Urban Homesteading

Urban homesteading is all about doing for one's self the things we no longer have to do, but which are useful survival skills and activities. It's empowering to eat tomatoes in the winter that you grew in the summer. To need a quilt and be able to make one. To want a special bread for dinner and be able to make a loaf materialize out of a few raw ingredients. It's about not losing our grasp on the thin thread of survival that has run through the story of mankind since we were first making fires to keep warm and cook food.

You can laugh all you want at the inane image of June Cleaver holding out her delicious meat-loaf for her family to eat and say that the housewife is a damned creature that should fade with the past. You can say that she is outmoded, that she is worthless in this new age of equal rights and feminism. But that would be stupid. Housewives through the ages have kept very important knowledge and skills close to us. She has mended, dyed fabric, made remedies against illness, grown food, and reared her children with her own hands.

Any woman who thinks that doing these activities is somehow less important than the work a man does ought to also remember that men have historically done all these things too. In fact, it doesn't really matter what gender does them, the point is, someone has always needed to until recent history. Now we have Chinese factories and Mexican laborers to do it all for us. We have nannies and daycare, we have superstores and Heinz, we have Macy's and unfortunately for all of mankind: we also have Walmart to do for us what we all used to have to do for ourselves.

It's important that humans never forget how to grow their own food without the aid of gasoline, manufactured pesticides, and electricity. I am not against machines, power, or progress. I thoroughly appreciate my plumbing, electricity, my coffee maker, and my vehicles. But I also know that if deprived of all of these luxuries, I might have a chance of surviving. That's potent.

"Urban" homesteading simply refers to the fact that homesteading doesn't have to be about being a farmer, or cultivating wild land, or conquering some western frontier. Homesteading can be practiced by anyone, anywhere. People can raise chickens in Manhattan (true fact), they can buy ripe berries from the closest farms and make jam in their own kitchens whether they are in the suburbs, cities, or the country. They can knit sweaters, they can make quilts, they can grow herbs and preserve them. Everyone can carry the torch of artful survival. Everyone can be part of this great chain of knowledge that has carried humans into the twenty first century.