Self-Sufficiency is Incompatible with Nature
Self-sufficient naturalist is an oxymoron, but you wouldn’t know it from the thousands of off-grid influencers and YouTube creators promoting the self-sufficiency lifestyle. As a tree-loving, beard-sporting, plaid-wearing, soil-building white dude, I know I’m squarely in their target audience. But here’s the thing: self-sufficiency is a myth
At best, self-sufficiency is a fleeting moment of privilege—a blip between states of total dependency. There will come a time when we will all be too old, too young, too sick, or too economically disadvantaged to go it alone. At worst, the myth of self-sufficiency isolates and stigmatizes those of us who need others—which, ironically, is everyone.
The Sufficiency of Nature
Nature is a process, not an isolated entity. Permaculture and other ecologically inspired design sciences teach that interconnected systems are resilient systems. A well-designed garden captures, stores, and shares water in multiple ways, creating redundancy and security. But the magic happens when we zoom out and cultivate a community of interconnected gardeners.
Sharing resources means we can do more with less. Sharing knowledge and skills builds collective capacity. Taking care of each other weaves social safety nets—nets that we will all depend on at some point. As a species, community is our superpower.
Anything You Can Do, We Can Do Better
Ecologically inspired design draws from the natural world. So why not learn from social insects or the Wood Wide Web? Nature teaches us that diversity is essential for resilience. Nothing is less diverse or resilient than some off-grid survivalist trying to go it alone.
Cultivating skills and knowledge? Yes. Removing yourself from endless consumerism? Absolutely. Gardening, preserving, knitting socks from wool you harvested? Fantastic. Building an off-grid home? Love it. But these practices are even more powerful in community.
Right now, the world feels increasingly uncertain. I understand the urge to withdraw. When everything feels like it’s on fire, isolating yourself seems logical. But I hope you don’t. Because the truth is, we need you. We need your ideas, your skills, and your generosity. And in return, we offer ours.
Insulating ourselves from the world won’t lead to sufficiency. And as fun as off-grid hippie communes sound, we should be able to build sufficiency in our cities. Cities maximize connections, which makes them some of the best places on the planet to foster communal sufficiency.
Self-Sufficiency Together
Cities are ecotones—places where people, place, economy, and ecology intersect. Our ability to create thriving human habitats depends on how well we integrate and align these systems to cycle resources, ideas, and opportunities. We don’t need rugged individualism. We need rugged togetherness. Let’s practice self-sufficiency together.
Designing healthy communities—sometimes called Social Permaculture—is an underappreciated aspect of permaculture. Design techniques like needs and yields analysis, stacking functions, zone planning, and sector analysis apply just as much to social systems as to landscapes.
Permaculture is incompatible with self-sufficiency because nature teaches us there’s no such thing as independence. Resilience is connection. Asking, “How can we build sufficiency?” is the same as asking, “How can we cultivate community?”