In this video, the second in a series of watching videos about starting a homestead, we'll watch "The Nomadic Movement's" video - How We Built a 3 Acre Farm from Scratch
Disclaimer! This video features some sarcasm and poking fun! Don't take the irreverent tone too seriously!
Interest in homesteading channels has exploded since the beginning of of 2020 and this is helping subsidize many projects, which is a good thing. This also means that millions of people are becoming exposed to gardening, land regeneration, homesteading and off-the-grid living for the first time through these videos and that they are setting a precedent.
We deeply care about the land design process and have experience in what it is to start up a project and work with land. We teach and consult the permaculture, forest garden and community design process in our region. And we felt a calling to start talking about some common mistakes and misunderstandings as we develop and prepare our own content for helping people begin their own eco-projects.
When a certain style of video becomes predominant, a style we are reviewing here, people make a psychological mistake that what these videos present is the norm, they may take the most-viewed videos as models to follow. The case is that many of the most-viewed videos are actually simply first-tries and experiments by novices, who unfortunately portray the beginning of a homesteading project as a series of acquisitions (solar panels, chicken coop, work shed, rain catchment, etc) rather than a complex cyclical process of developing an eco-centered culture and lifestyle that is appropriately weaved in to the local ecology with small and slow solutions.
Our observations have nothing to do with the homesteaders themselves as people but simply addresses the editing style of how homesteads are presented and the first-year anxiety to set up quickly seen in almost every homesteading start-up. The particular videos we choose have nothing against the content creators personally but are simply chosen because they are examples we stumble upon of a wider pattern of us city-folk deciding to get back to nature.
Homesteading is so much more than collecting the tools for energy, shelter and food. It is a change of consciousness, a rewilding process and opportunity to begin mature earth-centered ways of living on this planet.
It is about changing in to a lifestyle of cycles where we gradually figure out an ecosystem rather than just getting industrial civilization to quickly push us to an end point of “self-sufficiency” that brings its resource-demanding standards of living along with it.
The editing style also comes in. Many videos present their project as a to-do list: “we got this, then made this, then did this, then got this.” The editing style promotes materialism without us realizing it. Showing people a list of aqcuisitions and DIYs completed is a safe way to explain a project, but isn’t very nutritious as a story or as a way of discovering new cultures that learn how to live in symbiosis with the Earth and one another. This editing style does not do much to show how a project can be designed as organism where each element is related to the others and the local ecosystem nor does it convey the journeys of mental health and personal transformation that ultimately come with the territory of getting in to a lifestyle closer to nature.
Eco-centered living is not just about survival through growing your own food and acquiring renewable energy sources, it is about healing generations of accumulated traumas and returning to interdependent and loving relationships with the more-than-human world, Mother Earth and one another.
We are hoping to offer and create content that goes through the design process holistically, shows examples of projects that seek to develop at the pace and rhythm of nature, slowly but surely weaving the people, the technologies and the plants, animals, fungi and microbes in to true cultural, agricultural and wild ecologies. We hope to promote a project-style that treats land as a conscious and living being to get to know and cooperate with in symbiosis, rather than a blank slate to quickly mould and accumulate stuff on. This process means that we will change and grow, we will step out of our comfort zones in some cases, learn to live with less, but also in many cases learn to live with more (more love, more joy, more creativity, more possibility) and receive gifts we didn’t know were possible.
In sum, don't take any of this too seriously, we just want to be able to start conversations about the homesteading process and approach these projects with a sense of humour!
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