For the first time in a few years, my spouse and I were successful in collecting enough berries to make several jars of jam *dances for joy*. However, there is a back story to this whole escapade. For your information, dear reader, this story is about homesteading and jam making…there will be no recipe at the end. I’m sorry to disappoint, but I’m not that kind of blogger.

As we humans grapple with a “tripledemic” of COVID-19, influenza, and RSV (not to mention the lurking spectres of Mpox and staph/scarlet fever infections), it can be easy to lose sight of how our industrial civilization’s systems of production and consumption are interlinked with the subjugation and intensive exploitation of other life. Of course, besides zoonotic disease crises — and other forms of human suffering, such as the endangerment and exploitation of livestock industry workers who are primarily immigrants, refugees, and people of color in the U.S. — the worldwide intensive raising, warehousing, and slaughter of domestic livestock produces mass animal suffering and death even outside of slaughter for consumption, including the rapid spread of highly infectious pathogens that devastate domestic animals as well as wildlife populations.

This organization began in 2007 when I found a box of old books in my parents’ garage. Among the titles inside was one called The Guide to Self-Sufficiency by John Seymour. It is a beautifully illustrated tome of old-fashioned knowledge about how to subsist on what one can grow and harvest from the land. It gives step by step instructions on all the basic ingredients for a fully sustainable farm. I was enraptured by the idea of living such a life but there was one element missing from the farm that John Seymore described and that was people.