Whenever I have engaged in local community activism, my goal has always been to spread the word about self-sufficient communities. If you grow most of your food locally, buy locally made clothing, eat from locally made/carved/kilned utensils/bowls/plates/cups, etc, if you buy shoes made from local hides and local leather workers, if you work to create your own local economy, you become freer.

It’s not just about BUYING local, it is about CREATING local…the person who raises the sheep, who buys local hay and grains, the local butcher, the local shearing person who sells the wool to the local spinners and weavers, to the people who buy the wool and make the sweaters everyone wears- that is a local, self-sufficient community.

And frankly, that may well have to be the communities of the future… as more and more resources and land are channeled into fewer hands, communities are going to be forced into making a choice for who will control their lives- themselves, or the few.

“In a society in which nearly everybody is dominated by somebody else’s mind or by a disembodied mind, it becomes increasingly difficult to learn the truth about the activities of governments and corporations, about the quality or value of products, or about the health of one’s own place and economy.

In such a society, also, our private economies will depend less and less upon the private ownership of real, usable property, and more and more upon property that is institutional and abstract, beyond individual control, such as money, insurance policies, certificates of deposit, stocks, and shares. And as our private economies become more abstract, the mutual, free helps and pleasures of family and community life will be supplanted by a kind of displaced or placeless citizenship and by commerce with impersonal and self-interested suppliers…

Thus, although we are not slaves in name, and cannot be carried to market and sold as somebody else’s legal chattels, we are free only within narrow limits. For all our talk about liberation and personal autonomy, there are few choices that we are free to make. What would be the point, for example, if a majority of our people decided to be self-employed?

The great enemy of freedom is the alignment of political power with wealth. This alignment destroys the commonwealth – that is, the natural wealth of localities and the local economies of household, neighborhood, and community – and so destroys democracy, of which the commonwealth is the foundation and practical means.”   Wendell Berry