Homesteading at The End of The World? Not a Chance.
What it would even look like.
I’ve been watching homesteading videos on YouTube.
It’s been a strange experience.
Many of the homesteaders there love to walk you through their spacious basements filled with mason jars they bought from stores and filled with goods they grew using modern farming equipment. They post videos chronicling the construction of their root cellars, which they built with power tools and heavy machinery. They bring all their friends to help, or they even hire a crew. It’s fun to watch, and there’s nothing necessarily wrong about it, but…
There’s a certain notion circulating that somehow homesteading offers a sustainable future in the collapse of global industrial civilization, maybe even some degree of insulation from oncoming global famines, or at least food shortages. In hopes of liberating myself from that delusion, I’ve been reading into what homesteading looked like in the 19th century, starting with various blogs by history buffs and then working my way through books like Everyday …