For the past several years, I’ve argued that The Future is Rural, and that the hyper-urbanized world of today is not remotely sustainable and never can be. This contrary-to-popular-beliefs view surmises that as the drunken fossil hydrocarbon party comes to a close, a different set of living arrangements will evolve that feature a more modest human existence. If you take as a given the potential of renewable energy to replace fossil fuels, and for tech innovation along the lines of lab meat and synthetic airplane fuel to keep modernity humming, then what I am going to say will make no sense. However, I’m not going to repeat arguments for the reversal-of-urbanization thesis here, so please take a look at previous work (linked above) if you aren’t with me so far. Or better yet, cozy up on a couch and read a book by Chris Smaje, who writes about this sort of stuff with an English accent and unnecessary uses of the letter “u”.
In sketching out what this future might look like we can use history as a guide. For perfectly comprehensible reasons, villages and small towns have persisted through the rise and fall of hundreds of empires. Places that may function as quaint tourist destinations nowadays, are testaments to when the inhabitants garnered their means of subsistence from local ecosystems. The fall of Rome wasn’t all that consequential to the lives of folks who inhabited villages in rural England or thousands of other countryside locales. I want to pause for a moment and be very clear: I said history is a guide, but I am not proposing that we aim to replicate the past. I don’t believe in some Renaissance Faire utopia and am keen to consider what knowledge and rights gained over the past 200 years might persist that can help us thrive in sustainably scaled villages and towns.
Despite the fact that today’s globalized, city-centric arrangement consumes so much energy and matter that its days are limited, the mainstream media, halls of government, and boardrooms of business continue to promote the wishful thinking of a techno-urban dreamland. I have been irked by the pressures to keep investing in current modes of living when an alternative vision is desperately warranted. I feel bombarded by articles on the U.S. housing crisis, which inevitably display suburban tract homes sprawling across the landscape or promote skyscraper apartments instead. I look at these patterns on the landscape and think, “What an utter waste.” We are doubling down on a way of life that has no possible good future. And while insurers may be balking, no development policy is in place to arrest construction where, in only 20 to 30 years, severe challenges from climate shifts may lead to homes becoming stranded assets. County-level climate models projecting wet bulb temperatures, persistent drought, overwhelming fires, plummeting crop yields, rising sea levels, and cumulative economic damage do exist but are generally ignored. Maybe, unlike prominent thought-leaders, developers, and buyers of these homes, you get it.
So beyond taking seriously the need to build housing where water and climate are not so limiting to human life, if big modern cities (including suburban sprawl) are themselves a problem, then we can’t just climigrate to decent areas and call it good. We have to change how we live when we get there. With much reluctance, and approaching this slowly like releasing an animal caught in a snare and not wanting to get bitten, I’m going to explain what I mean by that.
Noticing Peasants
As an active research biologist between 1992 to 2004, I spent a lot of time in places that are very different from the United States. I lived for days, weeks, and months at a time in conditions that would be considered primitive and potentially illegal in the U.S. I’m not talking about trekking alone into the wilds of Alaska; I’m referring to living among other people as inhabitants of a particular ecosystem. I saw in Mexico, Bolivia, Madagascar, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, and other places, people living as they have throughout much of history, at least of the agrarian period. Their dwellings were simple, constructed of local materials, and people made their livelihood at or near home. They didn’t appear unhealthy or unhappy with this situation. Sure their homes were small, but they lived in some of the most stunningly beautiful places in the world, and I doubt they had a giant mortgage. I watched them roam around the landscape, foraging, moving livestock, heading out to cultivate fields, or paddling to fishing grounds. No formal bosses and paychecks. Autonomy with the responsibility to feed and house yourself and provide for your family and community. Basically how humans lived for much of the Holocene.
Traditional rural houses in Ciechanowiec, Podlaskie Voivodeship, Poland. Image by Patryk Michalski, c/o Adobe Stock.
We might call such people peasants, and in their minds there is no separation between them and nature. Nature is not romanticized. It is to be understood, worked with, a little feared, treated with respect, and appreciated with awe. A way of life and culture without separation of people from nature is needed if humans want to stick around for the long run. I agree with Wendell Berry and consider Ray Kurzweil a nice, but totally delusional, man.
Now some of you reading this, who have children, may be quietly whispering to them “Don’t look at the man coming our way who’s talking to himself; just keep walking.” I get it, I get it. I’m one of you. Unfortunately, I grew up in the deprived habitat of suburban California. Cupertino in fact, home of Apple computers. I played tag football on fields of fescue mowed for soccer and laden with doggie doo doo (nobody picked that stuff up back then), biked on concrete sidewalks and asphalt boulevards to play at shopping malls, and swam in above-ground pools lined with plastic. I spent hours upon hours training to be good at baseball and wrestling. I learned to solve a Rubik’s Cube, traded baseball cards, excelled at both ping pong and Pong, and built epic Star Wars replicas out of Legos. But not once did anyone think to teach me how to do anything useful to care for myself through provisioning from the environment, or to reciprocate by caring for the environment in turn (recycling newspapers doesn’t count). Nature was something we visited in a park in the mountains, cared for by rangers in snazzy green uniforms. The unspoken assumption was that I would get a job and earn money to pay for food and housing, all of which would be manufactured by machines and transported to me. I did go to a ranch camp near Santa Rosa during a few summers and learned to ride horses, but this was all for show (I “earned” a participation ribbon.). Looking back now, knowing what I know, it might have been better had I been raised in the hills of Romania, including the unpleasant bit of living under dictatorship
If a privileged boy-next-door like me, raised in glorious 1980s America and living the California Dream, can develop fondness towards Romanian peasanthood, then maybe you can too. Consider how many things have happened over the past 10 years that you never thought could happen. How many things you felt were solid turned out not to be? It’s downright unnerving. Times are, like, totally weird. We are living in Crazy Town. Go ahead and gird yourself for what is to follow, but if you were a latchkey kid like me, you probably have the fortitude to face the truth.
Cost of the “Normal”
Okay back to housing. I’m going to talk about the U.S., but the ideas likely apply to most industrialized nations. Not in the details but in the kind of infrastructure I am critiquing and proposing we replace. I’m going to use round numbers in the following, because the details are not critical. Pay attention to the big picture.
In early 2025, the U.S. human population is about 340 million. The housing stock is 150 million, so that on average there are 2.3 people per home. Home size is large, with newly constructed homes averaging 2,600 square feet.
New homes sell on average for $665,000, which works out to $250 per square foot. This enormous sum, allocated among 2.3 people, is around $290,000 per person. It’s a lot of money, and, this is key, each of these residences is tied to an infrastructure that locks it into industrial-scale flows of energy and materials that are paid for by wage earners.
Now I’m going to bring up something that is almost never discussed in the context of housing, let alone road building, career choices, or the future of college football, but is absolutely critical to all of these and much more: planetary boundaries. To understand planetary boundaries, follow this thought experiment:
Imagine you are living on the International Space Station. The station has myriad mechanical systems to keep you alive. There are systems to manage water, human waste, food, air circulation, ambient temperature, etc. The standard number of occupants in the station is seven. Because it is designed for seven, it won’t do well for long if it is overcrowded. But now you and ten other astronauts are living in the station for an extended period because nobody on Earth can figure out how to send up a rescue vessel. The systems are becoming stressed, the living conditions progressively more uncomfortable, until on day 22 a key function breaks. Specifically, the “human waste capture and reconditioning system” goes kaput and what ensues is a station in chaos as people first hold it in but then let it all go. In zero G, all your attention is given towards dodging the floating doogies, some more solid than others, all while your eyes become irritated and your vision fuzzy from aerosolized urine. Eventually everyone ends up swallowing and inhaling too much nasty stuff, and the tormented crew perishes from disgust and shock.
The planetary boundaries framework frames the Earth as a complex system that has limited capacities to carry out key functions, like producing oxygen and processing pollutants. Nine boundaries have been designated, and we have breached six of them. The breaches don’t mean we’re all going to perish next week, but we are living on borrowed time, and conditions will deteriorate to the point of mortal peril unless we reverse course and repair the damage.
The 2023 update to the Planetary boundaries. Licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. Credit: “Azote for Stockholm Resilience Centre, based on analysis in Richardson et al 2023”.
Why am I bringing this up in the context of housing? One of my pet peeves is the inability of the intelligentsia, those with high IQ and narrow specialization, to make real world-connections to something they may not be expert in but, by golly, should at least know a little bit about. I mean have you ever looked at a construction site? Or studied the parts of a house? What is everything made of anyway? Where does it come from? How are the materials mined, processed, transported, disposed of, or repaired? And the people living there day in and day out – where do they get their food, energy, water, and other material goods? Where do they work, and how do they travel there? I mean, sheesh, The Story of Stuff was released in 2007 and The Lorax in 1971. Did anyone pay attention? If you bother to ask these questions at the sophistication level of a typical 11-year-old, and then get a lesson in planetary boundaries at a similar level, you should quickly make the cognitive leap (actually only a tiny hop) to understand that the life-support systems of Earth are undermined by normal daily living in industrial modernity. Not to self-aggrandize, but I may do this better than most because of the time I spent doing connect-the-dot books as a kid, which was my peak artistic period.
The recent uptick in media on housing may be a reaction to the New York Times bestselling book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (which not only has dubious things to say about housing, but also is profoundly eco-illiterate on energy, transportation, and agriculture). Left-leaning critics of the book focus on social power relationships, pushing-back on suggestions in the book to loosen regulations, and variously arguing for better distribution of goods by breaking up monopolies, taxing the wealthy, curtailing oligarchic lobbying industries, and allowing communities in need to have more say in what is done on their behalf. I actually agree with these intentions; the rich and powerful need their wings clipped. But in virtually zero discussions and arguments over Abundance, which fiddle over the how not the what, has the broader, more critical topic of planetary boundaries been mentioned. Planetary boundaries are busting because we have too much biophysical power, which needs to be reduced by about an order of magnitude to have any hope of keeping Spaceship Earth conducive to Homo sapiens.
So let me be crystal clear why I am unimpressed with calls from the progressive left to improve housing availability, at least in the context of the current housing paradigm. More equitably providing people with typical affordable homes, in the context of contemporary living arrangements that are breaching planetary boundaries, is not helpful in the long run. Never mind allowing the market to build gaudy mansions for those who can afford them. Therefore, I propose a housing vision, focusing on the what instead of the how, that can meet human needs for flourishing and support planetary repair.
Modern Villages
I’ve seen my share of beautiful villages. Made of stone, old wood and cob, they really are visually striking, and it is comforting to walk through a place that you know was made by hand and could be maintained that way. But probably the most famous village nowadays isn’t even a real place, it’s a movie set. I’m speaking of Hobbiton, which in The Lord of the Rings saga is the village at the center of the Shire, where the halflings, including the reluctant hero Frodo Baggins, live.
Hobbiton has 44 homes. I’m going to use it as a muse. Please don’t take these details too seriously, as this is a thought experiment. But it should suffice, given the roughly order-of-magnitude difference between what I’m proposing and what “serious people” propose should be done about a housing crisis, while studiously ignoring all other crises.
In my Hobbiton, each of these 44 homes is 500 square feet and houses three people. The population of the village is thus 132. Conveniently, some other nutter has studied how much it would cost to build a Hobbit house, and based on his fanciful musings, I’m going with $200 per square foot – about 20% less than that of the average new home in the United States. I honestly think it could be a lot less, as, in my version, we use materials readily available in nature (and the crazed Hobbit fan uses faux natural methods to abide by various codes), but let’s drink some mead and stop arguing. Each modest Hobbit house would therefore cost $100,000, which, divided by three people per house, is about $33,000 per person.
Hobbit holes in the hillside of the Shire, part of the movie set for the Lord of The Rings and The Hobbit, located in Matama, New Zealand. Image by Gudellaphoto, c/o Adobe Stock.
If at this point you protest that I’m stuffing three people into 500 square feet, I suggest you open up Zillow.com and visit Manhattan, New York. For a few to several hundred thousand dollars, you can get an apartment about this size. If you are lucky, it has windows on two sides, one out to the street and one out to the wall of the adjacent apartment building.
But Hobbiton isn’t complete without the Shire that contains it. A luxury of the commons accompanies the modest private houses. And just like villagers of the past, our modern peasants will need a means of subsistence from the land. As a quasi-demigod here, I’m going to give them 1.5 acres each, which works out to about 200 acres in total (or around a quarter the size of Central Park in New York and a fifth of Golden Gate Park in San Francisco). Don’t picture 5-acre lots. No, Hobbiton is a compact village with the density advantages of shared infrastructure. But surrounding the village is land held in common with subsistence rights for each family. At $15,000 per acre, that is a $3 million additional investment on top of the $4.4 million it would take to build their homes. Now I’m just going to guesstimate that it would take another $1 million for various infrastructure enhancements, like common buildings, barns, silos, wells, a pottery shed, a smithery, etc., plus another $600,000 for livestock and equipment like carts, wagons, grain mills, a loom, woodworking and cultivation tools, etc. This rounds up to a $9 million project to make a peasant village and environs for 132 people, or $68,000 per person in total. It’s less than we spend a year to imprison someone, at least in my state.
If that last bit was jarring (“Is he really talking about basket weaving?”) I want to sell you on one advantage of the craft economy. And by crafts, I’m not talking about kitsch from Michaels, I mean basic goods from natural materials that are beautiful, safe, and made by you or other villagers, perhaps even those living in another village many furlongs away.
Here’s my pitch (segmented like a true marketing guru would offer) by gender:
Men, did you know that because of modern materials and manufacturing processes, your testicles are loaded with nano shards of plastics and associated toxic forever chemicals? Your baby batter is being battered! Possibly to the point of infertility! Wouldn’t it be better to live in a safe place with natural materials for clothing and other everyday items? And won’t you be ultra sexy dressed like you’re always on the set of Game of Thrones?
Women, see above but the plastics are in your brain.
How would modern villages compare with historic ones? The key similarity is that the people living in them will get their means of subsistence mainly from the Shire. They would be off-grid and out of the grocery store most of the time. But we have learned a lot in the past couple hundred years. Germ theory is great and allows villages to deal with human waste safely in low-tech ways. Residents of the Living Energy Farm in Virginia enjoy conveniences like refrigeration and washing machines, while using about 3% of the energy compared to typical households. Cooking need not be over an open flame, as the “appropriate technology” folks have engineered and trialed clean and efficient systems. And best of all, witches need not be burned, but instead are the center of a revived paganism that retains some odd Judeo-Christian tropes to comfort the recent converts.
Comparisons
Now I’ll make some comparisons between the conventional approach to housing and what I’m proposing. First, we should come up with a goal for the total number of new houses needed in the United States. It turns out nobody really knows. If you can get through this Brookings Institute article on the question without nodding off, congratulations – you’ve perfected your caffeine intake levels. Anyhow, the 2024 Harris campaign suggested 3 million new houses, so we’ll go with that.
The table below compares a “Conventional” approach with the Hobbiton approach. The number of units in Hobbiton is lower, as I’m advocating 3 people per household instead of 2.3 on average in the U.S. This plus the dramatically lower cost per unit (which includes building a Shire) makes the Hobbiton strategy 24% the cost of the Conventional. So if you care about affordability you have a winner.
| Approach | Cost per Unit | Number of Units | Total |
| Conventional | $665,000 | 3,000,000 | $1,995 B |
| Hobbiton/Shire | $205,000 | 2,300,000 | $472 B |
I can hear the “tsk-tsk” right now. “Oh, please,” the brains of many of you are internally monologuing, “We need houses where the jobs are, not in fly-over country.” It’s fine that your brain is doing that. It can’t help it, since you and I grew up in the same society and are steeped in all of its biases and assumptions. It makes total sense that you would be completely wrong.
With all due respect to rats, what we need is a pathway for people trapped in the rat race to step out of the rat cage. I’m going to bring up the ecological footprint, which, like the planetary boundaries framework, is a nerdish way to quantify that too many of us are consuming, polluting, and destroying too vigorously. In the U.S. the average person uses over five times the biological capacity of what might be considered sustainable. There is simply no feasible way to get that below one by living in conventional housing and having a typical job. However, if we replace “the goal is to have a job so you can pay for having your survival needs met by industrial equipment” with “the goal is to work directly for your survival needs using simple tools as part of nature,” then there’s the potential to have many successive human generations by fixing the planet we are trying so hard to break.
Perhaps a more familiar approach is to look at annual U.S. carbon dioxide emissions per capita, which roughly corresponds to the ecological footprint per capita. The table below compares emissions for the Conventional vs Hobbiton/Shire proposal. Of course we don’t have actual data for Hobbiton, but we do have models, including numbers for mostly rural nations and personal estimates of people living in agrarian ecovillages today. The Shire gives people a means to live decently at roughly a tenth the power and pollution levels of the Conventional arrangement.
| Approach | Annual metric tons of CO2 Emissions/Capita (2022) | Number of People | Total (Metric Tons) |
| Conventional | 14.2 | 15,300,000 | 217,260,000 |
| Hobbiton/Shire | 1.5 | 15,300,000 | 22,950,000 |
Who Would Want to Live in Modern Villages?
Perhaps by this point you are begrudgingly thinking, “By golly, this guy might be a snarky wiseass, but he might be right.” True, true, all of that. The big hang-up, especially if you are middle-aged and established with the exquisite comforts and pseudo-obligations of modernity, will be the question of “Who in their right mind would do this?”
The problem with using housing averages is that it doesn’t tell the story of distribution. And in the U.S. we have a GINI coefficient similar to the Gilded Age. This means many folks, as the late, great Chris Farley put it, “live in a van down by the river!” The number of unhoused people added up to around 750,000 in 2024. Substandard housing, meaning conditions of deterioration and danger to health, is estimated at 6.7 million households, which likely affects about 20 million people.
Some folks would prefer a lifestyle more in accordance with their values and don’t like what home developers tend to offer. Perhaps they live in a semi-legal tiny home (defined as under 500 sq ft), of which there are only around 10,000 in the U.S. But interestingly, a recent survey found a significant majority of Americans would consider living in a tiny home, especially young adults. Speaking of which, about one out of three young adults (or about 10 million people) live with their parents mainly to save costs.
Based on the numbers presented above, I can imagine around 30 million people are coping with a less-than-ideal housing situation right now and could be open to the idea of living in some version of the Shire. For around a trillion dollars we could pay for sustainable villages for all of them. Imagine a hundred thousand agrarian ecovillages across North America where 30 million people learn and then inspire future iterations. People in the Global Ecovillage Network would demonstrate how to subsist without the need for big machines and dirty fuels, learning from those steeped in folk school and small-scale agriculture traditions. They would have a small ecological footprint, live within planetary boundaries, and be engaged in the restoration work needed to secure biodiversity, which means their own security too, on their land. In the U.S., the Home Grown National Park movement is an incredible example of people becoming caretakers of other species we share this Earth with. Restor, which is active globally, shares other fantastic examples of the wonders people can do. Many of the Restor projects take place where people live and procure their food. And if you want an inspiring global view of villagers restoring landscapes, check out permaculturalist Andrew Millison’s YouTube channel.
The nation’s housing stock of 150 million units has a loss rate of around 0.9% per year, meaning around 1.4 million homes become uninhabitable and are demolished or significantly rebuilt. Instead of replacing urban dwellings we should shift investment towards regions with biological capacity, both now and in the likely future. This means rural towns, as advocated by Hillary Brown, and agrarian ecovillages, as I’m advocating.
Real Preparism
According to this spectacularly dystopian photo-essay in the New York Times Magazine, the ironically named SAFE company manages projects ranging from $10 million to over $100 million to build elite bunkers for high-net-worth individuals who are proficient at making money but may not recognize the rooting end of a rutabaga. I’d bet a lot of these guys are my age, saw Red Dawn as a teenager, and, flush with fresh testosterone, took it too seriously. So with all due respect to those with a shooting range in their bunker, this sort of “bespoke security solution” is stupid.
Survival bunker. Image by Pavel Lysenko, c/o Adobe Stock
An investment with a much greater ROI than a private security compound, and the highest and best use of your capital to ensure the security of your family, would be the development of one or more agrarian ecovillages as I’ve described here. If preparing for the collapse of complex civilization is your thing, and I’m agreeing with you on that, then having a self-provisioning community in place prior to the crap striking the rotary blades would be super-helpful. For under $10 million (or what I call a “Shire-unit” of wealth) you can fund one of those, and for $100 million, a network of eleven Shires. Tempting though it may be, you can’t be a dictator or cult leader of these, but you can be a valued friend of hundreds to thousands of skilled peasants who will have your back when the zombies or commies show up. It’s a freakin’ bargain!
On Becoming a Peasant
Through diligent research, author and journalist Brian Merchant rescued the term Luddite, carefully documenting how our unwarranted derogatory use of the word reveals an ignorance of history. Luddites, it turns out, were not against technology, per se. They were against technologies being deployed to diminish the quality of work and the social norms that kept their culture thriving, all while having their livelihoods undermined by cheap goods for export by cruel industrial capitalists who literally kidnapped orphans and forced them to work as indentured servants in their dangerous factories. Go Luddites! I’d like to accomplish a similar rescue for the deserving term “peasant,” but without all the scholarship and other hard work.
Let me tell you a story about one of my own experiences with peasants. Back in 2003 I was part of an incredible international research team establishing a set of one-hectare tree plots along the slope of the eastern Andes in Manu National Park, Peru. About 20 of us, including a dozen or so Peruvians from the University of Cusco, were camping at a site above treeline that included a concrete shelter at a place at the end of a gravel road called Mirador de Tres Cruces. One afternoon a gaggle of four kids showed up. The oldest was 12 and the youngest about 2, and they were some combination of siblings and cousins. After hitching a ride from the town of Paucartambo 43 km (27 mi) away, they walked 14 km (8.7 mi) from the main road to the camp. In a giant wool blanket slung over a shoulder they brought all their food, and pots to cook in from fires they made. They fetched water, made it potable, cleaned themselves, seemed to enjoy roaming across the alpine grassland, and slept together in the blanket like fillings in a taco. One night, we did our best to Americanize and de-peasant them by sitting them in front of a laptop screen and playing a bootleg DVD of the movie Shanghai Noon starring Jackie Chan and Owen Wilson. They freakin’ loved it (and I hope we didn’t damage their brains too much). We enjoyed their company and were sad to see them amble off one morning, but confident they would make it home by dark. At the time my kids were four and I couldn’t help but wonder if we were doing it all wrong.
I tell this story because it involves plucky, adorable kids who will melt your heart, and is an example of leisure, which is a decent counterpoint to the idea that subsistence farmers spend all their time in hard labor to barely survive. I’d like to dispel that myth, because, aside from periods of horrible drought and other disasters, it is easily falsified. Most creatures adapted to the environment are not in a state of perpetual starvation, but have time to play, rest, and procreate. Sure, the quality of peasanthood has been extremely variable in time and place, but rest assured, it need not be precarious. In the book Remembering Peasants by Patrick Joyce I learned that the potato (originating in South America) was seen by some as not good for the Irish as it made them lazy. Up until the potato famine, food was so easy to procure from the land it was difficult for the non-peasant class to get hired help. You can see what fun peasants can have by frustrating the hell out of non-peasants who rely on peasants to grow their food or work in their factories.
Modern examples of people growing their own full diet and measuring how much time it takes are difficult to find. The only one I am aware of is described in a pair of recent publications by Alik Pelman, a full time professor, and his collaborators. The first paper describes how a complete vegan diet produced solely from Pelman’s small farm provides adequate nutrition and lowers ecological footprint compared to commercial farms. The second paper describes his allocation of labor among the different crops, which averages 8.1 hours per month, or less than 100 hours per year.
While Pelman’s diet is unusual nowadays, as it is devoid of meat and ultra-processed convenience foods, it is nutritionally complete. What I want to point out is that for a U.S. household the approximate median cost per year in food purchases is around $8,000. With an income of $20 per hour (approximate median wage after taxes), this represents 400 hours of labor to support the food needs of 2.3 people. So, Pelman works about 100 hours for his food and an American laborer works about 175 hours for theirs.
Of course these are not apples-to-apples diets, but overall I contend that:
- The idea one has to put in extraordinary effort to grow one’s food is false.
- In the modern world we tend to work just as many hours for our food as a peasant does.
- Food grown the peasant way is much healthier than industrial food and not environmentally atrocious.
- People spend around 5 hours per day on their phones, so maybe, just maybe, some of us can find some spare time to devote to staying alive.
Look, I didn’t just fall off the back of a turnip truck. (It was an Amazon truck, which are much more ubiquitous.) What I am advocating is not for everybody; I’m just saying many people are interested in having a more sustainable and secure means of procuring basic necessities. And I would argue the whole of society will need to sort out what this means eventually. So even if this is not your thing, please support those willing to pioneer it.
A Japanese farmer in rural Niigata Prefecture, Japan. Image by Lowpower, c/o Adobe Stock
In Japan, a lifestyle has developed called Half Farmer/Half X, where you dedicate half your time to subsistence agriculture for your family, and the other half to something else that presumably pays a modest wage. This is what I do! I split my time between subsistence farming (as part of the Confluence Farming Club) and a paid gig as a tennis instructor. Given the internet and the normalization during Covid for people to work from home, life could be pretty sweet in the Shire if you are an online therapist, consulting engineer, or writer, for example.
Something the Luddites fought so hard to keep, but eventually lost, was cottage industry. Factory work tends to suck, and people resisted it fiercely. Mass over-production became such a problem that marketing was invented to compel us to buy, buy, buy. Now many of us pay for off-site storage for all our extraneous crap, and the mass of all human made stuff outweighs biomass. Terrifying. So other jobs in the Shire would be in cottage industries, which would produce almost anything else a household might need. Forget the Internet of Things and having Alexa auto-order your toilet paper. I’m envisioning a life absent a surplus of junk, but with enough. And it would be beautiful. Can you imagine almost everything in your home being made by a skilled artisan?
Life among peasant artisans would have its ups and downs. (And if it hasn’t happened already, here is where I will now be criticized as a hopeless romantic, ironically by those with an inordinate fondness for electronic equipment). There would be days or weeks that wear you out. Imagine it is lambing season and a mom drops twins who are struggling to nurse. You check their gums, see they are red, and the ewe is snotty. Probably a cold. So you and your partner get up every 5 hours to milk the ewe and bottle feed the babies. It goes on like this for a couple of days. But consider the benefits too. You got up at 1 am and gazed at the brilliant stars on a moonless night. You held and cared for a beautiful baby creature. Together, you and your partner cooperated to secure your livelihood in a memorable way. Back at 6 am with the sunrise, and to your delight you find their bellies round and full of milk. There is no rush to get dressed for work and drive anywhere, but plenty to do around the farm. You and your partner are fatigued, but taking a nap on a warm spring day makes everything okay again.
What’s in the Way?
What gets in the way of us doing this? A lot, and in different ways. Our own mythologies and consensus of what is normal give us pause. Daily news reports stock indices, and we are aware our retirement account is tied to these, but we don’t have daily reports on the carbon dioxide index at the Mauna Loa Observatory, or ponder the connection. The Progress Myth stands in the way, including the soothings of ecomodernists that perpetuate our general inclination to hear bad news and think, “They’ll think of something.” Who the “they” are that will think of something is unclear, but my sense is folks are under the impression that smart and capable people “out there” are innovating miraculously. Unless you think AI will quickly sort out the mess, this is not being felt with as much confidence in 2025 as it was in 1995. Also, “they” are probably having their funding cut or getting laid off in 2025.
I get excited about a Hobbiton future only to realize that building an eco-Shire is illegal. Land-use regulations won’t allow a parcel zoned for Exclusive Farm Use to include people actually living on a farm. Building codes won’t permit a dwelling that doesn’t have a heating system for every room, or a power outlet spaced regularly along each wall. Composting of human waste is verboten. If “they” are going to help, it may mean permitting regulatory “variances.”
Then we come to the very practical issues of getting it all done. Imagine the home-building industrial complex doesn’t fight tooth and nail against the Hobbiton vision, but instead finds it has no skilled workforce to carry it out. The same is true of the potential inhabitants. Few know how to farm, let alone make shoes out of sheepskin. Sadly, they grew up in Cupertino, not Paucartambo.
For each of these impediments people are pushing against them and building capacity. Gardening is one of the biggest hobbies in America, and 4-H Clubs teach kids practical skills. Ecosystem Restoration Communities demonstrate how to reintegrate humans into a thriving landscape. In Wales the One Planet Development Act has allowed large farms to be inhabited by groups of people wanting to make a livelihood much as described here. Ecovillages around the world have experimented with living off grid, building with non-commercial, local materials, and finding joy with a connection to nature and much less consumption in general.
If you’ve read this far I want to thank you for not looking away. Most people I know, perhaps for short-term mental health protection, only give a glance to our predicament and then get back to whatever else distracts and provides comfort. Something about human nature makes it difficult to own up to painful truths. I’ve been told over the past 20 years that sometimes what I say or write has led people to change the course of their life (and I certainly have been impacted similarly). By putting this idea out there – that we can respond wisely to the polycrisis by building ecologically savvy agrarian villages – I hope to capture the imagination and fruitful energy of some of you. Though my family’s and community’s journey is incomplete, I know that working towards this is incredibly rewarding and constitutes a joyful and meaningful celebration of wondrous life.
Teaser image credit: Feature Image: (Left) House from Hobbiton movie set, created for filming the Lord of the Rings and “Hobbit” movies – Matamata, New Zealand. Image by SASITHORN, c/o Adobe Stock. (Right) “Luxury” home. Image by aberenyi, c/o Adobe Stock.