Is self sufficiency sustainability?

[Up-the-Creek]

cmjust0,...I agree with you, but also it is just words that some wish to use to define their lifestyle. Is it really worth all the debate,..because nobody is going to win this one, after all it is just an opinion.

 

[Blackbird]

Ok, so we all have different reasons to be self sufficient and sustainable.
We all have different ways of doing this.
And I think we have come to the conclusion that many of us have varying opinions and meanings as to what this means.

I'm having deja vu. Must we revive an old thread so we can review this yet again?

 

[Blackbird]

Sorry, No BB, not you!

 

[Bubblingbrooks]

Ok, so we all have different reasons to be self sufficient and sustainable.
We all have different ways of doing this.
And I think we have come to the conclusion that many of us have varying opinions and meanings as to what this means.

I'm having deja vu. Must we revive an old thread so we can review this yet again?

Some of us are new to this forum. This is a good discussion for the newbies.

 

[patandchickens]

It's the only logical interpretation I can think to assign the phrase within the context of growing one's own food, cutting one's own firewood, canning one's own veggies, etc..

Yeah but that ain't what ANYONE ELSE BESIDES YOU is meaning by it.

You may indeed be surpassingly-more logical than anyone else here. Yay

But what if you listen to what people are actually SAYING, rather than getting hung up on nitpicking of vocabulary.

It might lead to a much more productive conversation than off-topic comments about 'ha, you didn't *make* that stove yourself did you'

I mean...if we open the door to the possibility of bartering and buying things we need...well, hey, most of us are already self sufficient.

Why treat it as a binary thing?

Are there not DEGREES of self-sufficiency (as we, not you, are using the term)????

A strawman is when you assign someone a position they haven't taken. If, however, the person has actually taken the position you're assigning...but won't admit it....it's not a strawman anymore.

Yes, that's right.

Nobody here has taken the position that they can expect to have ZERO reliance on other peoples' goods or services.

But don't call that self-sufficiency. It's not.

I'm sorry, but I wish you good luck in your endeavors to be the Terminology Police for the world, I do not think you are going to be all that successful. You might want to consider that, like it or not, sometimes people will use words in ways you find illogical, and it is more useful do discuss CONCEPTS than semantics.

(Don't get me started on horse people who write "lunging" or "lungeing" instead of "longeing", or "worming" vs "deworming" -- it isn't as though I don't have STRONG opinions about those things and many more -- but realistically I am not going to convince the majority of people out there to follow my own pet prejudices, however splendidly logical and correct my position may be <vbg>. So when someone says that they wormed their horse and then lunged it, I am not going to give repeated lectures on how it is stupid to intentionally infect your horse with parasites and then leap scarily towards it... I address what they *meant*, which is that they administered an antihelmithic and then exercised it on a single long rein going in a circle

Even though darnit that is a stupid way to put it

Pat

 

[Blackbird]

Aww! See Pat, Cmjust, I knew you two would get along!

You both have that completely annoying feisty competency that makes me want to stab myself repeatedly

 

[big brown horse]

First of all lets remember the original question:

Do you believe that by living a self sufficient lifestyle, you are living a more ecologically sustainable one?

Yes I do. We do what we can with what we have to live as self sufficiently as possible. Many of us (including myself) are doing this to be more ecologically sustainable.



By the way the title and sub title to this forum:

"Self Sufficient Forum: Living a more self sufficient and sustainable lifestyle"

Says it right at the top. It doesn't say "100% Self Sufficient Forum".

 

[Blackbird]

Excellent observation Sally!

 

[Buster]

The defense of Big Food. Well, there's an argument I truly enjoy having.

See, that's where you're wrong. I'm not defending big food -- I'm just saying that self-sufficiency doesn't necessarily mean sustainability. Since the obvious comparison to producing our own food is buying it from big food, well...that's the comparison I'm making.

See, that's where you're wrong. (Like how I turned that around? )

It is absolutely not the obvious comparison, unless that is the only kind of food production you know about outside of self-produced. If you want to make your point ("not necessarily sustainable"), a better example and most obvious would be a small to medium farm using sustainable practices.

Which is what I think you are trying to say when you speak of specialization.

So, you compare it instead to local farm on the order of Joel Salatin's Polyface Farm. If you did that, you would have a much better case in your "not necessarily".

Therefore, if I have a Polyface farm withing near driving distance that can raise beef more efficiently and sustainably than I can (I do) and I fail to take advantage of that just for the sake of self sufficiency, I'm failing in that particular area.

What I am saying is, I am ceding your point. There can be a point where self sufficiency can be less sustainable than relying on an outside input (Phelan Ranch Beef, in this case).

It is also the case if my neighbor is a mechanic (he is) but I insist on fixing my own car just to be self sufficient and take many more hours doing that than he would, when I could just trade him some eggs, chicken meat, and produce, which I much more efficient at producing than mechanic work. It is about opportunity cost. Cost in time that could be spent doing something more productive and thus more sustainable.

However, if I insist on taking my car to a specific mechanic 80 miles away in Oklahoma City, or buy my chicken via Tyson's factory farm system, or produce from California... well, then self sufficiency would have been much more sustainable.

Bartering and local economies would have been a much better tact for you to take to make your "not necessarily" point. Instead, you took the worst possible possibility (energy-intensive canned and shipped factory farmed mega-monocrop vegetables coated in fossil fuel).

Very bad idea.

 

[Occamstazer]

Another aspect of the ecologically sustainable issue, smaller veg/farming operations are much gentler on the environment not just in terms of pesticides.
For example, small-time catfish farms about in this part of the country. These ponds are one of the few kinds of agriculture that is actually good for the environment. Wild waterfowl *love* them.