We’re children of the late twentieth century. We grew up on home cooking prepared up by the folks at Kraft, Nabisco, and Hostess. We turned to Atari, Nintendo, and Sega for our entertainment. When we complained about stuffy noses or aches and pains, our moms doled out cures concocted by Wyeth, Bayer, or Johnson & Johnson. As teenagers we sported Espirit, Keds, and L.A. Gears while we cruised Main Street or roamed malls. Arnold, Webster, and Alf were some of our best childhood friends. Most of us can name more companies’ brand names or TV show characters than native plants growing near our homes.
So why on earth are a lot of us ditching supermarkets in exchange for gardens, farmers’ markets, and health-food-store grain bins? Why are we toiling away with hunched backs over heads of arugula and spinach, or spending long afternoons in steamy kitchens canning pole-beans? Why are some of us tossing our TVs, stashing them away in guest-room closets for movie night, or just being a lot more judicious about what programming deserves our attention? Why are we driving our Toyotas and Subarus less or trading them altogether for Schwinns and Treks? Why are some of us eschewing modern medical care and giving birth in our living rooms without pain meds, tincturing herbs in our pantries, or turning to non-peer-reviewed healing methods like reiki and ayurveda?
In short, why are we embracing the low-tech, the inconvenient, and the laborious? Didn’t our grandparents and parents eagerly abandon this way of life in the name of progress?
Well, we probably have as many reasons as there are names for what we’re doing – urban homesteading, backyard farming, self-sufficient living, radical homemaking, simple living, or downsizing.
- Maybe we came to frugality by necessity. The more, more, more; spend, spend, spend; charge, charge, charge American ethos is crumbling all around us, and the current economic collapse is threatening to leave some of us – or our neighbors, friends, and family members – without jobs, houses, or any sort of safety net. We’re looking to save a little dough by reducing what we buy, mending our clothes, or germinating seeds in our windows.
- Maybe we’re fed up with debt – credit cards, student loans, mortgages, and car loans. We have more debt than any generation before us, and much of it was acquired, not for travel, leisure, or new cars, but to cram for tests and write papers to get those B.A.s and M.A.s that were supposed to guarantee us decent employment for life. What many of us got from the deal was a monthly bill for somewhere between $100 and $500 that we’ll be paying well into middle-age.
- Maybe we’re exasperated by a corporate culture that doesn’t value our families or human connections, one that stopped guaranteeing pensions or any sort of security just before we came on board. And we’re terrified to rely on employers that can drop our health care, lower our pay, and lay us off at will, leaving us scrounging for jobs at McDonalds or Denny’s.
- Maybe we’re concerned for our children. We’d be crazy to feed them the baby formula, spinach, ground beef, or peanut butter they’re selling at the supermarket these days, because we can’t trust the government to make sure our food is safe. And we’re just as terrified to let our babies chew on anything they sell at Toys R’ Us. So we want to know exactly where our food comes from, be it our own yards or the farmer down the road. And let’s just say, homemade toys have become a lot more attractive.
- Maybe we’re exasperated by America’s broken health care system. If we can actually afford to see a doctor – a big if – we wait for an hour in a waiting room to spend five to seven minutes with our overbooked physician. She rushes us through our list of symptoms then hands us a pile of prescriptions for expensive, name-brand pharmaceuticals with questionable results and a dozen known side effects. She also treats normal, healthy stages of life, like pregnancy and menopause, like diseases that must be medicated. Low-tech, affordable treatments – like midwifery, massage, acupuncture, and herbalism – may not have as many big-drug-company-sponsored studies behind them, but we find them safer and more effective for our daily concerns.
- Many of us also have the bigger picture in mind. We’re concerned about global warming, or we don’t want to add to the landfills, or we want to stop contributing to the brown clouds of pollution that wallow over our cities. We feel responsibility because we live in a country where people buy 11.7 billion dollars of unnecessary bottled water a year when a billion people in the third world don’t have any access to clean water.
But most of all – we’re embracing a new way of life, because it just feels like a better way to live.
Most of us come to it bit by bit. We replace the slew of packaged products and food we buy for natural and organic versions. We swap the plastic diapers for compostable disposables, the ammonia and bleach for green cleansers, the Colgate for Toms of Maine. Then we realize that we might not need a lot of this stuff at all.
We can cultivate food in our backyards. We can whip up green cleansers with vinegar, baking soda, and hydrogen peroxide. We can buy one set of cloth diapers and dry them in the sun. The majority of the products in our bathrooms – toothpaste, shampoo, conditioner, mouthwash, astringent, toner, body scrub, lotion, and deodorant – can be replaced with vinegar, baking soda, or hydrogen peroxide. And the most amazing part is – these three cheap ingredients actually work better than many of the products we work so hard to dish out big bucks for.
So we veer off the consumer wagon … and something strange happens.
We love gardening. We delight in the feel of soil under our fingertips. We feel more touch with the shift of the seasons from summer to fall, fall to winter, winter to spring. We notice the moon as it waxes and wanes. We stand over the first tiny sprouts as they push up through the soil and feel an amazing sense of fulfillment. And food tastes better now that it comes from the deck or backyard. It’s a whole lot cheaper to eat, especially now that we discovered the ease of soaking and simmering dried beans and grains, or roasting a chicken on the weekend and eating it all week long, or baking a loaf or two of bread one evening a week.
We’re amazed by the real-life chemistry experiments of fermentation, baking, and watching kitchen scraps turn to soil.
We’re astounded by what we can make with our own hands – clothes, sweaters, toys, art.
We have so much more energy now that we walk and ride our bikes everywhere instead of climbing in and out of cars and meandering through endless parking lots. Plus, we don’t have to pay an exorbitant gym membership to look and feel healthy.
Some of us save so much money that we can cut back on work or trade our jobs for more satisfying pursuits. We see our kids more; walk them to school; bake with them; garden with them during the summer months; read aloud or tell stories at night instead of retreating to our own separate television shows. We’re more connected to our families. And we have more time to see our friends, go to community events, or get active in politics.
We’re working harder than ever, but it feels different now that it’s for our own livelihoods instead for the profit margins of Corporation XYZ.
Don’t get us wrong. We’re not turning our backs on the twenty-first century. Most of us aren’t about to give up our ipods, computers, washing machines, dish washers – or for some of us, our TVs – although we might dream of running them on solar power someday. What we’re after is a better way of life – one that melds the traditions of yesterday with the technology of today.
In our Pollyannaish daydreams, we imagine that everyone will discover what we have – that living simply is living better. And we like to imagine a time where all Americans – especially those with the most – will voluntarily live with less to enable those in the rest of the world to have more. But for today, at least the unconverted are stocking our thrift stores and leaving the bike lanes relatively free.
This journey we’re on toward self-sufficiency and community-building has so many rewards, but it’s not always easy. A few years ago, we didn’t know what an heirloom tomato was, we couldn’t tell a Bantam hen from a Plymouth Rock, and we thought basil and oregano came from plastic containers in aisle five.
That’s where New Urban Habitat comes in – it’s a place for us to come together, to share our struggles, to learn, and to celebrate together.
