Country Life

I often think of rednecks as noble savages. They work hard, don’t have a lot of money so they repair, reuse and maximize life out of whatever they can get second hand. Junk roofing, parts from old cars and motors, they use to repair what they have rather than throwing away.

The farm animals they raise produce food for their families and others. It is a life based on reality one where the piglet comes onto the farm, fed grain, fertilizes the land, has a 22 bullet put through its brain, scalded, quartered, frozen or cooked. Where food scraps are recycled into pig feed where the manure makes the farm field and garden grow.

The redneck homestead with the trash burning barrel goes to the dump like once a year, because most of their trash goes up into smoke and is disposed on site – if the ash and unburnt debris isn’t buried in the farm trash pit. Valuable recyclables – namely metals – get saved for scrap and are sold for money and actually used as industrial feedstock.

Many more remote, rural redneck homesteads are now off grid in part because the high cost of running electric lines up in the mountains. It turns out that solar technology is pretty damn good at supplementing generator power and that solar panels are fairly cheap especially when somebody does their own wiring and builds their own stands.

It’s a life so much more sustainable then the eco conscious suburbanite living in the city. Grid tied solar and your Prisus might reduce your carbon footprint or cleaning and recycling plastic bottles might keep them out of the landfill but it’s nothing like the homestead that keeps old machinery running rather than discarding, that produces and slaughters meat on site compared to buying on styrofoam.