if it takes all your working hours to be self sufficient is that

[thewomanwhothoughtshewasahat]

two things about the accepted wisdom that self sufficiency is a Good Thing have always troubled me. First - time and labour are themselves resources that should be used efficiently - does the wannabe green not have to ask herself honestly if her skills are best used doing other things than growing vegetables? Second - obviously closely connected I am concerned that not all economies of scale are a Bad Thing. Ultimately greeness is about efficiency is it not? ie use as little as possible. and it is not self-evident that self-sufficiency is necessarily the best way

thread title was meant to say "green"!

But presumably if you're self sufficient then your carbon footprint is v low or small or whatever the measure is? I think probably being self sufficient IF you manage not to consume much other than your own product is surely green. I bought a book called 'Authentic, how to make a living being yourself' a while back (still haven't succeeded myself!) and the author was pointing out how mad it was that a council somewhere violently objected to a family living in a forest and not (iirc) wanting to pay coucil tax because they really and truly didn't use ANY council services. I may be remembering that slightly wrong but the gist was that our society doesn't know what to do with people who aren't 'proper' consumers: it fears them.

Well, yes - but I suppose what I'm saying is that the green ideal needs to be extended beyond just carbon. We need to think of all our resources in terms of efficiency. And in some cases it might be a tremendous waste of talent that is hugely valuable to society to spend all their time growing veg? We need to think not just about the planet but about the richness of of the people on it. The world would not be a better place if we all spent all our time growing veg. we would have no literature, no ballet, no people campaigning for better child care. I fully appreciate we ought to minimise our carbon usage but I think we need to put everything in both sides of the scales and make our decisions accordingly.

It depends on what you consider talent and what you consider useful. Hmm, investment banking, useful? Vs midwifery? Teaching? There's a guy called Miller (I think, will look in a minute) who argues that art, literature, ballet, all evolved as mating aids, i.e. men used them to help women differentiate between them as humans got more sophisticated and moved beyond primeval needs. In which case you could argue that a) their origin WAS useful and b) it's not applicable now and anything we do that isn't to do with saving the planet is fiddling while Rome is buring. Not saying I AM arguing that, mind! :)

here you go, \link{http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0099288249/203-1393001-1031936\The Mating Mind, how sexual choice shaped human nature} - that's not all he's saying but it is one of the themes in the book.