Sunday, September 16, 2007

Our 3-5 Year Plan

Theressa and I just got back this evening from a few days of camping. I'll post a quick sketch of our "three to five year plan". I won't go into nearly as much detail as we've thought through so far, but I will fill those in at some point in the future...

Basically, we've copied our "escape plan from civilization" from the Tribe of Anthropik. So you might start by reading their plan, then come back to ours.

The main differences off the top of my head between what we've been thinking vs Anthropik's plan:

  • We will probably wind up living in the Pacific Northwest, somewhere in Washington, Oregon, or Northern California. We know the ecology of this area better than any other area; we live here already so can more easily transition from a city base to a rural homestead; the climate makes growing food and living as a hunter/gatherer relatively easy; and the population density seems much safer to me than in most of the rest of the US. Jason at Anthropik has written that he thinks the Pacific Northwest could have so many people move to it that the population density would rise to among the highest in the US, but I have a hard time imagining that happening. I do expect some influx of people, but I see most of the population increase occurring along the I-5 corridor, especially between Portland and Seattle. We want to find an area far from those population bases anyway.
  • We want to buy enough land to be able to theoretically support a tribe of 10 people entirely from growing our own food using permaculture design. My number crunching so far suggests we'd need 2.5 acres per person for a paleodiet, so we'd need at least 25 acres of land usable for forest gardening and/or pasturage.
  • We want to buy our land mortgage-free, and set aside enough cash to pay for 10 years of living expenses (taxes, hunting & fishing fees, etc). We don't want to have to work at all, though I expect we will generate some income from odd jobs for extra security, or to buy extra land, etc.
  • We plan to buy land by the end of 2010, and to live permanently on it by the end of 2012.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

interesting plan. have you given up on city living?