Planting the future

This is not a historical footnote. This is about next year.

A friend of our family who is, I think, 22 is starting a new anarchist collective in Woodstock, NY, the town where he grew up. Chrisso Babcock just wrote us the email below. There is a new wave of young people drawn to basic human skills of growing one’s own food, building one’s own home, and creating face-to-face communities. I am thrilled to see it. It’s happening all over.

It’s fascinating to me to see what is the same and what has changed since I was immersed in a similar scene in the 1970s. I make some notes on that at the end. Chrisso wrote:

Happy New Years!

For the Celts, Halloween was the start of the new year; at sundown we enter a new year, and two seasons of darkness. I am about to start a big project, and I feel that the beginning of a new cycle is a wonderful time to set my intentions and make something that has been phantasm up to this point begin to become a reality. My plan is this, and I am looking for help from anyone who would like to give their help -

I want to create an anarchist collective/homestead in Woodstock, NY.

By Anarchist, I mean: free-form and non-hierarchical and founded with shared ideals of equality, mutual aid, direct democracy and direct action, collective property, and active anti-capitalism and anti-authoritarianism. You do not have to identify yourself as an anarchist to understand the beauty of these ideals; in fact, it wouldn’t be a very anarchist endeavor if only anarchists were involved.

By homestead, I mean: self sufficient, communal group agricultural life style, including the building of our own buildings in a sustainable way, the construction of gardens and land for animals, and the creation of infrastructure such as – wells and water cachement systems, seed saving initiatives, canning, preserving and fermentation workshops, and communal composting initiatives, community blacksmith, free bike collective, just to list some possible examples.

My priorities are, as of now, the following -

November to spring: making connections and finding people who are interested in being a part of any or all of this idea/project. Spending time focusing on a few projects that will be a start to the larger whole – most importantly:

1. Creating a collective community composting project, that would both allow people who did not have the space, time, or energy to compost to begin to compost, and also would allow community members access to free compost. This is important to start early – compost takes time; however, once established, this project could help increase the fertility of many gardens all over town, which leads to the next project:

2. Creating a “Yardening” initiative – a project in which myself and others with an interest in food and self-sufficiency would create household-scale gardens in peoples yards for a fair wage, and/or for a share of the produce being grown, bartered time or skills, etc. This would form connections with the community, make a visible impact on the town, and help make Woodstock as a town more self-sufficient. Also, as the collective would almost definitely not have land of its own by next summer, this would allow a beginning to gardening despite this.

3. Creating a small bike and bike cart project that would allow for the transportation of tools, people, and compost, allowing us to garden all over town with the least possible reliance on fossil fuels while also making the project much more visible.

4. Developing a show for Woodstock Public Access TV. Since much of this work, besides the planning, is summer work, a collective outlet for creative visual and theatrical ideas – the opportunity to create a work of art as a group. I have some ideas, including an alternative news show and a muppets-esque kids show about environmental science, but I am really open to anything.

I am sincerely and seriously looking for people who want to be a part of this. I am looking for long term as well as short term, full time as well as part time. If you are or know anyone “radical,” or with an interest in farming, fermentation, pottery, food preservation, gift economics, philosophy, “politics,” art, bike repair, welding, sustainable building, “community organizing,” counseling, camp counseling, theatre, musical ability, herbal knowledge, or anyone who has passion, interest, time, abundant abilities, tools, or land, prior similar experiences, or stories, PLEASE let them (or yourself) know about this project. Please pass this message along to those you feel may be interested – friends, nieces, students, your kids, your parents, mentors, acquaintances, college clubs, food co-ops, youth programs, and whoever you feel may be interested. Please pass this along; or, give these people my contact info.

Please feel free to contact me with ideas, thoughts, hopes, knowledge and questions. Please do not contact me with political arguments; these do not interest me.

Thanks, Love, and Luck, Chrisso

Chrisso’s email is cbabcock64 [at] gmail

My own thoughts on this are many! Here are a few.

Lots of bright young people today think they have to go to college, do white collar work and earn a ton of money. Here’s another way. Leaving aside for a moment whether this will have much impact on the capitalist system, I can certainly say it will have a big impact on you and your understanding of real life if you:

• Learn basic manual skills — which also involve a great deal of intelligence and will stretch your mind, especially if you are in charge of your own work as part of a community or are self employed.
• Build communities that are grounded in producing your own stuff, and manage it all however most makes sense to you. Be in charge! Together!

It’s grounding, after growing up in the bizarre world of a highly complex civilization in which almost everyone feels like an insignificant cog in the machine. Few city or suburban folks today know how their food is grown or their house is put together. We can’t mend our own cars, plumbing, or electrics. I love that Chrisso doesn’t want to discuss the politics. He wants to do the work. Learn the skills. It’s the hands in the dirt, on the saw, in the smithy that ground you. I was a carpenter for twenty years for these kinds of reasons and it worked for me.

It’s also the relationships. When you get employed by a typical existing organization there is lots to learn about how to do relationships, but they are all pursued within parameters that are already set. This does make them easier. In an army or a corporation, everyone knows what to do to do well. I totally understand Chrisso’s desire to get rid of hierarchy. Sometimes you just have to reinvent things to make them your own — and maybe you really will reinvent them differently.

All I would say is that in my experience, hard as it is to learn how to compost, grow food, build a house, shoe a horse, run a windmill or many other highly complex homestead skills (I tackled just about all the building trades and “only” got good at some them), it’s a breeze compared to fashioning new relational and organizational skills. After some years in different collectives I left and went solo as a carpenter in part because I felt we all needed to grow up and become a whole bunch more mature as people before we could do anarchism or collectivism successfully.

But just as today you can go to classes in cool technical stuff like fermentation, solar power and permaculture which I heard nothing about in the 1970s, so you can learn all kinds of things that better people than me have developed around doing relationships and organization. By better people I mean ones who didn’t just throw their hands up in the air and say we’re all too immature to be collectivists yet, but instead worked hard at skills like empathic communication, interculturalism, capacity-based leadership, and so on. In getting rid of fixed hierarchies based on traditional sources of power one doesn’t have to go for completely flat organizations that are paradoxically prey to charismatic leaders and “the tyranny of structurelessness:” there are a lot more options to learn from now when you decide to do it yourself.

There is nothing in Chrisso’s email, even in the wider list of interests and skills he’s looking for, about birthing, raising kids, education, doctoring (apart from a mention of herbal remedies). That’s quite appropriate for the first stages of his project and I have no doubt it’s in his mind. But it’s around kids and health that alternative communities really have to work. There are fascinating memoirs of kids raised in the communes of the 60s and 70s, some of which were more functional than others.

And what about the effect on the capitalist system? If it truly goes into shock and meltdown from climate change and its own fragility, then we’ll need these skills. If it finds its way through to survival, it will only do so by changing. A critical set of changes revolve around learning how to situate ourselves appropriately in the eco-systems that sustain us, and what better way for many of us to learn that than through homesteading.

Of course, I think that shared rituals and expressions of the deepest meaning of life that the collectivists share, are another critical element.

I can’t wait to see what Chrisso’s generation creates.