This argument, reasonable as it may seem at first glance, in fact contains an inherent flaw, even deception. The fact is that the developed nations are consuming essential industrial resources in such a way and at such rate that it is impossible for underdeveloped areas of the world to follow in their footsteps. When one-third of the world’s population consumes two-thirds of the world’s resources, and then in effect turns around and tells the others to do as they do, it is little short of a hoax.

Development is all too often a euphemism for exploitation, a new colonialism. The forces of development and modernization have pulled most people away from a sure subsistence and got them to chase after an illusion, only to fall flat on their faces, materially impoverished and psychologically disoriented. A majority are turned into slum dwellers — having left the land and their local economy to end up in the shadow of an urban dream that can never be realized.

Quoted from: Ancient Futures, Helena Norberg-Hodge, 2016 (first print 1991).

Read more (open access): Wiedmann, T., Lenzen, M., Keyßer, L.T. et al. Scientists’ warning on affluence. Nat Commun 11, 3107 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-020-16941-y

Read more:  Not So Simple. Notes from a Tech-Free Life, Mark Boyle. Plough Quarterly Magazine, July 2019.

Many dream of financial self-sufficiency, but only few are prepared to go as far as Lasse Nordlund. In the early 1990s, Nordlund began an experiment living as self-sufficiently as possible. Eventually, he was able to sustain himself and his family with a budget of mere 30 to 50 euros per year, living in a small town in North Karelia, located in Eastern Finland, growing and preparing everything else from scratch, all by himself.

Nordlund is exceptional due to the depth of his experiment. What is also exceptional are the swarm of comments on the 2008 Helsingin Sanomat article covering the self-sufficient practices of Nordlund and his family. In little over a week, the article gathered 451 comments. A civic debate on radical self-sufficiency larger than this is hard to come by. Nordlund saved these comments for later research. Our study based on this material was published in the Kulttuurintutkimus journal in 2017.

Image: Lasse Nordlund, by Marko Ulvila (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Our article delved into the comments, and we extracted what we may here call common sense. Common sense refers to our every-day perception of the world that is based on experience and practice. What makes common sense interesting is how things beyond our perception, such as the possibilities of politics, are assessed in comparison to how the world appears to us as we now see it. Regardless of whether we have any actual, direct access to most events, we are still very much eager to have our say on them.

Common sense often appears to us as our own private reasoning, although it is very much a common form of reasoning: our perception of the world is not formed in a vacuum, but rather, reasoning that appears to be private is in fact part of a larger, prevailing general understanding. Therefore, the material depicting common sense reveals various common forms of reasoning. The Nordlund case is interesting for how foreign his way of life is to our common sense. Commentators had difficulty accepting something that was so distant from their own world of experience and were suspicious of his lifestyle. People found it difficult to believe that someone could possibly live entirely outside our monetary economy and structured society.

Moral Valuations

In our article, we discussed how money has such a central role in people’s lives that it offers the easiest way to bridge understanding of things beyond our immediate world of experience. The possibility of living so radically outside the norm was typically a simple question of what the cost is and who pays for what. Money clearly provides the easiest way to understand unfamiliar things and relations between people—who owes what to whom. Considering that money is, in fact, based on agreement, these statements are rather astonishing—as though human life could not exist without monetary transactions.

Our research focused on how commentators expressed moral valuations of Nordlund’s lifestyle. Their reactions were generally between very positive and very negative. Only those who reacted very positively believed such a lifestyle was even possible to begin with. It was more common for people to be mildly or strongly suspicious of the truthfulness of his story.

Children and lifestyle choice

Here, we will present a part of the material that was not examined in the actual study. It still offers an interesting piece to analyze because it provides new insights into the discussion on self-sufficiency and how far from the actual topic we can derail once excited, but nonetheless, connect the discussion reaching way up to outer space all the way back to the North Karelian self-sufficient way of life.

Compared to present-day standards, Nordlund and his family live in relatively primitive conditions. Many commentators are particularly irate that the family children must make the same choice as their parents, which is, to live a relatively self-sufficient life. This was largely seen as an injustice to the children, who were thought to suffer and be brainwashed. However, not all agreed. Someone comments: “As for urban families, we could ask the same question.” The conversation moves on to discuss the extent of the parents’ responsibility to decide for their child and what is deemed normal. For many, a lifestyle choice that differs from the imagined standard is seen as something children are forced to. Meanwhile, an unspecified, average way of life is held normal and needs no explanations.

This is a good example of what we call common sense: a way of life that we sense in our immediate sphere of life, that we ourselves are living, is normal and natural. Everything else is perceived as something children should be protected from.

The ‘abnormality’ of self-sufficiency is both irritating and inspiring. Nordlund gives food for thought to consider our personal and the entire humanity’s changes of survival and its preconditions facing the challenges ahead. At the same time, the deviant nature of self-sufficiency is also irritating because it appears to challenge the morals of people. Although Nordlund never raises himself on a pedestal nor even encourages others to follow suit, readers feel they are being challenged. Perhaps, we could all take a moment to reflect where this resentment comes from.

Written by Olli Herranen & Tere Vadén. Translated from Finnish by Salli Hakola. A longer version of this text is on the website of Tampere University. Thanks to Hanna Kaisa Vainio.

Herranen, O. (2017). Yhteiskunta ylittää arkiymmärryksen. Aikalainen. Available at: https://aikalainen.uta.fi/2017/11/17/yhteiskunta-ylittaa-arkiymmarryksen/ [Accessed 31. Jan. 2020].

Herranen, O. & Vadén, T. (2017). Arkiymmärrys ja omavaraisuus. Havaintoja yhdestä omavaraistaloutta koskevasta keskustelusta. Kulttuurintutkimus, 34(2­–3), pp. 41–54.

Reader Goran Christiansson sends us a link to Living Energy Farm, a research and community project in Virginia, USA. Most notable is their use of “Daylight Drive” DC solar power without batteries for workshop tools — reminiscent of the ideas outlined in How to run the economy on the weather. Also of note is their choice for less efficient but more durable Nickel Iron batteries for lighting.

Below is an excerpt from the introduction page:

“The vision of Living Energy Farm (LEF) is envisioned to be a community that is food and energy self-sufficient. We are off-grid, and we are putting together the means to run our farm without fossil fuel. Our intent is for Living Energy Farm to operate on a modest, globally applicable, renewable energy budget. We have found that this global perspective differentiates us from most other projects working on sustainable technologies.”

All of LEF’s DC shop tools and most of our appliances run “daylight drive” straight from the solar electric (PV) panels. We run high-voltage industrial DC motors with no batteries, no inverters, no costly or fragile electronics whatsoever. This is a MUCH cheaper, simpler, and more durable way of utilizing solar energy.

“In starting Living Energy Farm, our plan was to pull together renewable energy technologies already in existence rather than “re-inventing the wheel.” We have found that we cannot buy a lot of what we need, and thus we are having to build some of the tools and machines we need. We live, day by day, off-grid and (mostly) without fossil fuel. We experience the benefits and limitations of our own ideas every day.”

“We have assembled a set of documents to explain how our unique, off-grid systems operate. We suggest you review “Longterm Integrated Village Energy (LIVE) — community energy systems that make centralized power grids unnecessary” before proceeding to the other documents. That will give you an overview of the design process at LEF.”

At Living Energy Farm, our conservationist design means we need very little stored electricity. We store electricity with nickel iron (NiFe) batteries, a very old, very durable battery technology. Nickel iron batteries tolerate tremedous swings of voltage input and discharge rates that would destroy any other kind of battery.

“We have been pleasantly surprised by how well our DC Microgrid has worked. We have found a much, much better way to live off-grid. The widespread adoption of the tools developed at LEF could widen access to energy services for people all over the world while radically decreasing our environmental footprint. We are trying to spread these tools far and wide, and looking for support in that work.”

Living Energy Farm. Overview of all technologies (pdf).

“No country in the world currently meets the basic needs of its citizens at a globally sustainable level of resource use. Our research, recently published in Nature Sustainability (and summarised in The Conversation) is the first to quantify the national resource use associated with achieving a good life for over 150 countries. It shows that meeting the basic needs of all people on the planet would result in humanity transgressing multiple environmental limits, based on current relationships between resource use and human well-being.”

“The purpose of this interactive website is to foster discussions about the meaning of a good life for all, and what it would mean for nations to thrive within planetary boundaries. Explore the challenge using the chart below, check out a World Map with our results, or select individual Countries to see their environmental and social performance relative to a ‘safe and just’ development space.”

More: A Good Life For All Within Planetary Boundaries, University of Leeds. Related: How Much Energy Do We Need?

“The simplest homes in town were built using cratchets — natural forks in trees — as support for the ridgepole of the roof. The walls are built up with “wattle” — small sticks for the lattice structure — and “daub” — a mortar of clay, earth and grasses. Instead of using the traditional English lime wash to protect the walls, the colonists took advantage of the plentiful wood in the America and created clapboard siding by cleaving wood into thin boards. For the thatch roofs, large bundles of water reed or wheat straw are woven with a giant needle by two people working in tandem (one outside and one inside). “It’s like a giant quilt made of grass,” explains Brault, “which makes a water-tight roof that essentially acts as a giant sponge. It absorbs water and laps it off.”

Watch the video. Picture: a wattle and daub wall in Germany.

Some people would rather have wings but we don’t, we have feet. We were born to walk. Scientists say that walking gave us our brain capacity, walking turned us into the human beings we are. Walking made it possible for us to have the desire to fly and to come up with ways to turn our dreams into reality.

Walking made us fly. We can go anywhere. Still the easier it becomes to move through this world, the more disconnected we seem to get from it. We have to land again. Get close to the things. Be part of the world. Walking teaches us where we are, who we are. A slow speed makes our brain work fast. Makes us see more. Be more. And best of all: walking makes time disappear.”

Read more: A Soft Armour by Monique Besten. Previously: Our Right to be Oustide.

Families living in traditional courtyard houses of Baghdad, without mechanical ventilation or heating, migrate by day and season for comfort. In September or October, they move around the courtyard to rooms facing south. In April or May they shift to the north-facing rooms. In summer there is a daily vertical migration, the afternoon siesta being spent at the lowest levels and the nighttime sleep traditionally being taken on the roof under the stars.

Picture: muhammadshnait91.tumblr.com

Such migrations mean that space is used with a freedom unusual in modern life and in the West. Recent correspondence from Mounjia Abdeltif-Benchaabane, a professor of architecture in Algiers, describes how rooms there have not traditionally been organized with regard to individual use or established purpose:

A living room becomes a sleeping room at night. Closets are full of mobile furnishings. In the morning everything is hung near windows to air out under the sun before being reused, perhaps in a different room. The kitchen is a multifunctional space. They cook on the floor even if they have modern tools.

A long-established Arab concern with privacy, in conjunction with the custom of migrating through the house, established the texture of some old cities like Baghdad. Since the roof is used for sleeping during nearly half of the year and the privacy of the family at night is fundamental, no house could look down upon its neighbor nor could one house look into the courtyard of another. The result was an effective building height control with advantages for solar access: no house could overshadow another, thus assuring wintertime light and heat to upper living spaces.

Quoted from “Ritual House: Drawing on Nature’s Rhythms for Architecture and Urban Design“, Ralph L. Knowles, 2006.

This strange and, to many, awe-inspiring sight has been experienced by thousands of people in small towns and large cities throughout the western United States. But who is he and what is he doing? Is he lost in the wrong century? Is he homeless? Is he on a mission?

The Mules (as he refers to himself and the animals collectively) have traveled for nearly three decades through 16 states. For the last ten years they have lived outdoors. Even though he may not talk much when one first meets him, if the time and place are right, Mule will share something that he feels we should all be thinking about.

Throughout their travels, the Mules have noticed an ever increasing urban sprawl. Open spaces where they once moved through freely, and sometimes spent the night in a secluded spot, were disappearing. More and more cars filled up the roadways, and the expanding urban infrastructure seemed to serve one purpose: accommodate more automobiles.

At the same time, space for other means of self- transportation, such as bicycling, horseback riding and simply walking, were shrinking. Those alternative means of self-travel have often been confined to designated “recreation” areas. Also, as the urban environment exploded, natural habitats have vanished, or been “preserved” in spaces a fraction of the size they once were.
Mule sums it all up: “The space needed by The Mules to travel this country freely in all four directions on the landscape is being taken over by the suburban model of automobile usage, exclusively, and leaving no space for alternative venues of moving and living. In our travels, we carry that awareness and bring it to others. We’re a working model for that awareness, one step at a time, all day, every day.””

Quoted from 3 mules, via LLoyd’s blog.

“November 2011 – January 2013 marks the 200th anniversary of the Luddite uprisings, in which artisan cloth workers smashed machines which were destroying their trades, undercutting wages and forcing them into unemployment and destitution. Today, the industrial system that the Luddites were rebelling against has led to climate change and huge losses of biodiversity, and its new technologies, such as information technology, genetic engineering and nanotechnology raise equally profound issues. Yet anyone who raises concern about the price and side-effects of new technologies is harshly condemned as a ‘luddite’, someone supposedly irrationally opposed to technology and progress.”

“In fact, the Luddites were not ‘luddites’ in that sense: the idea that they were opposed to all technology is a history written by the victors. In fact the Luddites opposed only technology ‘hurtful to Commonality’, ie. to the common good, rather than the narrow interests of the few. They destroyed some machines whilst leaving alone others in the same workshop. So being a luddite today means being a sceptic about the dogma of technology as progress, not about denying the real benefits of some technologies. It means insisting that the crucial decisions about which technologies are developed are made democratically, not just imposed by corporations and technocratic elites. And it means standing up for our own ideas of what progress really is.”

Help celebrate 200th anniversary of the Luddite uprising: Luddites at 200 website. See also: “Lessons of the Luddites“.

So you can have more contact with a lot more people, but the quality of your relationships with those people, especially the people who are your immediate neighbors, is diluted. You don’t rely on them as much. It really drastically undermines the community.

The Beachy Amish — that’s a sect within the Amish — they decided to adopt cars. Then most of the young people left the group because they got exposed to the rest of the society and — poof! — they’re gone.”

Read more: Despite horses and buggies, Amish aren’t necessarily ‘low-tech’.