Backyard Chickens Are Not The Answer

Why It Will Take More Than Homesteading To Build The World We Want

What’s On?

This is the last newsletter of the year! Normally this would be a time to talk about everything that’s happened so far but I’ve only been at this for a few weeks. We’ll be back in January ready to go.

For the time being, I’m letting The Rehumanist be something that can expand and contract based on what’s going on with my personal life and family. Think of it as engaging in opportunistic hustle culture— hustling only when it’s convenient. One day that may change, but for now its nice to unplug for a few weeks and just come back once I feel like it.

The Rehumanist Recommends

Ryan Van Duzer- Youtube Creator

I first stumbled on Ryan Van Duzer’s content when the thumbnail from this video caught my eye…

I’d never heard of ‘Bikepacking’ before, but the concept immediately drew me in: Throw a tent and a sleeping bag on your bike and then ride (sometimes for weeks at a time). In Ryan’s case, that means eating beans and bathing in rivers as he crosses some of the most beautiful landscapes in the world. His YouTube channel is chock full of incredible adventures as he traverses not just the United States but Mexico, Sweden, Rwanda, and beyond.

As much as his content inspires me to go on bikepacking adventures of my own, I’m in a phase of life where doing so is a lot more difficult. Fortunately, Ryan’s infectious energy and realistic optimism make it easy to live vicariously through his excursions.

Whether its cafe owners in rural Idaho or ranchers in Oaxaca, many of Ryan’s videos have him connecting with friendly strangers who demonstrate that most people are good people and willing to help someone in need.

Even if you’re not an outdoorsy person, or even if you’ve never ridden a bicycle in your life, Ryan’s videos are the kind of content that makes the internet a better place.

Backyard Chickens Are Not The Answer

I realized when getting eggs out of the coop one day…

You’re still buying eggs, you’re just buying them ahead of time in the form of feed. Sure, you can make your own feed but that takes time, which is a commodity in itself. There’s really no such thing as free eggs…

The convenience of being able to get eggs straight from our own coop is truly great, but the more I think about it the more I realize that it’s really not doing much. We still have to buy pretty much everything else we eat and buying eggs would only add on a few more seconds of time at the grocery store. Given the price of feed, our eggs are still probably cheaper, but not by an insane amount.

All of these thoughts made me consider the approach I’ve seen in many online communities about homesteading as a way of life- a way of detaching from the mechanisms of capitalism (for the left), or the perils of government regulation and a secularizing society (for the right). The idea of ‘backyard chickens’ (that’s a metaphor here) is often put forth as a solution for avoiding what feels like an increasingly hostile and dysfunctional world.

While this may be true on the individual level, in a social context ‘backyard chickens’ are not the answer…

The Problem

Having backyard chickens is a perfect example of Rehumaning. It closes the gap between us and our food sources, gets us back to the land, etc. They’ve also become somewhat of a mascot for the crunchy/homestead community, and represent a movement that champions living in the country, homeschooling children, eating organic food, and many other things.

These are all noble pursuits that I completely agree with, but here’s the thing:

If everyone moved to the country, homeschooled their children, grew their own food, cut their own wood, and remained completely distrusting of the government, civilization would collapse.

“Good,” is what I hear from some people who are far down the anti-establishment pipeline, but that’s a terrifically unethical response. You may think our politics, economics, and institutions are dysfunctional or even evil, but a collapse would lead to immense human suffering. So many people would die.

We need people to live in dense cities. We need people to specialize to such a degree that they don’t have the time and skills to grow their own food or homeschool their children (because they’re too busy doing brain surgery and designing bridges.) We need this advanced, incredibly complex economy in order to produce insulin, fund our fire departments, build cancer treatment centers, and do any other number of things that keep people from dying of preventable causes. Not only that, but moving to the country or owning chickens is not feasible for most people.

Living the homestead life can be amazing for the individual/family, but is not (on its own) a solution for moving society forward. Putting it forth as a solution on a broad scale is a privileged and out-of-touch response.

Little House

When it comes to conversations about surviving an apocalypse, I have a friend who always likes to say: You should only be a prepper if you’re okay with the idea of killing a lot of people who are going to come after your stuff.

In other words, if society collapses it’s not going to be like Little House On The Prairie where we all go back to a simple, God-fearing life of shucking corn by candle-light. It would be more like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. One’s ability to survive would have a lot less to do with how well one could grow crops and a lot more to do with how cool you are with killing a bunch of people and performing life-saving surgery on yourself without anesthetics.

My personal belief is that we need fewer people preparing for the collapse of society, and more people actively trying to prevent it.

Homesteading can be a refreshing way of life for people who have a lot of anxiety and distrust about our current state of the world, but most people can never fully remove themselves from the mechanisms of society that feel threatening or oppressive.

Sure, you can carve out your own little kingdom and put up no trespassing signs, build fences, and conveniently forget to pay your taxes, but chances are you’ll need a doctor one day. Unless you want to ride a horse everywhere you’ll need a car with fuel in it to get anywhere. If you’re reading this you’re using a device that was built by a massive corporation utilizing hopelessly complicated global supply chains.

In short, there is a very slim chance you’ll ever exist completely outside of society. And if we are all forced to exist within this imperfect system, shouldn’t we strive to have the system work better for everyone?

So what do we do about it? I have a few ideas of how to start…

Urban Vs Rural

I have a theory about how Rap music and Country music are two versions of the same genre. Both are identity-forward genres based around geography where the lyrics (and really the whole vibe) is about conveying the supremacy of a specific way of life. One rural. One urban.

Much of country music is about how great it is to be country. In the same way, rap is about how great it is to be a gangster (side note: I have never felt whiter than I did writing that sentence right there.)

Are these two huge generalizations? Of course. Don’t come at me with your hot takes about all of the songs/artists that are exceptions! The point is that the message of both genres is the same: The way I live is the best way to live.

There’s a whole series of newsletters I could write on this idea and how it’s actually born out of a way to cope with economic disparity. But here I use it as an example of something I see as a problem:

The urban vs rural divide is hurting us. We need strong cities and strong rural areas to create a better future— it’s not a zero sum game. Even if we think the system is broken, it is in our best interest to care about the people we inhabit the system with, especially if they are different than us.

As the link above notes, people in cities and people in the country have been polarizing at an increasing rate over the past several decades. Their views have shifted further left and right, respectively, as the political temperature in the country heats up. The result is an increasingly elitist and antagonistic framework of beliefs that creates a cultural gap which is becoming harder and harder to cross.

It does urban progressives no good to belittle the people who grow their food. It does rural conservatives no good to scrutinize the people who design, build, and maintain the software and hardware they use on a daily basis. We need both ruralism and urbanism. To elevate one at the expense of the other hurts us all. But as long as the culture wars incentivize us to dehumanize those in different geographic spaces, we’ll never develop the class consciousness required to enact true systemic change.

The American Spirit

Beyond the urban/rural divide we (especially those of us living in the country) must choose to no longer sacrifice collective progress on the altar of individual freedoms. Those two things need not be mutually exclusive.

Like many first steps, we have to begin by changing the conversation. Rural farmers should champion building more robust public transportation for those in cities. Urban knowledge workers should advocate for greater access to healthcare for underserved rural communities. The list could go on… Regardless of what the people at the top want you to believe, we don’t have to sacrifice the needs of others to fulfill our own political interests.

The city I live near has a free public bus service that I will most likely never utilize, yet my taxes help pay for it. And you know what? That’s fine by me. Even if I never benefit from free public transportation I still want to live in a place where my neighbors do. That’s what it means to be part of a community. Does that mean that the system is perfect or that my tax dollars are always being used efficiently? No. Of course the answer is more complicated than that, but the principle remains.

Moving to the country and starting a homestead might be great for you, but we have to continue to expand the American imagination around what can be done for everyone. Is this an overly altruistic take full of ignorant optimism? Perhaps. Maybe the intense cultural and political gaps between these two groups of people cannot be fully bridged, perhaps the hyper-individualistic American spirit cannot be transformed. But until we can start thinking (and voting) beyond our immediate surroundings, we’ll continue our slow descent into a nation of paranoid, isolated individuals bent on conquering our neighbors to satisfy our own needs.

So in conclusion: get yourself some chickens, but also join your Chamber of Commerce. Build that homestead that keeps you away from all the evils of the world, but understand that you have a part to play in changing it.

We need healthy cities. We need healthy farming communities.

And we need people who care about them both.

Your fellow human,

Logan