Jobs continue to be big news: more specifically, the lack of them.

The unemployment rate manages to hover around 10%, but only because more than 660,000 people have given up even looking for work. Since the Great Recession began officially in 2007, more than 8,600,000 jobs have been lost, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The really bad news, according to economists, is that about a quarter of those jobs are gone forever. Many companies have found ways to make money without the expense of wages and benefits, and they won’t be rehiring even if or when the recession ends.

And of course, the really really bad news is that unless or until enough people have enough money to buy all the stuff and junk that props up the conventional establishment economy, there can be no “recovery.” Consumers account for about 70% of that economy, so it’s a vicious circle.

So the idiots in Washington are going to “create” jobs? And the idiots who elect them expect and demand that creation? Anyone who has ever met a payroll knows darn well that jobs aren’t created out of thin air, and certainly not by politicians. Don’t get me started on that.

I could switch my rant from jobs to food: people are eating out less and downscaling when they do, they’re buying more low-cost groceries like pasta and beans, food pantries across the country are seeing record numbers of new “clients,” there is growing interest in eating locally-grown and organic foods, and on and on. But to keep this short, let’s just add a few more ideas, then connect the dots and see what the picture looks like.

Item: During World War II, more than 45% of America’s vegetables were grown in backyard Victory Gardens.

Item: Way back in the 1930s, when Frank Lloyd Wright designed Broad Acre City (and used the term “homesteader” to describe the city’s inhabitants who had the time and skills to be part-time farmers, part-time mechanics [workers] and part-time intellectuals), gardens and root cellars were central to his thinking. He believed every man deserved an acre of his own land, where he could “never be unemployed or a slave to anyone.”

Item: Most sellers of vegetable seeds are reporting record sales, for the second year in a row.

Item: A city feller asked a homesteader what time he went to work. “Shucks,” came the answer, “I don’t go to work: I just get up and I’m surrounded by it!”

This too could go on and on, if I weren’t so weary of the idiots. I’m weary because I can’t see any signs that even in the current awakening — or what should by all means be an awakening — at least some people are becoming aware that the world does not need more cars (and roads, parking lots, petroleum, emissions, etc.), and the highly-paid workers who make those cars and provide all the support services; the world does not need any more resource-wasting McMansions (and therefore the carpenters, plumbers, electricians and certainly not the bankers involved in building them); the world doesn’t need 75% of the crap that is designed, manufactured, transported, sold, used lightly if at all, and trashed — all at the expense of the fragile environment and finite resources of Spaceship Earth. The “happiness” derived from such trash is as artificial as the economic system that creates it: demands it.

In other words, I don’t believe the world needs more “jobs,” in the traditional sense of the economic establishment. What the world needs is a lot more homesteaders.

But try to convince people of that, even in times like these: What a job!

I have found a point of agreement with Osama bin Laden.

The Al Qaeda leader just released another of his periodic tapes lashing out at the United States. But this time, instead of religion, the topic was global warming.

He’s against it. He said Western industrialized nations are responsible, and challenged the world to boycott American and other products to bring the wheels of the American economy to a halt.

According to the Associated Press, he blamed industrial nations for the floods, desertification and hunger spreading around the planet, saying, “Speaking about climate change is not an intellectual luxury, the phenomenon is actual fact.” His message was “to the whole world about those responsible for climate change and its repercussions, intentionally or unintentionally, and about the action we must take.

“I know this has great consequences and grave ramifications, but it is the only means to liberate humanity from slavery and dependence on America.”

I agree, although with a different slant. For more than 40 years I’ve been writing about “the… means to liberate humanity from slavery and dependence on,” not America, but the global  Industrial and Economic Establishment. Humanity could be liberated through what we call homesteading. That means boycotting industrial products, not to destroy an enemy, but to save the planet.

In those 40 years the potential disasters have taken many forms, from agricultural crises to stock market crashes to Y2K and Climate Change. The Establishment has always managed to muddle through, somehow, so far. But it weakens with every new blow. (It’s difficult to explain this in a few words to anyone who hasn’t been watching closely, but there are many ways to get up to speed… including reading The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Self-Sufficient Living.)

To both Bin Laden and me, the means isn’t all that important. Global warming just happens to be a handy, and very likely, current suspect, in a long list of possibilities. What really concerns both of us is what happens next. Not the means to the end, but the end.

In my case, the ideal would be to save the world — civilization, humanity, the planet itself — through reasoned logic and gentle persuasion. That’s why I have always tried to portray homesteading and simple living as a very pleasant, sensible way to live, as opposed to mindless materialism and the waste of life and resources involved in our current (and quite recent) culture of accumulation. If that doesn’t work (and it’s not working), the simple fact is that constant growth on a finite planet—the Spaceship Earth analogy — is impossible. (Stein’s Law: If something cannot continue, it will end.) The result can only be disastrous, whereas the sane, reasoned, homestead approach would allow a “soft landing,” so to speak.

With every new jolt that rattles the established system, that soft landing seems less and less likely. And yet, just try to imagine the vast difference between being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the devastated world Bin Laden and others envision, and actively managing that transition based on homesteading principles.

What would happen if Americans produced 40%-50% of their fruits and vegetables in their own yards, as they did with Victory Gardens during World War II? What if even just the 20% of Americans who are unemployed (yes, the true unemployment rate is 20%) engaged in a few homestead-type activities, such as food production?

And what would happen if virtually every American over the age of 16 didn’t feel entitled to 3,000 pounds of resource-wasting pollution-emitting automotive power? Yes, those who provide cars and their vast web of support facilities — gas stations, insurance, traffic cops and road maintenance workers, to name but a few — would be affected, and the economy would be devastated. But what would that do to mitigate climate change? And how would that be any worse, or different, from how those of us who are over 70 lived when we were young? Or from how the Amish, and in fact, most people in the world, still live today?

In a book I could (and did!) go on and on — about how the average house today is more than twice as big as the average house of my youth (and uses way more resources), how we use much more water and energy than we did then; how almost everybody has more clothing than any rational being could possibly require, and more stuff and junk of every kind and description (all requiring energy, in some form).

Today’s extravagance can be contrasted not only with the America of 70 years ago, but with most of the world today — including not only the Amish, but also many serious homesteaders. It could easily be shown — at least to rational people — that living simply and sustainably is not only no great hardship: it can actually be more healthful, stress-free, rewarding and fun!

That hasn’t worked out. The clock, a time bomb, is ticking. What could have been a glorious new age of sensible sustainable living will sink into a morass of deprivation and terror.

Osama bin Laden and I agree on the likely scenario. If it plays out on the course we’re now taking, he will be very happy. Not me. I know how it could have been avoided.

“It’s time for America to get very serious about food security and hunger.” That comment came from U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, in response to a USDA report that more than one in seven American households struggled to get enough to eat in 2008. That’s about 49 million people, or 14.6 percent of American households, and a 31 percent increase over the previous year. We’ve become accustomed to seeing pictures of starving kids in faraway places, but can you imagine? Americans, including 17 million children, not getting enough to eat, in what used to be called the land of plenty.

If that’s not bad enough, the report emphasized that the numbers from 2009 are almost certain to be worse. A survey of food banks last summer showed another 30 percent increase in demand.

Experts say the biggest culprit is unemployment, abetted by rising food prices. President Obama called the USDA’s findings “unsettling,” and said “the first task is to restore job growth, which will help relieve the economic pressures that make it difficult for parents to put a square meal on the table each day.” Meanwhile, Secretary Vilsack is pressing Congress to expand programs such as food stamps and free school lunches, which currently consume about 70% of the ag department’s budget.

To a homesteader who doesn’t have much use for high-fallutin’ academic economics, but who greatly appreciates common sense and simple solutions, this “Establishment” reaction is both typical and self-defeating, to say nothing of being unnecessarily complicated.

Restore job growth? Doing what, making more stuff that uses up energy and resources, then overloads landfills, and which nobody really needs anyway? Or would they be the kinds of jobs where workers don’t actually produce anything… like maybe on Wall Street?

As for “free” lunches, how can it be that some people still don’t realize that there is no such thing, when most of us learn that in grade school?

While the daily newspapers were all headlining the ag department report, and the Establishment response, a little quarterly magazine from the University of Wisconsin Alumni Association arrived with what would seem to be a very logical alternative. Justin Mog’s essay in the Winter 2009 On Wisconsin told how he and his wife had worked for three years in agriculture and nutrition in the Peace Corps, in Paraguay. On their return home in late 2008, they thought it would be fitting to send a letter to President-elect Obama, “urging him to plant an organic kitchen garden on the White House lawn as a model of sustainable living and healthy eating. To our delight, we weren’t the only ones who thought this was a good idea, including the Obamas themselves.” The Obamas broke ground on the garden in March, 2009. And not incidentally, Ag Secretary Tom Vilsack started a “People’s Garden” at the USDA.

Mog went on to say that in today’s world, “poor” can mean a dizzying array of things. “Helping people get out of ‘poverty’ requires the opposite of the all-too-common, one-size-fits-all strategy. But thankfully, one thing was universal in my Paraguayan community: no matter how poor, no one goes hungry.”

The reason, of course, is that they have food security, by producing their own, on a surprisingly small amount of land.

Americans do not.

How much imagination, or even common sense, would it take to put all this together? For those who still don’t get the picture, we could add tons of details: the amount of water, gas, fertilizer, and time and labor, wasted on useless lawns; the vacant lots and other unused spaces that could become community gardens; the joys of gardening, or raising chickens, or learning to cook “from scratch,” compared with the depressing and dehumanizing effects of being unemployed, and on and on. Obviously it’s not all that simple. And yet, the more data I apply to the problem, the more ways I connect the dots, and the longer I play with the pieces, the more sense it makes. (I could go on and on, but I already wrote a book about it: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Self-Sufficient Living will be out in December.)

There should be no need to worry about unemployment — or hunger — for anyone involved in self-sufficient living, even if it’s not beyond the sidewalks.

—Jd Belanger