Michael Margolin has worked as a garden educator, organic farmer and facilitator of various fields that are helping to create a more sustainable world. He has trained in Vipassana meditation for five years, is an experienced contact improvisation dancer and is currently training in Action Theatre, an improvisational theatre form.

Donations are encouraged!

Reserve your place to receive further details, address and directions:

Michael michael_j_margolin@riseup.net

Kevin Kevin@humanecologist.org, 07716246672

Natural Rhythms

2011-03-08T01:47:00.000-08:00

thanks to scienceblogs for the pic

There's a conversation thread meandering around at the moment about 'natural rhythms.'

My friends and I seem to be talking about rest, seasonal patterns, the rise and fall of energy.

Last week all I wanted to do was sleep and eat. I wasn't the only one. Did you feel that way?

This week the low ebb of energy persists and I'm juggling good intentions with the lure of coffee and sugar to prop me up. Struggle.

This morning I thought of my friend Alastair who worked for a year as a gardener and facilitator at Embercombe, a stay-in-yurts-and-sit-by-fires-and-find-your-purpose kind of place in Devon. Away from the stuff of modern life, he noticed strong differences in his available energy at different times, although his sleep, diet and activities were consistent. After a while he began to notice cycles in his energy, and a correlation with the cycles of the moon: that his energy would rise as the moon waxed towards fullness, and wane when it waned.

That might sound like something from the wacky bucket but perhaps that feeling is a symptom of the masculine slant in the ideosphere. I bleed each month on the full moon. For women it is obvious that at least one of the natural cycles of our bodies is pitched to the rhythm of the moon.

So I had a google at breakfast and found this from the very helpful teachers at Woodlands Junior School in Kent.

So last week, sleep-and-eat-and-drown-in-coffee in an unsuccessful attempt to prop up waning energy week, the moon was waning to a close.

This week it's beginning to wax so energy should be picking up! I don't see that yet. But I'm starting to feel it writing this :)

So my question now is, if this is one of the natural rhythms we may experience, what do we do with that?

An obvious answer would be to just do less when our energy wanes and do more when it waxes. Which is tricky in practice because professional deadlines and social calendars are not pitched to the lunar cycle and sometimes you just have to push on.

But just maybe they increasingly could be. No-one notices, for example, what time I arrive and leave work; the emphasis is on me meeting my targets not which hours I meet them in, and my irregularity is expected and predictable. So I do have some flexibility to do more when I 'wax' and less when I 'wane.'

Hummm..

I'm going to keep an eye on this one....

The Project

2011-01-14T06:46:00.000-08:00

Hello.

I like this blog.

I like all the comments from friends and strangers.

I haven't written in it for a while.

I have been Getting Practical.

A project team has amassed. They are lovely and it feels precious and beautiful.

We are (probably) going to Buy Land and Do Stuff.

Every three months or thearabouts we have an open meeting where anyone can come and that's currently the way that new people get involved. I guess the next one would be sometime in February or March.

Although that might be developing because I think we're going to start a DIY Church

yes a CHURCH

where you can be anything from a devout Jew to an athiest

and still come along and play

I think we're going to make up our own sermons

or something.

Anyway.

About this project.

We had a couple of days of visioning.

We came up with these key ideas / principles in popularity order:

1. A SPIRE! (14)
2. Personal growth and development (13)
3. Elemental living and a healthy relationship with nature (13)
4. Personal autonomy (11)
5. Creativity / emergence (improvisation / process oriented) (9)
6. In all our dealings we aim to embody: honesty, tolerance, openness, respect, and something else I can't read (8)
7. Resilience, self-provision, sustainability (8)
8. Collective joy (7)
9. Collaboration and mutual support (7)
10. Inreach and outreach (6)
11. Enduring relationship with place (6)
12. Collective purpose and endeavour (6)
13. Concentric circles of belonging / variety of relationships (5)
14. Play (2)

We don't have a website or anything yet.

The Great Reskilling

2010-11-22T10:01:00.000-08:00

more here

The winter quiescence

2010-11-15T08:32:00.000-08:00

I've just started to read Soulcraft by Bill Plotkin.

Just the forward, so far, by Thomas Berry.

He writes of "the springtime singing of the birds, the summertime showers, the autumn ripening, and the winter quiescence."

Quiescence

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

may refer to:

In fluid mechanics, it refers to the state of a fluid that lacks any movement
The G₀ phase of a cell in the cell cycle; quiescence is the state of a cell when it is not dividing
In neuron bursting, it refers to the quiet phase of a spike train when a neuron is not emitting bursts or singlets
In plants, it is the non-active state of a seed in which the only requirement for seed germination is water and oxygen; Contrast with Dormancy
In behavioral neuroscience or zoology, quiescence refers to a behavior where an animal is vigilant but relaxed and immobile. This may be related to a recuperative response after an encounter with a predator
In volcanology, when an active volcano is not actually erupting
An electronic amplifier or filter is said to be in a quiescent state when no signal is applied to its input
Quiescence search, In Game searching (adversarial search) in artificial intelligence, a quiescent state is one in which a game is considered stable and unlikely to change drastically the next few plays
In computer science is a data item that is not actively being changed

I feel this. Do you? Right now. All I want is to stay home. Why go out and do all these things and see all these people when I could stay home and practice piano, and cook, and read, and feel like I have contentment and everything I need in abundance?

And even that is fairly busy. I could go further into not-doing. The autumn leaves are almost all gone. The winter quiescence is drawing me in...

The Coming Insurrection

2010-10-25T10:29:00.001-07:00

"'Fewer possessions more connections.' Are they mad?"

I've got a goat!!!

2010-06-14T13:44:00.000-07:00

Ok, not a real goat. Yet...

I've got a sign I just pinned on the kitchen pin board that says 'This entitles the holder to one goat.'

"It's like the ultimate Oxfam gift," said my friend Mark as he gave it to me and I hopped whooping around the kitchen and hugging him. "You're like the only friend I have - probably the only friend I'll ever have, actually - who I can actually give an actual goat to."

This means I have to Do It. I'm moving to Wales this Autumn. We're buying a place and seeing who wants to chip in and stick something like a woodland or something on the side. I was thinking about making some kind of local goat co-op so we can share the strains and the gains of goat keeping.

And now I have a goat token. So I Have To.

!!!

I am delighted.

I'm going to call my first milking nanny goat 'Mark.'

Plant where you stand

2010-06-13T15:19:00.000-07:00

I'm just home from a lovely weekend with Limina people at the beautiful Quadrangle in Kent.

We've been talking about how we want to live.

Frank Forencich is a Stanford-trained biologist and play specialist.

Looking at indigenous wisdom from around the world, he says, the 'Mind Body Spirit' trinity has missed its other half:

'Land, Tribe, Ancestors.'

The yearning for connection with Land and Tribe that I feel is so widely shared, it seems.

One important thing came out of the weekend for me.

The notion of plant where you stand.

I've been slowly developing the idea of an intentional blended community and visitor place where people can try out practical skills and a blended lifestyle.

Wrong thinking, I realise.

If lots of the people with a strong orientation towards nurturing healthy connections with land and tribe all exodus from our existing communities, what will happen?

Plant where you stand, our conversations seemed to conclude.

I'm going to move somewhere quite small.

See who in the local community wants to start a goat co-op.

Embed it rather than separate it.

That's where I'm doing.

Lean into the cracks. Nestle and nestle into the concrete forms we've inherited until they soften and open into new structures that support new ways of life.

IT's possible.

I'm excited about Limina. It's got a good feeling to it. It's perhaps the main place for people who share this yearning to connect, inspire, enable, challenge and support each other. That's certainly what happened this weekend.

It's a good thing.

Passion

2010-06-10T06:41:00.001-07:00

Thanks to Dan for sending me a link to this incredible ted talk by Isabel Allende.

"I need mavericks," she says, "dissidents, adventurers, outsiders and rebels, who ask questions, bend the rules, and take risks.... Nice people with common sense do not make interesting characters. They only make good former spouses."

BBC: How to lead a simple life

2010-06-06T01:31:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Charlie for sending this BBC iPlayer link. The Rev Peter Owen-Jones tries to give up his "addiction to money" and develop a "simple life" (haybales, sheep etc) following the teachings of St Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of ecology.

(If he puts you off a bit in the beginning, stick with him, gets quite adorable by the end.)

Land, productivity and the blended lifestyle

2010-04-27T16:00:00.000-07:00

In the beginning of the 19th century 10% of us lived in cities. 100 years later, 90% of us did. (Rogers).

We left the land - some by choice, others by force - in order to participate in the growing industrial economy.

The land available for us to live and farm on was reduced, so that we would have to turn to wage labour to sustain ourselves.

"Lord and Lady Stafford were pleased humanely, to order a new arrangement of this Country. That the interior should be possessed by Cheviot [sheep] Shepherds and the people brought down to the coast and placed there in lots under the size of three arable acres, sufficient for the maintenance of an industrious family, but pinched enough to cause them turn their attention to the fishing [i.e. waged labour]." Patrick Sellar, Lawyer, 1815

1912, Kenya - Lord Delamere:
"If... every native is to be a landholder of a sufficient area on which to establish himself, then the question of obtaining a satisfactory labour supply will never be settled."

Both quotes from Soil and Soul, p94. Pic from internet shakespeare.

That industrial economy has brought us very useful wealth.

It is now unsustainable.

But we cannot slow or reduce the economy, we believe, because people will lose their jobs and incomes. Without jobs and incomes, how will we meet our needs?

My answer to this question is, by re-organising our use of land, such that we can work for money part-time, and be self-sufficient part-time, total employment can stabilise or reduce with wellbeing at least maintained, and probably enhanced.

200 years ago, it was thought that people would not want to move from local self-sufficiency to employment, so they had to be forced to, by reducing access to land.

Now, few people would altogether give up our jobs and put both hands on our spades. We like our incomes, our professional identities - some of us, at least - me for one.

So we need not fear that by increasing opportunities for self-sufficiency, you reduce the available workforce. Rather it will reduce the necessary workforce and enable the economy to explore what sustainable growth means in practice.

By taking parts of our lives away from the money economy, we give it a bit of a breather, and let it find its next, unprecedented form.

Become Uncivilised

2010-04-22T02:43:00.000-07:00

I'm very much looking forward to the Dark Mountain festival in Wales, 28-30 May, with Alastair McIntosh , Jay Griffiths, George Monbiot, and me! Among others. Having a big, fat, disorganised, creative, collaborative conversation about the emergence of the new and how we want to live.

Come!

This is their ning site and this their website.

Lambing!

2010-04-14T02:36:00.000-07:00

I'm back at the lovely Canon Frome Court.

Five baby boys last night! All in two hours, triplets and twins, mums and babies all happy and well.

(ok, this wasn't them, i got it off flickr...)

Ok I'm totally abusing this blog now and using it as my own note keeping tool but here's what I learnt.

1. Generally the mums get on with it and you stand back, wearing overalls, with a flask of tea and hopefully something nice to nibble on.

2. Try to co-ordinate the knocking up of your different animals so that they're due about the same time. Then when they're due, check on them every three hours, day and night, for signs of early or full on labour, or immanent birth.

3. First you see the water sack. That comes out and breaks and dangles around for a while, then the lamb (goats are the same they say) should come out front hooves first followed soon by head, coming out in a little dive. Once the first half's out, mum has a little rest before pushing the hind legs out.

(if it comes out head first you have to push it back in. If it comes out hind legs first, have a look, it might work, did last night for one of them, but might need "intervention" and I don't know how to do that.

4. The lamb is covered in a gooey sack which seems to constrict its breathing so mum sets straight away to eating it off. Once free of sack, after about five minutes of arriving the lamb is up on its feet, and finding the teet.

5. Once lamb 1 is clearly healthy, on its feet and suckling, mum goes into contractions for number two, and so on. Last night there was 30-60 minutes between babies.

6. The first bit of milk that comes out post birth is super concentrated good stuff. If twins, the second twin needs to suckle on the Other Nipple because the first twin will have got all the good stuff from the first nipple. You kind of grab them and move them to it. That's ok.

7. Now it's time for Paperwork. You need to check gender, identifying marks, and have a piece of paper where you tick things and check the eyelids and stuff. I don't know if you do this for you or for Defra or what but they do it here and they do things well here so that's what you do.

8. You will have pre-prepared a Birthing Unit - a little 1m x 1.5m or so fenced off area full of straw with lots of hay to eat and water to drink, safe from foxes. Now you Pick Up the babies by the forearms and hold them in front of mums face - walk backwards showing the lambs to mum and she'll follow you to the birthing unit. (It's good that this is a different space to where she gives birth because the latter is gooy and wet). Then you shut them in safely, check none of the others are going into labour, call it a job done and go to bed feeling warm and happy.

Hurrah!

:)

Oo and then after that they run around and spring jump a lot for no reason and it's really funny which, apart from getting to eat them in a few months, makes the whole thing make sense, to me...

But actually, I prefer Alpaca wool to sheep wool. I wonder what their meat tastes like...

Would you build your own house?

2010-04-08T04:34:00.000-07:00

I met the good Viv Goodings recently. If you remember Ben Law's woodman's cottage that was on grand designs, Viv was the guy who led the building and told the volunteers what to do.

In the end, the house cost Ben £20,000; because it was built by volunteers learning how to build a house, there were no labour costs, and because Ben got the land in exchange for work, he only had to pay for materials.

Most parts of building a house are very simple, Viv told me. All you need to know is what order to do them in. So really you only need one expert and lots of willing participants to build a house.

It made me think of Alastair McIntosh's description of community house-building in the Hebredes when he was a child.

"On this particular day the school bus had been delayed... Isobel and I wandered into the new house to keep warm. Nobody ever knocked on doors in those days, and many houses had no locks fitted. You went in and out of other people’s houses as if they were extensions of your own. If you were hungry, you would be fed; if you were cold, you would be warmed by the peat fire; if you were naughty, you would be ticked off, because the village was like an extended family.

"As Isobel and I stepped inside the half-completed bungalow that frosty morning, we encountered a hive of activity. It was buzzing with men. All manner of building skill was being applied. Every mod con was being installed. And over the open fire a string of salted ling and cod from Loch Leurbost was being cured for consumption later. ...

‘How is it,’ I asked one of the workmen in the bungalow, ‘that Neilie’s not rich but he can afford to have all of you working on his house?’

‘Ah, well,’ came the response. ‘You see, Neilie’s helped all of us to build our new houses each time he’s been back on leave. Now it’s our turn to help him.’

"I think that may have been the last communally built home in our village. Now, to comply with government regulations for housing grants and planning requirements, contractors put up most houses by competitive tender."

Once the house was completed, Alastair writes, at the end you had not only a house but a bonded community, and a householder who was not bound to a lifetime's work to pay of the debt and the interest on the mortgage.

Walter's Way in south London is a cul-de-sac of self-build homes using Walter Segal's wooden frame method.

Would you build your own house, given a little help from your friends?

What is beautiful about Capitalism

2010-04-01T07:50:00.000-07:00

I'm going to start two lists and add to them gradually. Feel free to add your own bits in the comments.

If we're embarking upon a creative, collaborative conversation about what post-capitalism means, then it's an appreciative enquiry.

In an appreciative enquiry we keep the baby but throw out the bathwater.

So what in contemporary capitalism is baby, and what is bathwater? Baby here.

What is beautiful about Capitalism

1. The decentralised agility of the market.

Post-capitalism

2010-04-01T07:20:00.000-07:00

Anti-capitalism is a critical, divisive conversation.

Post-capitalism is a creative, collaborative conversation.

Post-Capitalist life

2010-04-01T06:46:00.000-07:00

I was at a Talkaoke last night, with some Norf London Yoof and some East Londoners of about my age and sort.

"Humans are a virus", someone said at the end of the night.

Humm. "I don't think humans are the virus," I said to him. "We've been around for over 100,000 years I think and we've only really started to unbalance things very badly, like a virus does, in the last 500 years or so, and only then really in the last 100 years, and then particularly in the last 30-40 years. These periods correspond to the arrival and advancement of capitalism. Perhaps capitalism is the virus."

I have started to use the term 'post-capitalism' this week.

It works for me.

I realise today that this is what I am learning how to live; a post capitalist life.

A life where man is beside, not above or below, woman; where head is beside heart, beside body; where reason is beside spirit; science is beside nature; wealth is beside wellbeing.

It means a reimagining of almost everything.

Post-capitalist work; post capitalist music; post capitalist joy; post-capitalist food; post-capitalist love. Half of these explorations have been on a private blog. Maybe it will all make a book one day.

But in the mean time, the question becoming primary in my mind is, what exactly does a post-capitalist business finance model look like?

To be explored...

Are we wealthy?

2010-04-01T05:32:00.000-07:00

Look at the UK budget deficit 1946 - present - The Guardian has put together very clear information about
it a little way down this page.

I never realised that we had been in the black so much before the 1980s. And we are now incredibly in the red, of course.

With all this talk in the news, of strikes. cuts to public services, raised taxes, times ahead worse than when Thatcher came to power...

"The increase in the deficit," writes a Guardian blogger, "excludes the bank bailouts - this is just the structural deficit. Including the bailouts, the deficit has been in the region of £300 billion to £500 billion in both 2008 and 2009."

... with all this talk, it's time to talk post-capitalism.

Would you live underground?

2010-03-31T09:09:00.000-07:00

Not sure myself, get a bit claustrophobic, not good with caves and things...

Apparently they're great for heat and noise though, keep you warm in winter, cool in summer, and nobody can hear you singing/yelling/other at the top of your voice...

They're becoming more popular in other countries apparently, but still just 100 of them in Britain. Exemplary examples at Hockerton in Nottinghamshire.

Good for rural build where people don't want the views changed, I guess.

These pics are all from 'trendir.com'

"Growth is essential"

2010-03-30T04:50:00.000-07:00

On the radio, David Miliband said that the priority now is to return to "the growth that is essential in a modern industrialised society."

He's right of course. Growth is essential to a modern industrialised society. Newness is funded by investors and lenders who need to get back more than they put in, so things need to grow in order to pay everybody. The system, and most of the organisations in it, are based upon interest, profit and growth.

But, isn't 'modern industrialised society' broken? Of course Miliband is thinking of what is essential to hold up modern industrialised society, it's his job to be among those in charge of it. It's a big job, and probably doesn't leave much time for thinking, 'what next?'

But I wonder what he talks about when he goes round to Matthew Taylor's for dinner. I'd like to be a fly on their wall.

I'd be surprised if they're not talking about what next; it is, perhaps, the most fascinating question of our time.

Which is perhaps why he contextualises his assertion of that growth is essential within a 'modern industrialised society' - thereby drawing a circle around it like something we can start to talk about with separation, something we can start to think beyond.

A nice lady called into the show he was on and said, 'where is the energy for this growth going to come from? We're running out of oil and renewables can't match its capacity.'

Andrew Simms also raises doubts. "Adair Turner, chair of the Financial Services Authority and the Committee on Climate Change, refers to the pursuit of growth for its own sake as a "false god". Other work by Professor Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester University concludes that: "Economic growth in the OECD cannot be reconciled with a 2C, 3C or even 4C characterisation of dangerous climate change."

He's saying, in other words, that economic growth is not compatible with reaching our targets on climate change, or even something worse than our targets.

Growth seems to mean always making and selling and buying more stuff. We know we've already passed the law of diminishing returns with our relationship with stuff. We know we're drenched in it and worse off for it.

You could dematerialise the economy to some degree. Trade in non material stuff like massages and therapy. But massagers and therapists still use a lot of stuff to do their non material service. I don't think dematerialised growth is going to help us.

But what is the alternative? I've got a cleaning lady from Brazil. She left Brazil after her husband left her and her son died, because there simply was no work to be found. She left her ten year old daughter, now fourteen, with her sister, and came to England where she now cleans fifteen houses a week at £8 an hour and is sending money home and saving up to return to Brazil and her daughter. Tears well up in her lovely eyes as she tells me this.

Heartbreaking.

That's what can happen when you have a money-based way of life (as opposed to a land-based way where you can still meet your basic needs without money), and there is not growth, and so not enough jobs.

So if we don't want growth but we don't want depression and destitution, if we don't want Capitalism but we're not interested in Communism, what do we want?

It's time for a big, exciting, challenging, explosive conversation about post-capitalist economic theory and practice.

It's time for a scale of innovation and creativity that rattles our roots and shakes our timbers, and results in something better than we have ever known.

The next thing I'm going to do is read Prosperity without Growth by Tim Jackson and see what he has to say. (There's a nice little video on the Amazon page btw...)

Mellowcroft

2010-03-29T15:12:00.000-07:00

This place looks interesting.

"People don’t come here to escape, but to awaken their potential, to sing, work and play; to remember skills, to practise arts, to breathe fresh air and to be themselves."

I like that "sing" is the first thing that people go there to do :)

Fyi, they're inviting people to go over and help on the land between now and the end of April.

Seasonal Rhythms

2010-03-23T05:43:00.000-07:00

Going through old notebooks and found this from Christmas.

The time in between Christmas and New Year is for rest and retreat.

It may be actual retreat; yoga, vipasana. It might be an at-home retreat; shutting the doors and quietly pottering away with the remaining December tasks in an unhurried way, and taking long rests. It could be going away somewhere peaceful just the 1/2/3/4/5 of you. Whatever. Rest and retreat. Like the earth does then.

Then New Year needs a Ritual. On new year yoga retreats we get given a list of questions to ponder on the 29th. On the 31st we do a partypiece party, where everyone does a party piece, which is diverse and surprising and delightful. Then we write down the things we are choosing to leave behind in the departing year on little pieces of paper, and at midnight we burn the paper in the fire. Then we talk together about what we're letting into the coming year. I've done it twice with Alaric and each time it has felt special and seems to have had a really nice impact on my life.

The two months of the year where most of us (ideally) put the least energy into trade are August and December. In August we put most of our energies into the land, and in December we put most of our energies into our relationships, from our relationship with our world and community, through our friends, family and partners, to our relationships with our selves.

Both periods precede New Starts and both are full of holiday, festival and celebration.

The Pilsdon Community

2010-03-23T04:31:00.000-07:00

The Pilsdon Community, on the border of Somerset and Devon, is a place for people who've been through a hard time, wayfarers, and volunteers who want to support them, perhaps in need of a bit of land-based-tonic themselves. I visited in January and, relaxing in the library by the fire, found that Tobias Jones in his book Utopian Dreams did a far better job of describing it than I could hope to.

Here are some excerpts

“It feels as if there is an unobtrusive magnet at its centre, moving those who feel its pull.” p164

“You are living among people who would be terrifying to middle England – many men are covered in tattoos and a few have harder-than-thou scars. But often I have to nip off to finish mucking out the cow shed or whatever, and Fra is in the pottery shed or kitchen, so I leave tiny Benny with one of these guys. And they all gather round and laugh at her smile and mini-teeth, and she starts showing off, and by the time I come back an hour later she's asleep in one of their arms.”

The Rev Percy Smith and his Wife Gaynor bought Pilsdon Mannor in 1958, for £5k.

“By 1960, Percy was writing Letters From a Community, a sort of summary to the outside world of what was going on. He described the planting of japonica, forsythia, aubrietia; he described the animals and the harvests and the potato-peeling. 'If Pilsdon teaches anything,' he wrote in December 1960, 'it teaches through failure and disappointment how far we fall short in our love.' It was, he said, 'a school for sinners and not a museum of saints.'” p166

“There was, as far as I could see, a style of leadership which was completely removed from vanity or power. It didn't shrink from taking responsibility in what were, without being melodramatic, potentially life-and-death situations. 'The leader of Pilsdon,' I was told by one former warden, 'will always have to have the authority to ask people to leave against their will. Within an hour if they are drunk, on drugs or violent. The sense of security and safety for many guests at Pilsdon relies on this authority.' It's a kind of leadership underpinned by service to the whole.” p 167

“...the place felt intimate and calm. Unusually, there was a complete lack of conceit, a tangible humility to the place.” p160

Percy inspired by reading about Little Gidding.

“They believe in the root of community – koinonia – which means having things in common.”

“There was an affinity between us,” writes Gaynor Smith, wife of the founder, describing their relations with the wayfarers who passed through: “we too had chosen an unconventional path and, like them, were living a life that had shed many of the sophistications of society and was simpler and more primitive than most of modern life. Almost unconsciously we understood each other and were relaxed and at home in that understanding.” quoted on p 169.

“Those who have been emotionally skinned, who are in exposed agony, have a gift. They break down the prison of prestige. Jean Vanier, who founded the L'Arche communities for people with learning difficulties, once wrote: 'The poor man has a mysterious power: in his weakness he is able to open hardened hearts and reveal the sources of living water within them. It is the tiny hand of the fearless child which can slip through the bars of the prison of egoism. He is the one who can open the lock and set free. And god hides himself in the child.” - quoted p169-70.

Visitor info booklet in bedroom. First line:

“Welcome to the Pilsdon Community! Coming here is part of a journey of discovery about relating to yourself, to others and to the environment.”

It's interesting, I've always seen that as the question at the core of my work, and at the core of political science: How are we to live, as ourselves, with each other, in the world? Each culture, each layer of history, finds its own answers to this perennial question. I think a new layer of culture is necessarily emerging within our current / old culture now; and once again, we are exploring what our answers to these questions might be.

Three More Goats Cheeses

2010-03-23T04:06:00.000-07:00

Simple soft cheese

Add a few drops of rennet to milk, and salt, and leave overnight. It’ll separate into curds and whey.

Next day, put a colander into a pan and a muslin inside the colander. Gently put the curds and whey in. Knott and hang up the muslin over the whey bowl and take the colander away. Leave for a day. It’s ready next day.

Labna

Take yoghurt (make yoghurt by putting a couple of spoonfuls of yoghurt into some milk and leaving it out at room temperature (Indian room temperature) so airing cupboard.), add some salt and a drizzle of cream, mix, and put in cheese cloth/colander/bowl.

Next day, give whey to pigs / chickens, and put cheese/yoghurt in bowl. Add chopped fresh herbs, garlic etc to taste. Mix and leave for a bit. Serve.

Paneer

Bring milk to the point where it just starts to move towards boiling – but don’t let it actually boil – just wait until it starts to sway and move a little.

Slosh in lemon juice till it separates.

Put in cloth/colander/bowl. Add salt and mix gently. Hang. Ready next day. Chop in spinach curry etc. It’s a curries or bbq cheese rather than a solo piece.

Tribe

2010-03-16T16:20:00.000-07:00

I've been moved tonight, watching the Amazon DVD where Bruce Parry travels the full length of the Amazon.

I was watching the part where he's with the Kayapo people of Brazil, taking part in their songs and dances, and hearing their powerful calls to be allowed to live, as a people, to live in the forest and to be allowed to survive.

Like almost all peoples living in forests, it seems, they're under threat from loggers clearing forest in order to get timber, meat, or minerals from off or under the land, resources to trade on global markets, ultimately with consumers in places like the UK.

In all the healthy tribes Bruce visits on his trip, I'm struck by how much they sing and dance together. It's almost in the same family as some of the things we do at the fun fed. Almost.

It was last Christmas in India that I realised that there was something tribal about my many hungers. The kind of lifestyle I long for, with its relationships to nature, community, self-sufficiency, singing, dancing and (healthy) social ritual - these hungers are all elements of a tribal lifestyle.

And how strange that I should hunger for this, born and brought up as I am within this culture

This culture whose materialist norms and demand for resources is leading quite directly to the destruction of exactly that kind of lifestyle where it currently exists.

Let's get together :)

2010-02-18T08:28:00.000-08:00

Come to the event I'm putting on with the lovely people of Limina, 12-13 June, in a farm in Kent.

HOW DO YOU

WANT TO LIVE?

When 12th & 13th June 2010

Where The Quadrangle Farm, middle of nowhere, Kent

What I would like (circle + cross out as appropriate):

good work | children | a spouse | the countryside |

the city | a life that contributes to climate change | a

nice laptop | grow my own | milk my own | butcher

my own | skype | wood fires | people around | com-

post toilets | flush toilets | to be busy all the time |

big debts | ommm | sweatlodge in winter + roll naked

in snow | to be a hippy | no fucking hippies | live just

like my parents | live like they did 500 years ago | the

best of the past + the best of the future | live next to a

motorway / on an island / in a hammock | wake up to

birdsong and the smell of baking bread

Other: …………………

How Arrive 4-5pm. settle in, eat, talk. Hear what people

are doing, tell what you’re doing, or what you want to

do. Play by the fire. Sleep. Wake gently, good breakfast.

Go for a walk in beautiful Kent countryside, have a

pub lunch. Catch the train home, the end, for now.

How much £10 deposit at We Got Tickets (advance booking essential)

+ £15 cash upon arrival, so £25 in total for the whole event.

Any further donations to support Limina’s work gratefully appreciated.

Real beds for the first 16 to book, then camping.

Full location and necessary info provided upon receipt of deposit.

Queries to rachel.marcuzzi@limina.org.uk

In search of a word

2010-02-14T04:24:00.000-08:00

I'm looking for a word.

I just wrote to Alain de Botton to ask him. Then I thought, why ask just one person?

Do you have any ideas?

The question is this:

if we move away from a materialistic life, what is the name for the kind of life we enter into? I don't like 'de-materialised' (so what is it then?), 'simple' (it's not simple), or 'spiritual' (problematic term). So I am missing a word. Do you have any ideas?

There's a fleshier version of this question in the last post.

I do very occasionally get the odd comment and it is great to get comments, like nice letters in the post. If you have any thoughts you might perhaps leave one...

Simplicity is Bollocks

2010-02-14T03:48:00.000-08:00

I'm in Brazil for work. I'm planning to visit a seaside village called Arembepe where there's a hippy village that Mick Jagger and Janis Joplin "got rolling" in the 1960s, according to Lonely Planet. It says:

"For a taste of a simpler life, the aldeia is a curious place to explore."

I went into the shower mulling on that line, and concluded that the term 'voluntary simplicity' is a pile of bollocks.

Dematerialising your sources of pleasure, meaning, identity and satisfaction is not simple. It's really really complex.

pic 1 by marilene
pic 2 by teresa

It's much simpler to use booze to kick back, clothes/music/cars/house/friends/income for a sense of identity, and tv/the pub/the odd show for a bit of fun.

OK so in reality few people are that shallow but here's the thing.

Paths to joy that don't use booze are less simple not more simple.

Paths to meaning and identity that don't use money and possessions are less simple not more simple.

Finding genuine satisfaction in life is a Fine Art.

Probably all of them take practice, and years.

To call a dematerialised lifestyle a 'simple' lifestyle is to look at it through materialist eyes.

...

I once collaborated on a project with a fine sustainability professional called Andrew Outhwaite.

One day he turned up in my office unannounced, came to my desk, and said, Briony, what are we doing? What are we actually doing?

We went to a meeting room with some big paper and pens, and spent a couple of hours talking and scribbling.

We ended up with a single line. A diagonal line going upwards. At the bottom end we wrote 'materialism'. At the top end we wrote 'spiritualism'.

'Spiritualism' is an icky term and I'm not sure we're talking about becoming a God-loving evangelist or a kirtan chanting hippy.

It's probably the wrong word.

But what is the word for how when we put down all our stuff, what we are left with is not nothing.

We are left with more than we ever had before. We enter a richer territory, a more subtle and nuanced world.

We still need things in this world. We still need homes, food, clothes, and ways to get around and communicate.

But then instead of all the rest of the crap, we actually need a bunch of services and practices that nurture our capabilities in the fine art of life.

English land maths

2010-01-21T10:40:00.001-08:00

We've organsied our land into urban and rural areas, distinct. Separate. Broadly speaking, disconnected.

This trend for growing your own; how big is it? How long will it last? If it's big, and if it lasts, what does it mean for how we organise our land?

The numbers for England

England is made up of 13.028 million hectares, that's about 2171.33 square meters per person, or 46x46m.

It breaks down like this.

Type of land use	% of our space	Total area (hectares)	Area per person (sq metres)	That's about

Urban	19.15%	2.49m	415.81	20x20m

crops and bare fallow	30.05%	3.9m	652.49	26x26m

grazing and grasses	37.80%	4.83m	805.12	28x28m

forest and woodland	8.50%	1.1m	184.56	14x14m

other	5.13%	.67m	111.39	11x11m

So for a community of 100 people, it might be reasonable to use about this much land:

10 acres for housing
36 acres for all your crops, animals, meadowlands and so on
4.5 acres for your woodlands
3 acres of 'other'
and some space for natural water.

That would be representing the macro land use pattern at the micro level.

This data all comes from Defra . The url seems to change quite a lot so if this is dead just google "defra land use" and you should find their spreadsheets in no time.

Andy Collier calculated that a person needs 0.1 acres to be self sufficient for food, or 0.5 acres if you're going to grow the food for your animals. 0.1 acres is 400m2, or 20x20m, and 0.5 acres is 2023m2, or 45x45m. The above land distribution gives you 0.36 acres per person.

Incidentally, 36 acres of farmland is about 14.6 hectares so should be eligible for some farm subsidy...

This Green and Pleasant Land

2010-01-21T10:25:00.000-08:00

My friend Jack if critical of the idea of the Funny Farm.

Don't build on the countryside, he says. Let's live high density in cities. Death to suburbia. Keep our green and pleasant land green and pleasant.

The Government's South East plan sets a target of building 32,700 new homes each year in the SouthEast of England. The document says it's time to build on the green.

We've had a policy against doing that as least since the Second World War. At that time, we had to import food by boat at great danger. This is crazy, we said. Let's grow our food here. Let's protect our agricultural land.

Plus, culturally, we are deeply attached to rural England. Planners have had a strong remit to prevent rural development.

The South East plan changes that.

4.23

"Planning policy must therefore balance the need to protect the countryside and retain the charm and heritage of the region’s enviable patchwork of smaller settlements whilst making sure that thriving and socially inclusive communities are maintained and developed, to serve the needs of both their locality and the wider region.

"Whilst the policies of this Plan seek to focus new development into and around existing larger settlements, there remains a need to recognise that local authorities should consider the need to plan for some new development outside these areas to support rural communities and services."

My Dad's a planner. He says there's a big furore in the planning press about the Government's building targets. It's not realistic, say local authorities. We don't want it, say local communities. We won't do it, they say together. Court cases are ensuing. Who knows.

Agricultural subsidies

2010-01-21T10:08:00.000-08:00

My friend Jack gave me this film about his project, FarmSubsidy.org.

According to the film, European agricultural subsidies currently amount to over 100 Euros a year from every man, woman and child in the EU, and most of the subsidy goes to the old, big landowners.

I searched on the website for Suffolk where I come from, and where I am right now, typing away by the fire. A lot of subsidy money comes here. Including a farm a friend of mine lives on. I wonder if we could get subsidies for the funny farm....

How to make Halloumi (and ricotta on the side)

2010-01-18T08:47:00.000-08:00

Recently, people have become excited when they discover I know how to make Halloumi, so I thought I'd post the recipe, for which many thanks to the wonderful Pam at Canon Frome.

You need:

Some goats milk, ideally unpasturised and organic and taken from the animal with your own hand (ideally)
A thermometer
Some cheesecloth or muslin or similar thin clean material, about the size of a dishcloth
A colander
Two pans big enough for the volumes you're working with
Salt
Rennet - either veggie or non veggie (I think it comes from the stomach lining of an animal)
Some kind of hook about 2 or 3 feet above some kind of surface where you can leave things undisturbed for 24 hours.

So

Heat the milk to 35 degrees c. Ideally use a few litres, maybe 2 - 4 litres, of milk.

Mix a slosh of rennet with a bit of water in a mug, and add that to the milk when it reaches 35 degrees. Turn off the heat.

When you add the rennet, the milk separates into curds (thick yoghurty stuff) and whey (like milk with all the whiteness taken out of it).

Put your cloth in the colander and put the colander over a big bowl.

Pour the contents of your pan into it. The curds will stay in the cloth / colander, and the whey goes into the bowl. Pick up the edges of the cloth and bring them in, twist them around so they form reasonably snugly around the curd, and tie a knot in them. Then move the whole shabang - curds-in-cloth, whey-in-bowl, colander in between - actually you can remove the colander now - to your hook, and hang the curds-in-cloth on your hook.

Remove a jug of the whey from the bowl, add a teaspoon or two of salt, and put it in the fridge.

Do something else for 24 hours.

The Next Day

Unwrap the curd and cut it into big chunks, each the size of a small block of halloumi.
Put the whey in a pan and heat it to 90 degrees. Then put the curd pieces in carefully and let it boil for 30 minutes. Don't let it go over 95 at all costs.

As it cooks, skim off the curd that comes to the surface and put it in cloth/colander/bowl. This is ricotta - 'twice cooked'.

After 30 mins, take the curd pieces out of the whey and put them on a rack to cool; cover them somehow for protection. Give the whey to your pigs or chickens.

When cool, put the the halloumi pieces in a dish and pour over the salty whey you put in the jug on the first day.

As you do all this, listen to something interesting on the radio / bbc iPlayer / a ted talk / sing / have a calm time

Don't bother doing it if you're in a hurry, spoils all the fun.

Eat and share.

Yummy!

Knowledge work and growing get married

2010-01-18T08:27:00.000-08:00

I'm thinking of writing a Manifesto.

A Blended manifesto.

I'll have titles like, Knowledge Work and Farming Get Married

Knowledge / Creative work - yes, why leave out the artists? - and growing need each other. They need to be together, to live together, or at least next door.

Work can be great. But working five days a week for most of your adult life, for most people, sucks. Literally. It sucks the life out. Look at most people when they stop. Old and sucked dry. No thanks.

Aspects of self-sufficiency - gardening, animals, building stuff, sewing stuff - can be great, but try doing the whole show full time and your life becomes one long grind.

Knowledge and creative work need to have manual/growing/agricultural work dropped in the middle of them and wiggled around like marble cake mixture. When you need to think, step back and let ideas or the bigger picture bubble into view, or have rich conversations with colleagues that don't need flipcharts and spreadsheets - this is the time to be getting your hands dirty. An hour or two a day, peppered into your working day. Thinking time.

"A lot of our problems are created in there," said a man in Canon Frome community pointing to the meeting room. "And a lot of the solutions come up in informal conversation out here," he said while we stood together under the big fresh sky, turning a pile of pruned branches into kindling.

Next door, growing needs knowledge or creative work, otherwise it just gets boring. Farmers kill themselves a lot because it's a crap job if you do it all the time. And the system they're in now is horrible, feels horrible from the inside. You don't just need interesting things to think about and interesting people to talk to while you tinker with the broccoli; you might also need to sing.

I sing a Phoebe Smith song called The Tan Yard Side that my friend Sam taught me.

Phoebe Smith came from Suffolk, like me. She was a farm worker with a voice like a fog horn and she used to sing for everyone as they worked, across the fields.

In Burkina Faso, says Malidoma Some, they play music while they farm. Work is draining, he says, so you need to do things to stay full. Where we use tea and biscuits, the Dagara people use music, he says, because "Music and rhythm are the things that feed someone who is producing something." (p68).

So, that's it really. We need to tear down our buildings and utterly redesign our spatial organisation, nationally, so that offices and growing spaces can get married and live next door to each other.

Here's a nice example, 1.20 in.

The secret to a good soup

2010-01-18T07:47:00.000-08:00

It's taken me thirty years but I've finally discovered it. Please ignore this if you were quicker on the button.

The secret to good soup is:

onion + potato + knorr vegetable stock cube

+ whatever else you want to put in the soup - extremely simple seems to work best

= delicious soup! Every time!

If you'd like more detail...

Chop and gently fry an onion. When it's soft add your potato, as much as seems reasonable. In a little bit, add the stock you've made with your stock cube/s, (I think the other flavours don't work half as well as vegetable), and put in the other vegetables when it makes sense. So, today, I rescued some dying artichokes from the bottom of the fridge and put them in with the potatoes. Last week, it was broccoli, so that went in about fifteen minutes after adding the stock, and then it simmered gently - (i hear that if you boil things too hard you kill all the nutrients and flavour - I'm told the issue is all about temperature much more than time) - for about five minutes more, then wizz it up and add salt and pepper (at any stage I think) and you're done.

O, a hand blender. That's the fourth magic ingredient.

onion + potato + knorr vegetable stock cube/s + hand blender = delicious soup from any old veg you've got.

Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Festival

2010-01-12T09:21:00.000-08:00

"Because we will probably outlive our way of life"...

UNCIVILISATION is a festival for anyone who's sick of pretending that we can make our current way of living "sustainable", that we can take control of the planet's reeling systems, that "one more push" will do it. It's time to acknowledge that "saving the planet" is a bad joke. We are entering an age of massive disruption and the task is to live through it as best we can and to look after each other as we make the transition to the unknown world ahead.

from the wonderful Dark Mountain Project

R4 programme on Canon Frome Court

2010-01-11T09:50:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Phil Ayres for pointing out this great radio programme about Canon Frome Court, a community I visited in November.

"Housing, and the need to live sustainably outside of big conurbations, are two of the biggest problems facing life in the countryside," says Ms BBC intro voice. Canon Frome is introduced as "one solution."

thanks to geograph for the pic

TV programme about self-sufficiency looking for couples

2010-01-10T16:45:00.000-08:00

"Hi there,

My name is Sophie and I am a researcher at a television company called
Tiger Aspect Productions.

I am currently trying to find contributors who would be interested in
taking part in a new programme we are developing. We need to find couples who would jump at the chance to leave their lives in the city to forge a new self-sufficient life in the countryside and spend a year getting back to a simpler way of life."

If you're interested email sophieandrews@tigeraspect.co.uk

Adam McIntosh's Treehouse

2010-01-10T02:34:00.001-08:00

Cool shower

2009-11-26T08:49:00.000-08:00

I stayed at Dave's smallholding for a few days last week.

In the woofers' 'lodge' there was an aga (or was it a rayburn?) that Dave had set up in his own special way.

We lit a small wood fire in it each evening and shut the door. That provided us with enough heat for the whole night, and heated the water for three of our showers the next morning.

pic from rich66

And now I'm thinking about slow casserole cooking, in a pot on top. So you could combine space heating, water heating and cooking fuel all in one small wood fire...

With the wood from pretty woodland nearby, in which you cut tress down and up when you have a bit of something to get out of your system, and in which you come with small children to plant trees

oo it's getting so idyllic it's oozing...

The Obamas' new veg garden: former White House lawn

2009-11-26T08:39:00.000-08:00

Not exactly current, but fab news story.

Thanks to treehugger for the pic

Rob Hopkins TED Talk

2009-11-26T08:14:00.001-08:00

Late November Veg

2009-11-25T00:54:00.000-08:00

I tend to think that food growing is mainly a summer thing.

At Canon Frome organic grow/milk/slaughter/bake-your-own community in Hereford, they have a chalk board in the dairy kitchen where they write up what food is ready to harvest. On November 24th, this was the list: [lost camera!!! :( ]

(most of it was growing outside with a tiny bit in a polytunnel)

Peppers

Parsley

Oriental leaves

Mouli (Japanese raddish)

Carrots

Chard

Celeriac

Beetroot

Bulb fennel

Spinach

Sorrel

Beet leaves

Chinese celery

Corn salad

Chervil

Coriander

Dill

Lettuce

Coriander

Tomatoes

Thyme

Tarragon

Turnip

Cabbage

Sprouts

Calabrese

Swede

Red cabbage

Rocket

Kohlrabi

Leeks

thanks to ann-eve and zotz for pictures

We drink meadows

2009-11-23T07:35:00.000-08:00

I've been spending quite a bit of time with the goats here at Canon Frome.

I've milked them, put their milk in my tea, and made halloumi, ricotta, paneer, cream cheese and labna (boursin-like) from the milk. (In 4 days. Each cheese takes literally 24 hours to make. Or rather, about 15 minutes of effort over a 24 hour period.)

Every morning and evening, before milking them, I've given them hay. A lot of hay, to eat.

They make their own hay here, and before coming here I didn't really get what hay actually is.

Hay is summer meadows. Mown and baled and stored in the haybarn. (That I want to put a big rope swing in...)

And the cows and goats eat it and turn it into milk.

Oranges, Avocados, Pecans...

2009-11-23T07:27:00.000-08:00

I'm having a fantastic time at Canon Frome, an exceptionally well-organised organic community in Herefordshire where people have part time professional jobs, and they grow organic veg, keep goats, cows, chickens and bees, make hay and wheat and oats and all that, and are generally lovely and healthy and happy and great.

Lazing in my friend Ellie's bath last night, I leafed through a copy of The Hamlyn Guide to Trees of Britain and Europe, and it appetized me with ideas of orange, avocado and pecan trees.

Then I started thinking about the Pineapples they grow at the Eden Project in greenhouses heated by compost.

And now I'm excited.

"Why I'm starting a woodland community"

2009-11-19T11:04:00.000-08:00

"This week my wife and I took a rather large leap in the dark. We did something that many people dream of; something that many more think is daft or even dangerous: we sold our house in Bristol and bought a 10-acre woodland in Somerset. Which in itself is only semi-daft, it's the next bit that makes people think we're either visionary or deranged: we're going to run the woodland as a communal shelter for people facing a period of personal crisis."

This is a lovely article, in full here

pic source

The blended block

2009-11-11T00:22:00.001-08:00

my favourite bit starts 1.20 in.

William Morris

2009-11-11T00:07:00.001-08:00

"It seems to be nobody's business to try to better things - isn't mine you see, in spite of all my grumbling - but look, suppose people lived in little communities among gardens and green fields, so that you could be in the country in five minutes' walk, and had few wants, almost no furniture for instance, and no servants, and studied the (difficult) arts of enjoying life, and finding out what they really wanted; then I think that one might hope civilisation had really begun."

Quoted in How to be free, Tom Hodgkinson, p53

pic source

Tom Hodgkinson

2009-11-10T23:39:00.000-08:00

"Escaping the city has been a long-cherished romantic dream. From the Bucolics of Virgil to the Romantic poets, and today in pop songs and folk songs, it's obvious that we all yearn for peace and that we're all trying to get back into the Garden of Love."

"Your view of the city depends, I suppose, on whether you view commercial activity as liberating or imprisoning."

"I even like the idea of going around on horses and getting from country to country by boat."

How to be free, pages, 50 - 61. Pic source

John Seymour

2009-11-10T23:36:00.000-08:00

"I believe that if half a dozen families were to decide to be partially self-supporting, and settle within a few miles of each other, and knew what they were doing, they could make for themselves a very good life. Each family would have some trade or profession or craft, the product of which they would trade with the rest of the world. Each family would grow, rear or produce a variety of goods or objects which they would use themselves and also trade with the other families for their goods. Nobody would get bored doing their specialized art or craft, because they would not have to spend all day at it, but there would be a large variety of other jobs to do every day too. This partial specialisation would set them free for at least some leisure: probably more than the city wage-slave gets, after he has commuted to and from his factory or office."

Quoted in How to be Free, Tom Hodgkinson, p54
pic source

Yeats

2009-11-10T23:30:00.000-08:00

"Wherever men have tried to imagine a perfect life, they have imagined a place where men plough and sow and reap, not a place where there are great wheels turning and great chimneys vomiting smoke."

Quoted in Tom Hodgkinson, how to be free, p50.
pic source

350

2009-10-28T14:09:00.001-07:00

House buying, 2009 vs 1973

2009-10-28T12:17:00.000-07:00

I'm staying with my parents. We're talking about house buying. They've offered us all some money towards getting on the housing ladder when we're ready. I asked if a yurt counts. They say it doesn't.

Humm.

Long and animated conversations ensue, and a bit of random hunting for yurts and mad people across the fields of Suffolk with my middle aged, posh-and-loud voiced mother...

So. Housing.

My Dad earnt £2.5k a year when he bought his first house in 1973. He was supporting himself, my mother and my eldest sister, then a babe in arms. He was 26 years old.

He bought a 4 bed house in Stoke Newington for £11k. He inherited £4k from family for the down payment and got and a £7k mortgage from Islington council.

Wind forward 36 years. It's 2009. I'm that man's daughter. When I was 26 I was earning £28k a year in a comparable job, so let's use £28k.

To stick to his proportions,

I'd be buying a 4 bed house in Walthamstow (a comparable area to Stokey of the 1970s) for £125k.

I'd have a family contribution of £40,000, and a mortgage of £84k.

O, and I'd be supporting a husband and a baby on that.

So I looked at 4 bed properties in Walthamstow and the cheapest I could find was £250k, exactly double what my Dad would have paid proportional to income. My parents' kind offer of support for bricks and mortar is generous, but it is nowhere near £40k.

So. Why.

Why are the houseprices I face pretty much double those my Dad faced?

Level 1: increased demand without an equal increase in supply = increased price.

Level 2: the increased demand is not really about population increase. In 1973 there were 56m people here, today there are 60m.

Level 3: So what is leading to the increase in demand? Around the kitchen table we've identified four drivers:

One: Increased availability of credit has made a larger proportion of the population able to buy houses. That has increased competition.

Two: Women work too now. That's raised household income. People are willing and able to pay more for what they want in competitive circumstance.

Three: Some people earn A Lot of money. And some get high bonuses. And they buy property and let it out as a good way to turn money into more money.

Four: Smaller household sizes. People are marrying later, divorcing more, and living longer. So the same number of people need more dwellings than ever before.

Ok, Judgement Time.

One. (easier credit). Fine. Apart from it's maybe contributed to the financial crises which would have bought the whole system to its knees were it not for trillion dollar bailouts that are coming from..???? Public services for one, says my sister who's a government economist.

Two. (women work too). Problem, says my ma. Families need time. Relationships need time. Bodies need time. People need time. Communities need time. Cooking needs time. Friendships are really important all through life and they need time. She doesn't mind whether it's men or women putting in the time, she says, but if everyone's energy is going mostly into work, then lots of important things get fucked up.

Three. (some people earn lots). My Dad says that 1% of people earn over £55k a year. He got that off a radio programme where MPs were moaning that at £57k they didn't earn enough, and an economist said, you're in the top 1% of earners, stop complaining. (sorry for the tipsy sources: if this were a book I'd sharpen them up :). Problem, say I. I'm concerned about the ongoing growth of economic inequality within the UK and around the world, and the impact it has on everyone's life. I put it down, largely, to the plc model of company ownership and finance, whereby companies effective suck money from the many and deposit it with the few by maximising profits (created by the work of the many employees and the money of the many customers), and distributing them among the few shareholders and the few top bonus-receiving employees.

It's like holding a salt cellar upside-down over a table and pouring the salt down so there's a big peak in the middle and an ever widening periphery. Except this dynamic works in the opposite direction, so resources are hoovered from the many, the periphery, and piled up in the central cores. I think that's problematic. I think it's better to balance the interests of employees, customers and original financers (shareholders). So it's the people towards the tops of those peaks of salt that are earning high incomes and buying property and contributing to the fact that if I buy a house I have to effectively pay twice what my Dad did back then.

Four. (more people living alone). My mum's given me one minute to write this because dinner is ready.
That is SHIT because it's LONELY and SAD. Especially when you're old, but even when you're not, living alone is just SAD. Ok there are other issues but food is ready so I'm done.

The Future of Farming

2009-10-15T05:30:00.000-07:00

This BBC documentary is on youtube in 5 parts.

It's really interesting. It explores how our ways of farming aren't resilient to a carbon / oil constrained future. Basically concludes that lots of small scale permaculture is the answer, and eating less carbs and more nuts.

Oh My Green Soapbox

2009-10-15T03:26:00.000-07:00

My old housemate Lucy's ace show is on for the last time, 5-7 November.

"... a comically wayward attempt at environmental activism... genuis" Time Out

The Blended City

2009-10-12T09:18:00.001-07:00

C4 Landshare website

2009-10-05T04:30:00.000-07:00

Landshare - dating website for veg growers + land owners

Care Farming

2009-10-05T02:33:00.000-07:00

I've lost a couple of friends to suicide and I see the drivers as 80% external, ie, they were in shitty situations in very unhealthy contexts, in one case medicated up to the eyeballs and if you or I were in either of their situations, I bet we'd do the same.

I'm not interested in cute neat shiney blended communities where the most privileged and progressive urban working elite sit happily under apple trees with their apple macs typing innovatively away or having creative meetings on skype. Ok, I am interested in that, but not that alone. I'm interested also in the very old, the very young, people with other kinds of work, and the vulnerable. I'm interested in integrated communities.

So I find the growth of Care Farms interesting (although they're not very integrated).

"What is Care Farming?

Combining care of the land with care of people, in a setting where they feel safe, respected and engaged in meaningful activity.

Using commercial farms, woodlands and market gardens as a base for promoting mental and physical health through normal farming activity.
A partnership between farmers, participants and health & social care agencies, that develops people's potential rather than focusing on their limitations.

Who benefits?

Participants: They often experience improvements to their physical, mental and spiritual health and well-being.
Farmers: A high value is placed on their knowledge and skills. They gain great satisfaction from helping people improve their lives through farming.
Rural communities and economies: Care helps rural communities become more socially, economically and environmentally sustainable."

Looks like there's quite a lot going on. Vauxhall City Farm and Spitalfields City Farm both have a care farm element going on there.

There's a bunch of research about its impact available here.

Research: The Work Front

2009-10-01T09:26:00.000-07:00

People who live blended lifestyles in rural areas either need to be their own bosses, or to have very flexible bosses, or to work nearby.

My employer is very flexible. What does the rest of the picture look like?

1. Between 1997 and 2001, the proportion of people teleworking rose by over 65%, to 2.2 million people. (Matheson, J. and Summerﬁeld, C. (Eds). Social Trends No 31. ONS 2001, p82-83)

2. That kind of freedom is still a privilege rather than the norm, and tends to be enjoyed by graduate and professional knowledge workers. In the US, where teleworkers’ mean income is 66% higher than the national average, 12.5% of the workforce telework. 40% say they would like to but don’t think that their employers would allow it.

(Bennian, Y. and Dwelly, T. (2003) Time to Go Home London: The Work Foundation)

3. Researchers have identiﬁed ﬁve types of mobile workers, including Yo-yos who occasionally work away from a ﬁxed work location; Pendulums who work alternately at two locations – say, the rural home and the urban ofﬁce; and Nomads who work at changing locations.

(Lilischkis, S. (2003) ‘More Yo-yos, Pendulums and Nomads: Trends of mobile and multi-location work in the information society’, in Socio-Economic Trends Assessment for the Digital Revolution, p7.)

4. "Organisational cultures are shifting. The bureaucratic, hierarchical structures of old, in which management would impose control over not only what workers do but how, when and where, are beginning to dissolve. Networked organisational structures are growing up in their place, with increasingly ﬂexible relationships between employers and employees hinged by mutual trust. One product of this shift is that more employees are exercising greater autonomy over where they work – and in many cases it is broadband that enables them to seize this freedom." John Craig and I in Beyond Digital Divides, Demos and the Countryside Agency, 2004.

5. "Employees want more human organisations with greater autonomy and ﬂexibility… In short, they want organisations to ‘disorganise.’" - Miller, P. and Skidmore, P. (2004) Disorganisation: Why future organisations must ‘loosen up.’ London: Demos

6. Since it's launch in 2005, The Hub - a shared office space for come-and-go workers and organisations - has been a phenomenal success, and there are now 18 around the world - just four years since the first one opened.

I reckon there are a lot of jobs where you need to go to the office for group meetings, and that that needs to happen no more than once or maybe twice a week. That's been the case in all the work I've ever done, apart from site specific work like waitressing and babysitting when I was younger.

In between the office contact, for two or three way communication, skype, the phone, and other kinds of electronic comms work just fine.

This works where there's trust and commitment going two ways.

Call me an extremist, but I'd say, if there's not trust and commitment, why bother?

Lots of managers think their employees have to be in the office all the time so that they can be controlled. And I think, if you have to control people to get work out of them, that's shit. If the work doesn't come voluntarily, there's something fundamentally wrong. The situation is saying something to you.

Like, if you're a plastic cup factory, and your office staff have to work in the office otherwise they'd be at home just pretending to work, that says, the staff don't love the organisation and what it is here in the world to do.

And I think, if an organisation's staff don't love the organisation and what it is here in the world to do, then maybe the organisation doesn't have a right to exist.

Maybe if everybody working in organisations doing and producing things that they didn't love just stopped, you'd only be left with the organisations doing things that were really worth doing.

I've observed a 'fewer, better' principle at play in my life. Gradually, I start wanting fewer, better clothes; fewer, better friends. Maybe the world needs fewer, better organisations.

I know in the interim there'd be a hell of a lot of chaos

but there's a fair amount of chaos around right now

maybe it's time to start

ok, fewer sounds like The Day of the Multinationals but you know what I mean. If no-one loves plastic cup companies, let them die. We'll figure out something better.

Here's what they do in India instead of plastic cups.

When they're done they throw them on the ground and they smash and gradually get stomped back into the earth and it's the same earth that new cups are made from so it's like life, zero waste, works just fine.

The Research: People Like Me

2009-10-01T09:01:00.001-07:00

Ok here's my first stab.

On people, in no particular order

1. 4 out of 10 UK adults under 35 dream of 'downshifting', according to research from the Prudential

2. While 75% of Brits live in urban and suburban areas, 54% say that they would rather live in the countryside or a village, and 72% think that they would be happier anywhere but a city, according to a Gallup survey reported in The Economist

3. This isn't a new trend: even in 1939, 61% of people wanted to move to rural areas – yet at that time, national migration ﬂows ran the other way (same Economist article)

4. So, young wealthy urban folk are on the move. Research has found that urban to rural migration outstrips North to South migration at a rate of 4:1; in one study, 48% of urban to rural migrants were under 40, and in another, 50% were aged 25-44. One study found that 41% of incomers earned over £25k a year, compared with 13% of locals, and 70% of incomers were economically active.

These figures are all reported in a report I wrote with Demos for the Countryside Agency back in 2004, called Beyond Digital Divides, and come from Mason, John, ‘Is there really a rural economy? Urban concerns crowd in on the countryside’ Financial Times, 18 September, 2004, and Findlay, A and Stockdale, E.(2003) Rural In-Migration: A Catalyst for Economic Regeneration, Draft report.

So are the migrants living the Good Life or shopping at Tescos? What do they want to be doing? Don't know. Do know this, however:

5. In 2006 the BBC reported that allotment waiting lists in Camden were ten years long. ("Forget the flat caps, allotments are becoming fashionable among inner-city eco-warriors.") In 2009 the Telegraph reported that Camden's waiting lists were now 40 years long, with many other parts of the country at the 10 year point, and a total of 100,000 Brits on waiting lists for allotments. It's the recession + Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall + Jamie Oliver that've done it, writes the journalist.

6. Everyone I speak to seems to share this yearning.

7. Last friday I went to an Alastair McIntosh talk down in Brighton. (In Soil and Soul , Alastair points out that we partly left the land in the first place because we wanted to, but a lot of the migration was driven by the sword.. Enclosures etc.).

It was friday evening. Train from London after a long day of work. (Four hour meeting in chairs, bodies slouched, energies kept up with tea and snacks, sunshine outside, walls around us. We should have had that meeting over a veg patch somewhere... But where?)

The city in my body. I sat. Alastair opened a slide of his home Island of Lewis and the woman behind me had exactly the same reaction as me in exactly the same moment, at the sight of all that wild green expanse; a sharp, instinctive inhalation, followed by a long slow out breath accompanied in my case at least by a relaxing of the body and a little wetting of the eyes.

This yearning is beyond ideas, for me. It is in my fibres, perhaps it is in that woman's fibers too, perhaps it is in all of our fibres.

Everyone I speak to seems to yearn for this kind of thing. It might be because I mainly speak to people who are more or less like me. It's also possible that it's because this is about something fundamental to the human animal.

Call for Research

2009-10-01T09:00:00.000-07:00

Hello.

According to my stat counter, about ten different people visit this blog each day.

I have a question.

You might have leads.

Do you?

Ok so here are my questions. (they've just multiplied).

1. Who else wants to live the way that I want to live? With part time knowledge work, and gardening, and goats, and a slower pace of life, and rural air and space and breakfasting on the hedgerows?

Who are they? What do they number? What sorts of people are they?

2. Who is able to live that way?

I've got 50% of the blended lifestyle: a part time interesting job that I can do from anywhere provided I can be in London for meetings about once a week. That gives me the time and flexibility to establish the other 50% of the blended lifestyle.

How normal is that kind of work? How many people can have such freedom and flexibility with their employers?

3. What are the relevant social, economic and environmental trends?

And what are the drivers? And, how might they play out over the next couple of decades?

If you know anything, any stats, or any articles or reports that would be good to read, could you drop a comment or an email??

Not clucky, just nesting

2009-10-01T06:47:00.000-07:00

"Are you clucky?" Jo asked me as I peered in terror and fascination at my very new first cousin.

No. Not an ounce of desire yet looking at that tiny, terrifying thing.

Jo is my age.

"So you're nesting."

Nesting.

Ah.

My mother had children young and told the three of us regularly, from before we were old enough to understand, that we were Not Allowed to marry or procreate before we were 30.

I turned 30 recently and about a week later, my mother told me I was over the hill. "There's a window of opportunity for falling in love and settling down, and frankly, darling, you've past it."

Ah.

Well, over the hill or not, I seem to be displaying nesting instincts. I have an unprecedented desire to accrue savings. Having lived happily for years in a shared house with three friends, something told me it was no longer right, and I had to go and... make a nest. My small inner voice didn't quite use those words, but that was basically it.

The problem is, there is nowhere I want to nest. No existing types of nest I want to copy. The way I want to nest doesn't exist yet.

So, awkward bugger that I am, it looks like I have to create it.

The Natural Beekeeping Trust

2009-10-01T05:24:00.000-07:00

runs courses

Organic Farm School - short courses from the Soil Association

2009-10-01T04:36:00.001-07:00

more here

92% of people think self sufficiency is important now

2009-10-01T04:28:00.000-07:00

92% of people in the UK say that self sufficiency and traditional skills like growing your own food, crafting and rearing your own livestock have become more and more important during the financial crisis.

But half of the 1230 people surveyed (by Pollab Limited for the Soil Association) said they have lost the practical skills of their grandparent's generation: 45% admit they have fewer cooking skills, 47% say they are less able to grow their own food, 48% have lost the rural craft skills that make self sufficiency possible and 51% say they would have no idea how to rear animals.

More: Soil Association

My Grandfather's diaries

2009-09-25T02:03:00.000-07:00

Mum just emailed me with an entry from her father's diary on 21st May, 1948

"Reading 'The Rape of the Earth' , a survey of world soil erosion by G.V. Jacks and R. O. White. Makes you think, and also a bit scaring. I want to stock up with at least 5 years' supply of of tinned provisions, in case man's stupidity with the earth means soon that the earth will not be able to produce enough to support man. Finely balanced nature hasn't a chance against man's industry, energy and science; later, man hasn't a chance against the revolt of unbalanced nature - deserts, floods, drought and sterile soil."

Plus ca change....

Love, Mum

Farmer Suicide Rates

2009-09-23T08:17:00.000-07:00

Further to my thoughts about how knowledge work and growing go better together than in isolation, some stats on farmer suicide rates - around double that of the rest of the population.

Source: Defra

Clear Village

2009-09-23T04:22:00.000-07:00

"Developing sustainable living solutions at the village scale"...

"Goals of the CLEAR Village Foundation:

Develop an aspirational future of living in the midst of financial and ecological crisis. Co-design a replicable masterplan strategy with global experts to reboot rural & peri-urban areas. Harmonise low-tech romantic ideals with 21st century high-tech solutions and which offers alternative paths to non-sensical new builds."

In praise of yurts

2009-09-21T12:38:00.000-07:00

"While this [yurt] looks like a normal, round canvas tent on the outside, inside it is... considerably more comfortable, and certainly a lot bigger, than my sitting room at home. If this is camping, then please let me live in a tent for the rest of my life."

The telegraph

The yurts at Embercombe were what got me hooked. They had really big windows in the side that light poured through in the day, and a big skylight at the top that you could see the trees and the moon through at night as you feel asleep in your super comfy bed.

I like what they've done here (above) with the flooring and woodstore beneath. Wood must get damp in the rain though, no? The Embercombe yurts had fitted round wood floors, in four layers: wood, insulation, ratproofing, top wood. They were gorgeous.

(You need source of, and storage for, wood with yurts because you warm them by wood burning stove. And unless you hook up electricity you need oil lamps too, which produce a beautiful light.)

I'm wondering about how I'll power my speakers. Maybe a mini solar pannel?

Fuck it - the ultimate spiritual path

2009-09-21T11:20:00.001-07:00

Knowledge work and farming

2009-09-18T00:47:00.000-07:00

I said goodbye to the farm yesterday. Everyone is likely to leave in the next three to four months; the landlord has requested an exit strategy, for the distance between what he wants done with the land and what the community want to do with the land is too great. The community wants to run events there and produce food to sustain themselves and their visitors: the landlord wants them to just farm tons of veg for his farm shop in Bristol. The community aren't really interested in being farmers. Yesterday was a sad day, for the group have put their love and sweat into that place for a year and a half, and now they have to leave, and all their lives will change, because a man who owns more than they do wants something different to them.

Such is the world.

I once stayed in the welsh B&B of an ex farmer named Marcus Lampard, who wanted to start a website named farmingisfucked.com.

Radford Mill was the first time I've helped out in a garden for commercial production and it had a totally different feeling to a garden producing just for the community.

In producing food for the community at Embercombe or Findhorn for example, there is a feeling of something like love in what you're doing because you're helping to make delicious, healthy, sustainable food for people you know and care about.

Why should that sense stop simply because you have never seen the face of the person who will eat the lettuce you're picking? At the Mill, I was trying to imagine the tables that the salad bags I was making, complete with delicious organic mixed leaves and decorated with blue and orange edible flowers, borrige, nasturtiums, marigolds - beautiful! At least when picked. Wilted probably by the time they're eaten unfortunately... Anyway, I was trying to imagine the people that would eat them and thinking, why can't my feeling of delight in producing food extend to these people I will never meet?

It can, I thought, but I don't like this because we're selling wholesale to a landlord, the relationship with whom is widely perceived here as exploitative, and that makes me an exploited agricultural worker right now, and that's the last thing I ever wanted to be.

And that's only participating in the system at one remove from a farm shop fifteen miles away, working in a beautiful place with nice people. How must people feel producing food on a massive non-organic farm for Tesco? Putting in a lot of effort for virtually no money in return?

I've done a lot of shitty work at the Mill. I took down yurts after a big party (heavy and dull work that took a team of 5 an entire day), and dealt with the party's rubbish (disgusting, and formed my resolve to live in a zero waste community). That rubbish was mindless, just like all rubbish is, and it only becomes mindful when you're the person having to sort it out and think about where it all goes. It all goes into Great Big Piles of Crap.

I think we can do better than that.

So I did a lot of shitty work. And it offended me inside which was interesting. "This is manual labour," said my pride. "I am not a manual worker. I am a knowledge worker. Why am I hauling around sacks of crap like someone with no education?"

In the first week I had three dreams that senior members of my family - who have tried for me and have expectations of me - died and my silly actions were partly to blame. Last year a consultant writing think pieces for government strategy units: this year, a shit-clearing farmer. You're letting your family down, wasting all that has been invested in you, my guts seemed to be telling me.

But it was also interesting. I was grumbling to myself about spending a day hauling around canvas and bits of yurt, but then, some of the most amazing experiences of my life have happened in festival yurts that someone put up and took down. And I pay for my ticket, come in, sit in them, experience nirvana or something like it, throw my rubbish in the bin, fuck off, and people I never meet do the dirty work.

And food. My London housemate Mark wastes a bunch of food. If he ever buys vegetables, he makes one thing using some of them, and the rest go in the fridge in their plastic packets never to be touched again until they're mouldy and he or I or the Brazilian cleaner picks them up and throws them away.

Harvesting at Embercombe is inclusive. It involves all the vegetables. The criteria for inclusion is ripeness. If you're ripe, you're in. Harvesting for the Radford Mill farm shop involves a tonne of wastage. The criteria for inclusion is visual conformity to a norm. If the leaf is too big or wiggly or holy, it's to the house or the pigs or the compost heap - and a lot of it ends up in the compost because the house and the pigs between them can't eat all of the fresh ripe organic food that tastes amazing but never gets to the customer because it doesn't look pretty enough.

All of that, every bit of it goes out the window when you produce your own food. When you've invested in it, you love it. You won't let it be wasted.

Kim and I walked the mile and half back from the goat farm in the dark the other night, me carrying the three litre tub of milk we'd just taken gratefully from The Ladies. We walked a bumpy bridleway by starlight, slowly. We didn't want to drop the milk! If we spilt the milk, we really would cry! The whole no-use-crying-over-spilt-milk thing means something totally different if you have taken the milk from the creature with your own hand, and it is then to become the milk and yoghurt and cheese for your family for tomorrow / the day after / three days after respectively, and if you spill it, that's it! Effort wasted and a hungry(er) family. Something to cry over for sure - and avoid.

So. Where does this take us. Most people who eat food are many steps away from the people who make the food. So we value it much less and waste it a lot, and the growers get a shit job. And we get worse food because of the time-lapse between field and plate.

It's alright, it's not bad, some people get work, others get fed, that's good. But isn't is also much more miserable than it could be?

...

It's time to get specific. Growing food all day every day doesn't work for me. So what does?

1. Growing as headspace

If I've been doing office work for hours, there is nothing more fantastic than stepping away from the screen and the phone calls and the meetings and going into the calm space of Growing. You feel the sunlight and the air and you work manually with the sensual food factory, involving lush black earth, in harvest time handling gorgeous sensual colourful forms of food - food just picked beats an art gallery for me every time - in spring time preparing beds and carefully laying rows of seeds full of promise. It's slow, steady, measured, physical work in nature and it lets the head slow down and breathe.

That can be an end in itself, or sometimes, when I would grow food in the garden, I'd scramble my own head by working for hours and having tea and biscuits instead of actual breaks, then I'd go into the garden and slow down with the veg and ahhhhhh that's it. Your brain wanders around and gradually, new ideas bubble up, the problems you were caught on get unstuck, useful questions and perspectives just arise in your mind. You stop forcing and start letting, and everything starts to move again.

When you return to the screen, you do good work. Somehow you have been nourished.

Aside from work, just pottering in the garden with the radio on is great.

2. Growing as group headspace

There's a lot of value in working in the garden beside people you have important relationships with. Members of your team or family (I include partner in family), or your friends.

It brings space into conversation. And it slows it down. It's ok to pause for thought as you poke a hole in the ground and wiggle a tiny red onion into it, knowing it will come back a big onion.

Embercombe does this really well. Groups go and work the land together to talk and reflect and process and think slowly, at the pace of the garden, at the pace of the heart.

3. Growing as fun

On our first friends weekend at Embercombe, mark and I were asked to clean the outside of an entire polytunnel with a hose and a long mop/broom, which we did, while getting each other wet in the Autumn sun, playing around, being silly, shreiking with laughter, and teaching each other songs.

4. Singing and growing

Sometimes we started to sing songs while we picked together at the Mill. That was good. I reckon we should have fun fed singing sessions on the land while working it. Nice.

They do stuff like that in Africa.

Malidoma Some describes how it works in his village in Burkina Faso:

"Villagers are interested not in accumulation but in a sense of fullness. Abundance means a sense of fullness, which cannot be measured by a yardstick of the material goods we possess or the amount of money in a bank account...

"Most work done in the village is done collectively. The purpose is not so much the desire to get the job done but to raise enough energy for people to feel nourished by what they do. The nourishment does not come after the job, it comes before the job and during the job. The notion that you should do something so that you get paid so that then you can nourish yourself disappears. You are nourished first, and then the work flows out of your fullness.

"Many areas of work among villagers, including farming, are accompanied by music. Music is meant to maintain a certain state of fullness. People recognise that even if you are full before the work, you can't take that fullness for granted. You have to keep feeding it so that the feeling of fullness continues, so that the work you are doing constantly reflects that fullness in you. It is as if the output of work takes a toll on your fullness, even it if is an expression of your fullness, and you have to be filled again before you can continue. Music and rhythm are the things that feed someone who is producing something."

Malidoma Some, The Healing Wisdom of Africa, p68

So. Do I seem to be saying that:

Knowledge work and food making need each other. Knowledge work without land work is too heady and tight: land work without knowledge work is too dull

The participation principle rises again - it's good if you participate in making the food you eat, even a little bit

Growing works in community, in conversation, and with music, but not in isolation

So on the funny farm we'd have a garden that one person manages and the whole community and all it's visitors participate in a little bit. And musician gardeners / garden musicians get everyone singing. What about everywhere else? Maybe starting with getting it right on the funny farm is enough for now.

My first Goatmilking

2009-09-15T07:14:00.000-07:00

I breakfasted from the hedgerows on my way to the bus stop this morning, and my pockets now bulge with a couple of ripe apples taken from the autumn tree.

I've found it glorious to conduct my daily business in the countryside, walking to work, home, the goat farm and the bus stop through fields, woods and bridleways.

I'm on my way to London. I've been at the farm nearly two weeks now. Here's what I've found.

The greatest thing is the goats at the goat farm over the hill. When Kim and I first arrived, we were silenced and spellbound by the herd of baby goats in the lower fields, their mothers all up top getting a milking. On a Devonshire hillside, the sunset valley behind them, they clustered curiously and characterfully towards us, each one a clear Personality, and gradually explored us and nuzzled and cuddled and made friends.

We dragged ourselves away and walked up to the main shed where Rowan was milking their mums. I fell in friendly love with Rowan on the spot. She was a grinning no-nonsense tall strong slightly posh bird like me, and she was goat crazy. Casually milking 24 organic, Neil's Yard dairy goats in about 7 minutes with the aid of a machine, she invited us to help while she chattered away merrily about all things Goat.

I approached my first goat. Yowzers. I reached my trembling hand towards her bulbous udder, made first contact – yeek! - my poor goat jumped all over the place – my trembling hand tickled her! I jumped away in fear of these flailing goat legs and stood there with Rowan and Kim laughing all over the place and me trying to calm myself down enough to touch the poor beast without tormenting her.

Several similar tries later, I kept going, and I finally managed it with a bit of steady breathing, a different goat, a pat on the haunch to warn her I was about to come in, and softly repeating 'steady now, steady now, here we come, nice and steady...” and it kind of worked.

When we were on our last batch of the 120 goats we milked, she let us have a go at milking by hand.

Goat udders are like warm jugs made of incredibly soft leather, and holding one in each hand is like eating a bowl of steaming porridge in winter, with honey or brown sugar and cinnamon. I farted around a bit figuring out how to get any milk out of the teet, but once I managed it, I got into something of a rhythm. Goat milking is meditation. Provided you don't have to do 15 by hand morning and night, it basically gives you the same good feeling as sitting in a tree or putting your head or tummy to the earth, but it's even better because it also gives you milk.

And more. I've eaten yoghurt with my breakfast every morning for the past several years. Maybe you've bought a plastic bottle of milk every couple of days for years. If I collected all the plastic yoghurt pots I've thrown away to god knows where, they'd probably fill both decks of this bus.

I don't like that.

A goat eats up your brambles, nettles and leftover food. You have a little homecoming meditation on it each day in the quiet of the shed and as a result you get milk which lactose intolerant people can handle and is really good for the skin (I was allergic to my mother's breastmilk when I was born – projectile vomited it across the room after every feed – so I was weaned on goats milk. I've never liked cows milk and I find that when I drink it it makes my skin flaky, my nose blocked and my singing voice muffled). If you do some very simple things, you can also get yoghurt, and really delicious cheese quite easily – more on that in a sec.

Their shit becomes fantastic compost if you can sweep it up and put it somewhere quite regularly, their girl babies can either be kept to increase your herd or raised, impregnated and then sold for something between £120 and £200, and their boy babies can be killed at between 3 and 6 months old and turned into human energy, either yours if you want to eat it and you have a local slaughterhouse and butcher to use, or Rowan's farm sells their boy kids to flashy London restaurants who are interested in unusual food like goat meat.

You also get calm, peaceful friends.

And when your ladies die, you can bury their carcasses several feet below a new veg patch and they'll make excellent fertilizer. Actually any roadkill or fish bits (you can buy these) will do the same – this is fairly common practice in New Zealand I'm told.

Your milk is unpasturised so healthier for you, says Rowan, the biochemistry graduate Neil's Yard cheese maker - that's why she makes her cheese with unpasturised milk. Pasturisation kills a lot of the vitamins and nutrients, apparently.

And you don't participate in a questionable dairy industry...

How much better is that than a tub of yoghurt from the supermarket? And that's not even going into the economics.

I'm sold on goats.

Kim and I went up again last night and came home with three litres of milk with the following simple additions to prepare it for cheese: a couple of drops of rennet, which comes from the stomach of male goats - you can also get vegetable rennet – and a couple of spoons of whey (the liquid that separates from the curd when goats milk starts turning) from yesterday's goats milk that's already on the turn. This introduces the cheese culture into the milk. If you want to make yoghurt you add a couple of spoons of yoghurt instead; that introduces a different bacteria, the yoghurt bacteria.

For yoghurt, you don't need rennet, but Rowan says that adding a couple of spoons of skimmed milk powder makes it more thick and creamy, otherwise it can be a bit weak and runny. Kim and I looked at each other at that point – skimmed milk powder isn't the sort of thing we have on the farm – then clearly simultaneously thought, what the hell, worth a try.

We left half the milk in the larder overnight, covered, and this morning it was already solid like set yoghurt. Amazing! The over half we'll do tomorrow when I get back from London.

She said, what we do then is taste the curd to make sure it's no longer creamy but a little bit sharp and acidic. Then we put a sieve in a bowl, and put some cheesecloth in the sieve. Carefully spoon the curd into the cheesecloth without disturbing it too much, and when it's all done leave it for a day or two and then eat it like cream cheese.

I don't know make mature goats cheese with a rind. I'll investigate.

Ok. Enough eulogising on goats.

So veg. I love vegetable gardens, but I'm not loving this one. The production is more for sale than for the community, and that creates a different feeling. There is a widespread feeling that the relationship with the landlord, who buys the veg wholesale for sale in the farm shop - is exploitative, and I find that demotivating: I don't want to be an exploited agricultural worker. My interest in the veg garden is removed.

The community is struggling right now with the relationship with the landlord. Profound uncertainty looms about the future of the farm. The effect on the community is paralysing. A troupe of 8 pigs is down to two – we're slowly eating our way through the third – delicious! - and is not being regenerated. The three goats were weaned off milking weeks ago and are being sold today. The chickens were all killed by foxes one day – yes, they don't just come at night – when they'd been let out and about – and they haven't been replaced. Their pen is grownover with tall weeds.

Understandably, nobody wants to do anything until they know they can stay on terms that work for them and that don't make everyone feel like exploited agricultural workers.

Moods pass like viruses through the house. When we're happy and chirpy, we bob around happily together chirping. When a mood of uncertainty and somnolence descends on the house, it descends on all of us. We all retreat quietly to our bedrooms, caravans and yurts, and in my case at least sit there thinking about what next, what else, what instead of this.

Lammas

2009-09-14T22:53:00.000-07:00

Wow.

Lammas, a group of people trying to create an eco-village in Pembrokeshire, submitted a planning application for 9 smallholdings and a community hall in June 2007.

Their application was rejected once, twice, but their third application was successful on August 27 2009.

This was the crowd in the courtroom last month.

Pembrokeshire County Council adopted a low-impact policy (Policy 52) that allows new-build eco-smallholdings in July 2006. Lammas' application is the first to be passed under it.

"The planners require that 75 per cent of all household needs must be met directly by land-based means," says the press release. Wow. That's not blended living. Blended would be more like 50%. "Each smallholding has had to be meticulously planned to meet this requirement with a broad spectrum of enterprises ranging from strawberry production to basketry, from smoked hams to furniture making, from woollen crafts to medicinal tinctures."

More here.

Doing it: Three Months

2009-09-07T13:19:00.000-07:00

This is my first night at Radford Mill Farm, near Bath.

I'm going to be living here and volunteering three days a week on the land, learning about harvest and winter vegetables and goats and chickens and everything, and 2.5 days a week at my laptop, working professionally for the Fun Fed.

I can already feel the tension of the city draining from my body.

At dinner Deasy did the nicest thing. She casually Held Court on all the hilarious things that Bad volunteers had done, and all the great things about the Good volunteers, thereby subtly giving me a clear and entertaining outline of expectations, desires and norms.

I want to tell you about my dream

2009-09-01T15:13:00.000-07:00

I went out dancing with Jo, Anna and Graham a couple of weeks ago.

Graham is my boss.

After a few glasses of wine and cocktails, I came home in the small hours and had a nice-feeling urge to email him about the Funny farm.

It was the first time I'd clearly articulated the idea.

The first part only makes sense if you know that we'd been talking about the strange experience whereby when you follow instructions to stand beside a tree, listen carefully to it and then communicate on its behalf, you have a clear impression of receiving communication and a strong feeling of pure, basic goodness.

From: briony.greenhill@gmail.com

Subject: i want to tell you about my dream

Date: August 9, 2009 3:41:00 AM BST

To: Graham

hello

i want to tell you about my dream

not a dream from sleep

a dream from my tummy

a dream of the 'funny farm'

it's a place of goodness

like the inside of a tree

when you listen to it

that's how it feels

and at this stage, for me, it's a dream, not an aim

but if a point comes when life brings together enough people with the same dream

maybe a shared aim will whirl together

the idea is like a cake of several pieces

there's a rural fun fed home

a place of play, and knitting, and singing (and fooling and dancing and and...)

a place that celebrates seasons, and birth and marriage and death and weekends and the passing into different ages of life

with joy and upliftment and laughter

applying our techniques and art to the important moments of life

there's a school

for the children who live there and the children who live nearby

that jo can take care of and lead on

there's a rural hub

that a man you don't know but who you would trust and like, called alastair, could lead on, this is his dream and he has the competence to make it real

it's a space where people who live there and people who visit can work

there's a farm

where everyone can feel the simple nourishment of helping things grow

and teams can share broader conversations than the office usually holds, over planting carrots, or digging raised beds together

maybe you haven't experienced the quality of conversations that seem to happen over working the land

they're good.

it's a place where people can buy and sell and build and make homes

it's a place of rehabilitation for maybe five people a year

people like my late friend charlie, or jo's late brother

people who have been through a trauma and through their most intense period of rehabilitation elsewhere

and who now need not to go back to their old lives, communities and ways

but to go to a place of nourishment where they can begin to imagine and create new, healthier lives with goodness at the core

it has a spa/watsu/hottub/sweatlodge

where people can be naked outdoors if they want

that zoe could lead on; this is her dream, and she has the competence to make it a glistening reality

and it's run by a progressive, sustainable, just and growable business/ownership/finance model

and it is a community

of people who live very close, slightly close, not very close, and not at all close

who share in each others lives

for a long, long time.

it is a place for children and old people and everyone in between

for permanent, semi permanent and visiting people

it is a place to live out gold day by day

this is my dream.

Lammas

2009-08-17T01:04:00.000-07:00

Lammas says it's the 'first planned eco-village in the UK'

slight reservations about posting this because it's so hippyish. I think my dream is for a place that's a bit more mainstream. But it's interesting what they're doing and as I understand it, they're changing the local planning laws in Pembrokeshire in order to be able to.

I'd love something even better

2009-08-15T04:23:00.000-07:00

Something where earth / nature, spirit, women, the body, the heart and the community are valued as equal to, not subordinates of, science, god, man, the head, rationality and the individual.

Something where power, ownership and resources are more equally and decentrally distributed, while keeping the leftwing idea of equality of opportunity and the rightwing idea that hard work and merit should have the opportunity to excel.

Something that works within nature's constraints, the way Indian improvisation works within the constraints of the raga.

humm.

I love capitalism

2009-08-15T04:19:00.000-07:00

I love the last 500 years of capitalist development. Thanks to it, I have a washing machine, modern dentistry, trial by jury, anesthetic, the opportunity to be more than my husband's housekeeper and PA, a tiny tiny likelihood of dying in childbirth, a very great likelihood that any children i bear will live long and prosper, sort of, state monopoly on the use of violence (pretty much), central heating, gortex, safe mountaineering equipment, an excellent bicycle and fruit in winter.

Capitalism, I Thank You.

And now, I think it is time for something even better.

Land clearances

2009-08-13T14:35:00.000-07:00

Reading a history of collective joy, I realise that my projects meet at root. The forces that drove us away from contact with the land also drove us away from play. All the things I instinctively hunger for are things that were part of normal life before the advent of contemporary capitalism as the dominant social and economic order.

Christianity was the first attack on wild and free community revelleries, singing, dancing, play and games. Capitalism was the second:

“The explanation offered by Max Weber in the late nineteenth century and richly expanded on by the historians E.P. Thompson and Christopher Hill in the late twentieth is that the repression of festivities was, in a sense, a by-product of the emergence of capitalism. The middle classes had to learn to calculate, save, and 'defer gratification'; the lower classes had to be transformed into a disciplined, factory-ready, working class – meaning far fewer holidays and the new necessity of showing up for work sober and on time, six days a week. Peasants had worked hard too, of course, but in seasonally determined bursts; the new industrialism required ceaseless labour, all year round.” p100

The same capitalism that drove the laughter from the streets also drove the people from the land.

History tells us that in the process of industrial development, people move from rural areas to cities to find work. It makes it sound like it's voluntary. In my case, it was. I moved from Suffolk to London, via University and a bit of travelling, because work and life here is much more interesting.

But historically, the process was driven by the sword, according to McIntosh. Violence drove crofters from the land. Because, he says, we were too happy to work hard for industrial owners if we all had our own plot.

Some revealing quotes in Soil and Soul, p94:

Quote from 1815, Patrick Sellar, a lawyer:

"Lord and Lady Stafford were pleased humanely, to order a new arrangement of this Country. That the interior should be possessed by Cheviot [sheep] Shepherds and the people brought down to the coast and placed there in lots under the size of three arable acres, sufficient for the maintenance of an industrious family, but pinched enough to cause them turn their attention to the fishing [i.e. waged labour]. I presume to say that the proprietors humanely ordered this arrangement, because it surely was a most benevolent action, to put these barbarous hordes into a position where they could better associate together, apply to industry, educate their children, and advance in civilisation."

1912, Kenya - Lord Delamere:
"If... every native is to be a landholder of a sufficient area on which to establish himself, then the question of obtaining a satisfactory labour supply will never be settled."

1960, J.L. Sadie in the Economic Journal:
"Economic development of an underdeveloped people by themselves is not compatible with the maintenance of thier traditional customs and mores. A break with the latter is prerequsite to economic progress. What is needed is a revolution in the totality of social, cultural and religious institutions and habits, and thus in their psychological attitude, their philosophy and way of life. What is, therefore, required amounts in reality to social disorganisation. Unhappiness and discontentment in the sense of wanting more than is obtainable at any moment is to be generated. The suffering and dislocation that may be caused in the process may be objectionable, but it appears to be the price that has to be paid for economic development: the condition of economic progress."

The Blended Lifestyle

If not capitalism, then what?

Allotments

Can the UK feed itself on ecological agriculture?

Open Hardware Technology

Beth Tilston is my new hero

Beth TilstonGrrrrrrr

True for me some days

Joanna Macy workshop 3 April

Natural Rhythms

The Project

The Great Reskilling

The winter quiescence

Quiescence

The Coming Insurrection

I've got a goat!!!

Plant where you stand

Passion

BBC: How to lead a simple life

Land, productivity and the blended lifestyle

Become Uncivilised

Lambing!

Would you build your own house?

What is beautiful about Capitalism

Post-capitalism

Post-Capitalist life

Are we wealthy?

Would you live underground?

"Growth is essential"

Mellowcroft

Seasonal Rhythms

The Pilsdon Community

Three More Goats Cheeses

Tribe

Let's get together :)

In search of a word

Simplicity is Bollocks

English land maths

This Green and Pleasant Land

Agricultural subsidies

How to make Halloumi (and ricotta on the side)

Knowledge work and growing get married

The secret to a good soup

Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Festival

R4 programme on Canon Frome Court

TV programme about self-sufficiency looking for couples

Adam McIntosh's Treehouse

Cool shower

The Obamas' new veg garden: former White House lawn

Rob Hopkins TED Talk

Late November Veg

We drink meadows

Oranges, Avocados, Pecans...

"Why I'm starting a woodland community"

The blended block

William Morris

Tom Hodgkinson

John Seymour

Yeats

350

House buying, 2009 vs 1973

The Future of Farming

Oh My Green Soapbox

The Blended City

C4 Landshare website

Care Farming

Research: The Work Front

The Research: People Like Me

Call for Research

Not clucky, just nesting

The Natural Beekeeping Trust

Organic Farm School - short courses from the Soil Association

92% of people think self sufficiency is important now

My Grandfather's diaries

Farmer Suicide Rates

Clear Village

In praise of yurts

Fuck it - the ultimate spiritual path

Knowledge work and farming

My first Goatmilking

Beth Tilston
Grrrrrrr