What are you doing to claim food sovereignty for yourself or your community, and why?
This question has been mulling in my mind since @sagescrub posed it a few days ago. Of course, it's been mulling in my heart for quite some time, as food sovreignty is a huge step in personal sovreignty, and you all know the rabble rousing anarchist I am on the inside.
I was having a hard time forming my thoughts until I read @riverflows' response entitled A Revolution in Dirt and Seeds. And what a title to be inspired by!
My own efforts in soil and seed are so meager when I look at all these people with years more experience than me. When I look at @rawutah with his 110 trees in a tenth acre food forest, or when I hear @bobydimitrov talking about starting hundreds of tree seeds, I can't help but feel puny with five blackberry bushes, half a dozen trees I don't even know what they are, and only 60 varieties of seeds going in the ground this year. But we're growing.
Our efforts here to establish our own food forest and a tree-guild-based sharing garden are just the start. A big part of the sharing garden is going to be my marketing attempts to spread information about permaculture and home food production to everyone I am blessed enough to serve. When people come to pick berries and food, I'm going to greet them with a hug (I'm a hugger) and a small book or brocure of permaculture information.
I was happy that @sagescrub included that water and medicine count in that sovreignty, as those are two other things that I'm working on. I have a well on my property that doesnt work. A lot of homes in my neighborhood have wells. It's an odd feature for this area where water wells are restricted to rural properties of over two acres, but it's a feature that can be used to great effect if we can get them running again. I'm not sure if they all fell into disrepair or if the aquifer ran dry, but getting our well running is a big part of our sovreignty plan. Paying for subpar chemical water is just silly. Our water bill this month is over $140! I'm in the process of talking with Melissa about how much we're willing to spend in order to eliminate that bill.
Twin birches on the farbank
Another aspect we're working on here is wildcrafting. Using and developing sustainable, naturally occurring, hyper-local resources to fuel our sovreignty. Within a few minutes drive (well under an hour by foot if vehicles are not an option for whatever reason), we have multiple sources of bamboo for building materials. There's also a creek and deciduous forest and at least one very large, sprawling blackberry patch. I intend to cultivate a few wild garden patches within walking distance of our home. Fruits and flowers and herbs growing in a semi-wild geurilla garden that'll be encouraged to grow and flourish for myself and anyone that recognizes what's going on.
Included in the whole system are medicinal herbs such as St. John's Wort (a herb for mental health) and Mullein (primarily for respiratory strength). The modern medical system has been sadly manipulated into another form of oppression and enslavement of the people it's meant to help. If there's a cause that's vastly more noble than medical freedom, I can't imagine it. Healthcare debt is a notion that is becoming increasingly staggering to me just based on my own mild experience. I'd hate to have an extreme experience with something like financing the act of being alive.
In conclusion, I'd like to part with some ideas related to the topic of food sovreignty.
Imagine a time when seeds were money. When that potential to feed yourself was a medium of exchange. In exchange for a chair, you could give a craftsman a handful of seeds or canning jars that will help support his health and independence. Seeds are wealth. I think we've strayed too far from that idea, and I think we're going to yo-yo back to it.
What happens when they ban our gardens? When people have made so much progress outside the system that the system starts to feel it. When we're independent and successful and we've WON and cronyist powers decide to react in the only ways they know how. There's no constitutional amendment that says we can grow spinach and kale. Does that mean you don't have that right?
What happens when they outlaw home food preservation like canning or dehydrating? It's not a far stretch from "you can't have chickens near your home because of diseases" to "you can't can your own beans in your home because of diseases." Sure, there are health risks in both those situations. But the spinach in my back yard isn't going to get recalled for having an industrially produced E. coli from a system that does things ass-backwards in the name of obscene profit. (Remember, you're hearing these things from a capitalist.)
Are you going to tuck tail and bow in service? Or are you ready to support your community and their ability to live and thrive?
Here's a relevant song to part with. I'm not sure who shared it, but this was posted in the Natural Medicine discord chat sometime around this last solstice. Listen to the words:
Wise men say that rushing is violence
But so is your silence when it's rooted in compliance.
Stand firm in loving defiance
Make hard your alliance
Give voice to the fire
You can't stop this.
Be blessed.
Be fruitful.
Stay relevant.
Nate.
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