The Steader Manifesto

The Right Way to Live

This is what you should do.

Grow.  Be healthy.  Be well.  Claim territory.  Create.  Be beautiful.  Know beauty. Find truth.  Multiply, and replenish the earth.  Inherit.  Steward your inheritance.  Pass it on to your noble heirs.  Live. 

That is the call of life.  That is what God and nature have made us to do.  That is the fulfillment of what we are and the way we were meant to be. 

We have lost our way and must find it again, renewed and adapted.

We call this steading.
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As steaders, we believe in beauty, growth, and living things.   We believe in the natural world, and in people as part of the natural world.

We believe in the human, in men and women, in children, in families, in big families, in extended families, in friendships and loyalties.  We believe in the human scale.

We believe in generational projects. 

We believe in modest efforts and soaring ambitions.

For all these reasons, we embrace the homesteading, permaculture, and regenerative grazing movements.  But we recognize that they go both too far and not far enough.  They go too far when they become ends in and of themselves, when they become fashions, when they become ideologies.  They don’t go far enough when they are limited to hobbies or businesses, when they are limited to one family at a time, and when they are limited to one generation.    

We believe in the principles behind permaculture and regenerative grazing, and believe those should be applied to people and families and institutions.

It has been said that environmentalism without socialism is just gardening.  We call for environmentalism without socialism.

We believe in terraforming.  There is immense spiritual power in transforming the barren wastes into arenas of life.  Let Mars blossom as the rose.  It is a holy mission.

 But we call for terraforming to begin here.  The first planet that we must make more earthlike is earth.   This begins with you and extends to your home, your family, your neighborhood, your town, your country.  At the intimate scale this means growing healthy by eating healthily grown food.  It can mean growing flowers in pots that speak to you, because they are beautiful, because they are tied to your place or to your family heritage.  Perhaps they are native and remind you of your local character and of your walks in the wild.  Perhaps they are the ones your grandma grew, and are taken from her seeds.   At the global scale, it means—with due respect to native life forms and customs—greening the Sahara, making the deserts of the American southwest wet, transforming Antarctica, settling the Canadian shield, herds of bison roaming the Plains, thundering mammoths ruling Siberia.

We also call for human-scale societies to replace the abstract arid systems that dominate our social environment.   These systems are increasingly as frigid and airless and hostile to human flourishing as the surface of the moon is.  We believe that just as it is a holy mission to bring life to barren, inhospitable terrain, it is a sacred crusade to bring life to barren, inhospitable systems and institutions.  We call this process humaniforming.  We humaniform ourselves, our families, and our neighborhoods.  We will humaniform our rulers.  We will humaniform global capitalism.   We will humaniform mass information mediums. We will turn them into real things, made up of flesh and blood.

Our call is

Humaniform society.  Terraform earth first.

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We support homesteading and permaculture.  But we are aware that the homesteading and permaculture space is awash with practices that are mainly meant to be performances—actions whose purpose is to be witnessed as homesteading action.  We are aware that the space is awash with rumor and myth.  We are aware that the space is awash with salesmanship.  Socially and informationally,  these  communities are a wild proliferation of garish strip malls, all with their flashing neon signs.

We believe that a great deal of permaculture and homestead information that is out there is simply false.  We call for a hard-headed use of science and data that knows the limits of both and understands the fallibility of the process that generates them.  We call for admitted and humble reliance on personal experimentation and folk knowledge.  We reject scientific gabble used as an incantation and a veneer.

We call for instructional writing that is clear and brief.   We call for writing that respects the audience as people and relates to them as people, not as clicks and page views.   Do not take three pages to explain how to make sauerkraut. 

We call for clear-eyed awareness of costs and benefits.  Cheaper methods are better than more expensive methods.  Simpler ones are better than more complicated.  Less time-consuming methods are better than laborious ones.  Steading is not  meant to be a demonstration of virtue.  Be thrifty, including with your own time and effort.

We call for productivity.

We call for a willingness to reject cherished methods that don’t work. 

We call for a measured and thoughtful embrace of technology and industrial methods even in the home.

We also call for optimism.  We believe that a radically better way of life is possible that marries new means with old means and old ends.  We believe that in the headlong rush to modernity, much good was found and much good was left behind and many low-hanging fruits were passed by. 

STEAD is an old English word.  The original stead was a farm inhabited by an extended family in several homes, plus retainers and friends and others.  It was its own small community.    The independent flourishing cities of the Hanseatic league were by extension called the Steads.  A stead was also one’s role or position.  Stead is related to stand.  Your stead is where you stand.  A stead is something lasting.  It is stead-y.

The stead is the healthy, self-contained  thing, the permanent thing, the thing that stands.

The steader is the one who builds and lives the stead.

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We call for the thriving home stead.

We call for the thriving self stead and body stead.  We call for the family stead.   We call for the clan stead and the compound stead.  We call for the prepper stead and the mannerbund stead and the buddy stead.   We call for church steads and digital steads. Let their be steads of steads.  Let there be neighborhood steads and town steads and country steads.  

Let us be able to look on what we have done with ourselves and rejoice.