WHY

We're doing it here.

There's two ways the conversation can go when I talk to people about Cripples' Spinney.  They either ask me why we're doing what we're doing, or they ask me why we're doing it where we're doing it.  The first answer bleeds into the second.

People come to the homesteading movement in a lot of ways, from a lot of places.  For most of them, emotion is a big driver.  Feeling this way or that way about a specific topic motivates them to modify their own behavior, in order to feed or suppress those feelings.  That leads to a change in lifestyle, and a change in priorities.  Most of us eventually start seeking out people who have similar priorities, and it snowballs from there.

This isn't a story about catching feels and saving the planet.  You're welcome to do that, but my journey into this space has been more pragmatic than emotional.

Sometimes there's only one way to go.

If I'm part of the homesteading movement at all, it's because there only seems to be one sane direction to go in the real world, not because there's a hashtag I'm trying to cash in, on or a scene I want to break into.

I don't say that to shit on anybody who's actually getting their hands dirty out there, but I do think there's an important distinction to be made: documenting the process of changing your lifestyle and selling a lifestyle fantasy are not the same thing.  You will find no upbeat ukulele strumming or cheerful whistling here.  No public comments section.  No social media presence.  Entertaining you is not our goal.

Bellatores and laboratores, in their natural habitat.

Speaking of not entertaining you, let's talk about medieval European class distinctions.  Stay with me for a minute.  I'm going to grossly oversimplify this, so it won't take long.  Let me draw your attention to two groups: the fighters (bellatores), and the workers (laboratores).  The bellatores have evolved into defense contractors, politicians, the intelligence community, and the military.  (I'm in that group.)  The laboratores have evolved into the unemployed and the working class.  (Most of my family is in this group.)

Now let's talk about blowback.  The word has been around a while and it means a few different things. The definition has widened since the 1950's to become a synonym for unintended consequences, especially the kind caused by the actions of modern bellatores.

No, not that kind of blowback.

Blowback became a household term starting in the 1990's, in part because there was just so much of it popping off. It also got a big boost from the explosion of media outlets following the birth of the internet, who turned blowback into a meme.

Over the 70 years that blowback has been evolving, two related trends have been converging:  Some bellatores have started to consider the consequences of their actions in areas that would normally be considered "purely civilian".  At the same time, laboratores have been encouraged to ape many of the attitudes, postures, and beliefs that have been traditionally displayed by the military.

This class convergence has been helped along by two things: First, the spread of cheap military equipment and military fashion trends among civilians.  Second, the spread of cheap communications devices and computer networks.

"...ARPANET came out of our frustration that there were only a limited number of large, powerful research computers in the country, and that many research investigators, who should have access to them, were geographically separated from them." ~Charles M. Herzfeld

"Reevaluation" is where you need to be.

Computer networks were originally intended to help the smartest bellatores share information with each other so they could fight more effectively.  The internet still does that, but it also helps people like Zuckerberg and Bezos guide labaratores into digital serfdom, and it lets the military recruit teens through video games.  How's that for blowback?

The upshot of this medieval / modern mashup is that civilians now have access to unclassified intelligence reports, created by spooks and contractors.  These contain complex analyses of world events and likely trends, as interpreted by experts across a huge range of disciplines.  More importantly, some people are actually reading them.

So what the fuck does any of this have to do with why my family is carting sixty-year old garbage out of the woods, learning how to plant fruit trees, and building sheds badly?  Let me explain.  One day back in 2012, as I was pissing my Cheeto-fingered life away in the backwaters of the internet, I stumbled over a strange and wondrous PDF file.  Within it, I found this:

"Demand for food, water, and energy will grow by approximately 35, 40, and 50 percent respectively owing to an increase in the global population and the consumption patterns of an expanding middle class. Climate change will worsen the outlook for the availability of these critical resources. Climate change analysis suggests that the severity of existing weather patterns will intensify, with wet areas getting wetter and dry and arid areas becoming more so. Much of the decline in precipitation will occur in the Middle East and northern Africa as well as western Central Asia, southern Europe, southern Africa, and the US Southwest. 

We are not necessarily headed into a world of scarcities, but policymakers and their private sector partners will need to be proactive to avoid such a future. Many countries probably won’t have the wherewithal to avoid food and water shortages without massive help from outside. Tackling problems pertaining to one commodity won’t be possible without affecting supply and demand for the others." ~Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds

I sleep like this too, but in slow motion.

This document describes itself as "...the fifth installment in the National Intelligence Council’s series aimed at providing a framework for thinking about the future."   It was perplexing.  If this was genuinely the way that the federal government was thinking about the future, why weren't they encouraging civilians to prepare for it?  Or avoid it?

Reading Alternative Worlds was sort of like watching a dog try to run in her sleep, but then realizing that what I had mistaken for a dog was actually a political system.  Soldiers and spooks are scrambling to address the impacts of climate change, but our elected officials  are too busy glad-handing and pussy-grabbing to do anything serious about the causes.

It occurred to me that I was looking at a preview of the assumptions that our bellatores might start acting on over the next few decades, if politicians had the sense to listen to their own advisers.  But maybe they wouldn't have any sense.  Either way, it was 160 pages of blowback waiting to happen.

A portrait of the author as a hand-basket.

 I read through it, and then I read the previous four installments.  I eventually decided that if "policymakers and their private sector partners" would "need to be proactive to avoid such a future" then so would I.  But why not just kick back, crank up the AC, and keep eating my Cheetos?

The sad irony was that the intelligence product I'd stumbled across wasn't ever intended to communicate directly with laboratores and encourage them to avoid behaviors that would cause blowback.  Rather, it was created to help the bellatores manage both the blowback and the increasingly panick-stricken laboratores.

Let's be honest about the America we've built:  Our social, political, and economic structures aren't designed to reward selfless service, even if the alternative is mass extinction.  Faced with a genuine existential crisis, the response from our captive regulatory system has been to encourage increasingly greasy forms of disaster capitalism.  The most common response on the part of civilians is to withdraw into virtual worlds while the too-complex real world unravels.  It's already happening.

Food. Water. Energy.

I tried to imagine an alliance of corporations and politicians planning ahead with my children's best interests at heart while the world around them was rapidly going to hell in a hand-basket.  When my laughter finally subsided, it was clear we'd have to start taking an interest.

We had our work cut out for us if we wanted to be in a position to reduce and withstand some of the blowback that was headed our way. At least we had a list of things to focus on:  Food, Water, and Energy.  The trouble was, at the time, we were completely dependent on corporations and governments to deliver all three.

So the answer to the first why is chance.  I was randomly in the right place at the right time to read something that I was able to understand, prepared to accept, and willing to act on.  This is where the second why comes in.

One of the many, many maps I used.

So...why here? Luck.  (But not blind luck)  We knew that living in a trailer park in tornado alley was not the path toward any future we were interested in.  I sorted out a $100K mortgage and went looking for property we could afford that met some basic criteria.

The first thing we needed was a medical marijuana state, and I wanted at least 20 acres.  At the time, that narrowed things down pretty fast.  A state with a lot of fresh water.  So, somewhere in the Great Lakes Basin.  Only Michigan had property in our price range.

I started cruising the websites of Michigan state agencies, looking for maps.  We wanted a house with a well, and we didn't want land that had been fracked.  That cut out about half of the listings.  Lots of people were already trying to escape that blowback.  We didn't want land that had anything valuable under it, other than water. That cut the list way down.

Now we spend the winter getting plowed.

We wanted a climate where we could grow food and fuelwood without having to invest heavily in technology, so it needed to be USDA zone 4 at a minimum.  Snip.  We wanted to be near a hospital, but not in a city.  Snip, snip.

We wanted to be on a fiber internet trunk.  Snip.  On the highest elevation lake.  Snip.

After about a year of learning how to ask the right questions and dicking around with a series of realtors who thought our criteria were several shades of crazy, we had a list of five properties.

We were completely burned out by the process.  It was exhausting. Eventually we just picked Cripples' Spinney at random from among the last five.

Four months later we packed everything and drove from Oklahoma to Michigan. We got to the house at 11pm during a blizzard and had to dig our way to the front door through three feet of snow.  That first night we slept on furniture that the sellers had abandoned.  The next day we bought a snowblower and started unpacking.