Homemaking, gardening, and self-sufficiency resources that won't radicalize you into a hate group
It seems like self-sufficiency and homemaking skills are blowing up right now. With the COVID-19 pandemic and the current economic crisis, a lot of folks, especially young people, are looking to develop skills that will help them be a little bit less dependent on our consumerist economy. And I think that's generally a good thing. I think more of us should know how to cook a meal from scratch, grow our own vegetables, and mend our own clothes. Those are good skills to have.
Unfortunately, these "self-sufficiency" skills are often used as a recruiting tactic by white supremacists, TERFs, and other hate groups. They become a way to reconnect to or relive the "good old days," a romanticized (false) past before modern society and civil rights. And for a lot of people, these skills are inseparably connected to their politics and may even be used as a tool to indoctrinate new people.
In the spirit of building safe communities, here's a complete list of the safe resources I've found for learning homemaking, gardening, and related skills. Safe for me means queer- and trans-friendly, inclusive of different races and cultures, does not contain Christian preaching, and does not contain white supremacist or TERF dog whistles.
Homemaking/Housekeeping/Caring for your home:
Making It by Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen [book] (The big crunchy household DIY book; includes every level of self-sufficiency from making your own toothpaste and laundry soap to setting up raised beds to butchering a chicken. Authors are explicitly left-leaning.)
Safe and Sound: A Renter-Friendly Guide to Home Repair by Mercury Stardust [book] (A guide to simple home repair tasks, written with rentals in mind; very compassionate and accessible language.)
How To Keep House While Drowning by KC Davis [book] (The book about cleaning and housework for people who get overwhelmed by cleaning and housework, based on the premise that messiness is not a moral failing; disability and neurodivergence friendly; genuinely changed how I approach cleaning tasks.)
Gardening
Rebel Gardening by Alessandro Vitale [book] (Really great introduction to urban gardening; explicitly discusses renter-friendly garden designs in small spaces; lots of DIY solutions using recycled materials; note that the author lives in England, so check if plants are invasive in your area before putting them in the ground.)
Country/Rural Living:
Woodsqueer by Gretchen Legler [book] (Memoir of a lesbian who lives and works on a rural farm in Maine with her wife; does a good job of showing what it's like to be queer in a rural space; CW for mentions of domestic violence, infidelity/cheating, and internalized homophobia)
"Debunking the Off-Grid Fantasy" by Maggie Mae Fish [video essay] (Deconstructs the off-grid lifestyle and the myth of self-reliance)
Sewing/Mending:
Annika Victoria [YouTube channel] (No longer active, but their videos are still a great resource for anyone learning to sew; check out the beginner project playlist to start. This is where I learned a lot of what I know about sewing.)
Make, Sew, and Mend by Bernadette Banner [book] (A very thorough written introduction to hand-sewing, written by a clothing historian; lots of fun garment history facts; explicitly inclusive of BIPOC, queer, and trans sewists.)
Sustainability/Land Stewardship
Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer [book] (Most of you have probably already read this one or had it recommended to you, but it really is that good; excellent example of how traditional animist beliefs -- in this case, indigenous American beliefs -- can exist in healthy symbiosis with science; more philosophy than how-to, but a great foundational resource.)
Wild Witchcraft by Rebecca Beyer [book] (This one is for my fellow witches; one of my favorite witchcraft books, and an excellent example of a place-based practice deeply rooted in the land.)
Avoiding the "Crunchy to Alt Right Pipeline"
Note: the "crunchy to alt-right pipeline" is a term used to describe how white supremacists and other far right groups use "crunchy" spaces (i.e., spaces dedicated to farming, homemaking, alternative medicine, simple living/slow living, etc.) to recruit and indoctrinate people into their movements. Knowing how this recruitment works can help you recognize it when you do encounter it and avoid being influenced by it.
"The Crunchy-to-Alt-Right Pipeline" by Kathleen Belew [magazine article] (Good, short introduction to this issue and its history.)
Sisters in Hate by Seyward Darby (I feel like I need to give a content warning: this book contains explicit descriptions of racism, white supremacy, and Neo Nazis, and it's a very difficult read, but it really is a great, in-depth breakdown of the role women play in the alt-right; also explicitly addresses the crunchy to alt-right pipeline.)
These are just the resources I've personally found helpful, so if anyone else has any they want to add, please, please do!
Gonna chime in as the resident Vintage Kitchen Witch:
Go look up vintage kitchen planning and home economics resources. Subscribe to GRIT magazine. These are the Old Ways and the thing about the design principles and the canning tips is that they are not subject to needing much in the way of "updating". We still use our kitchen much the same way we did in the 1950s, we just have bigger fridges, bigger freezers, and more bulk purchasing we have to factor into our planning. But the calculations offered in this Westinghouse Kitchen Planning Manual are still a great jump-off point for planning your own kitchen, for example. Here's a planning manual from the U of Minnesota's Agricultural Extension Service.
Did you know that for many years, the US government had a home economics department, and that the research they did there was toward making housework easier by design? The design principles their test kitchens and researchers found out influence kitchen design to this day.
The USDA's guide to Step-Saving Kitchens (archive) is still relevant today. Here's a video version that shows how they researched and designed the modern kitchen we all have a better or worse version of today no matter where we live, unless we're in some kind of very old museum-kept Victorian or Colonial house:
Downloaded from US National Archives Youtube channel on 2025-02-06 04:55:59 https://youtube.com/watch?v=2N9RCQjPqh4 -------- Creator(s): Dep
Many universities particularly in agriculture centres put out "extensions" that were little guides on kitchen planning in the 30s, 40s, and into the postwar period. You can find many of these on archive.org, or check out your local agricultural school's archives!
Understand, also, that every appliance used to clean or make food is a labour-saving device that was either designed by a woman or to help homemakers and housewives do less backbreaking labour. Machines like dishwashers and washing machines are much more water-efficient than doing the same tasks by hand.
Solarpunk should not mean you picture everything being done by hand again, and that appliances should no longer exist. Do not assume that appliances are wasteful luxuries when they represent generations of women and those who cared about women trying to make the work assigned to them less arduous. Just because we consider (if we are feminist anyway, and I hope you reading this are) this work to be something all genders share in does not mean it should go back to being harder. Labour-saving devices are also something that makes disabled people's lives better by giving us the ability to do our own housework more easily.
Many older appliances waste energy, but many more actually use a lot less of it than modern versions--fridges in particular, as well as "smart" appliances, will sometimes waste a LOT of energy in comparison to that old tank of a fridge your mom's had since the sixties or seventies. Older fridges also sometimes have incredible features like swivelling pull-out shelves. Older ovens have built in stock pots, roasters, and guides to safe cooking temperatures or cooktimes for baked goods. While old fridges and dishwashers can be hard to find, old ranges/stoves are not--in fact, there's a guy in New Jersey who restores not just old ranges but a specific make of them, because he loves them so much. You can find vintage appliances by scavenging your local ebay and craigslist and sometimes there's junkyards that specialise in them. And this is recycling btw! Remember, it isn't just "recycle" it's also "reduce" and "re-use". If you can restore or buy a restored old appliance, you've saved a crapton of energy and materials that would have been used to make a new one. And the old one will last longer, because it was made to.
Your solarpunk kitchen shouldn't look very different than the most efficient kitchen designs from 1949. That's how GOOD those designs were. Don't believe me? Watch that video and pay attention to it. It's INCREDIBLE.
And while I have your attention--please think about disabled people when you're thinking about solarpunk. Keep 40" continuous pathways with texture blocks on sidewalks. Keep 40" doorways for all your fun bus stop/library/house/street designs, and make sure all your buildings have ramps or level entry from the street. Keep your bathrooms able to fit a wheelchair. Remember that plastics are extremely necessary for medical equipment and many medicines have to be derived from petrochemicals. Remember that many people living in any given community are under four feet tall, many people are bigger than 150lbs, many are taller than 5'5", many are blind, many are deaf, many are colourblind, many are sensitive to sounds you can't hear or flickering you can't see, many cannot eat foods you can eat, many need to walk slowly, many need others to mask all the time. Remember you will become disabled at some point. We all become disabled sooner or later. So imagine a world where being disabled is the default. Where accessibility is not an afterthought but integrated into design from the beginning.
Remember there is NO acceptable number of avoidable injuries or lost lives.
