What is self-reliance

Subject: Water usage; what is self-reliance?
Date: 2002-12-04 12:54:20 PST

Wayne,

Your point is well taken. Indeed, we get our electricity
from a coal plant that is not terribly far from here. LP
for the heat, which, of course, is derived from crude.

However, I would like to use your comments as a
springboard to my soapbox, so that I may share with
you two of the central dogmatic themes of the Fookaiser
School of Self-Reliant Living.

First, as Tim May pointed out in a related thread not
long ago, you have to choose your battles on the road
to self-reliance. To eschew technology and outside fuel
sources entirely, it would be necessary to adopt a lifestyle
of poverty, much the same as many people of more limited
circumstances in other parts of the world.

Here at the School we emphasize the importance of
having and maintaining the skills to live in a self-reliant
manner. We practice the skills, but we don't necessarily
live them every day. So while we are perfectly capable
of maintaining our standards of hygiene on less than a
gallon of washwater a day, we choose not to do so.

In the same light, we are perfectly capable of growing
enough grain for ourselves without mechanization. But
why would we? Such a time consuming effort doesn't
pay when we can buy our flour for twenty cents a pound.

Secondly, we are believers in cash as the means of
keeping score. Where the dollar flow is minimal, our
attention is rather drastically reduced. Despite our
conservation measures, we end up burning around $2,000
worth of gasoline a year for routine trips to work and
to town. This in spite of choosing a smaller car and
arranging a schedule of less than 5 days a week in the
office, and so on. That's more than ten times what
we pay to pump, soften, and heat water. So we think
ten times as hard about ways to reduce it. Now,
the environmental impact and use of nonrenewable
resources and so on tends to be in proportion to the
dollars spent. So, not only from a strictly selfish,
monetary point of view, but also from an environmental
point of view, our water use is all but irrelevant compared
to how much we drive our cars.

Similarly with heating the house. This is one area
where we choose to utilize our self-reliance skills
more actively, as we heat with wood. This conservation
measure alone does more to reduce our reliance on
outside fuel sources than we could possibly save
if we were more stingy with our water use. (How
do you heat your house, Wayne?)

<stepping down from soapbox>

Oh, and I've always found wall warts to be aesthetically
barbaric. I suppose there's more leakage in the underground
electric wiring around the place than what the wall warts use,
but I still dislike them on principle. Really, anything that
consumes power when it's just sitting there rather offends me.
On should be on, and off should be off (The fact that it is
possible, with sufficiently sensitive instruments, to measure
even the minute amounts of leakage that occur even with
something that really does shut off is beside the point).

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