Labishire Homestead Commons

Labishire is a gay POC-founded and led experiment to figure out how to live on Mother Earth during and after the climate collapse. We want to see if it is possible to create a place to live and work where all members achieve a good quality of life by stewarding the environment. We define quality of life not in terms of money or expensive material possession, but as access to good clean air, water, food and lodging, rewarding and deep connections with other people and life around us, and ability to pursue learning, artistic expression and spiritual growth.
In practical terms, Labishire is a homestead common, i.e., a community of people who are homesteading collaboratively. But we are not just homesteading to eke out a living on the land. Grounded in our daily labor, we are consciously trying to discover the answers to questions such as: What is appropriate technology in our context? What kind of culture do we want to create or re-create? What kind of trade offs should we make? E.g., buying things is a backdoor to exploitative capitalism but completely not buying things like tools or salt, etc., won’t work either. Is regenerative living really possible, if so how? How can we adapt our local solutions to be scalable to fit other localities?
Drastic times calls for drastic action. Instead of waiting for governments or giant corporations to get their acts together while feeling powerless as an individual, we choose to ask instead: what can just one individual or a small group of committed individuals do to change the course of human history? Well, first we need to figure out how much can one person achieve regenerative living. By myself, I can’t make tools, build homes, make clothes, etc. I have to buy these things from the default economy. But with five or twenty people, some of these things become possible. With hundreds and more, especially when we replicate across different geography and gain access to resources like salt, metal, etc. more and more of the technology that are destructive to the environment today can be adapted and made regenerative.
The problems are complex but the potential solutions are also many. For example, if we want to reduce the use of plastic drip tapes (because it is a petroleum-based manufactured product) then we may need to figure out how to dry farm vegetables. This may involve developing our own landrace seed bank. Or adapting the greenhouse for starts and timing spring transplant after rain events. It may involve putting in swales and using them as grow beds. The plan is to make the kind of trade offs that will ensure food security. Doing trade offs in the beginning allows us to make finding solutions to these challenges fun and exhilarating, rather than stressful and high-risk. As we solve each challenge, we can reduce the trade offs and become even more align with our values.
Due to the size of the land we currently sit on (16+ acres), this project can accommodate probably at most 20 people. The first goal is to leverage each other’s skills to collectively live off the land as much as possible. We aim for a way of life that is ecologically aware, culturally regenerative, and economically just. We are anti ecologically suicidal technologies but pro ecologically savvy technologies such as biomimicry, and adapting existing technology to make them ecologically friendly. We want to be not just sustainable (i.e., reducing our footprint to less than one Earth) but regenerative (i.e., keep reducing our footprint until it becomes negative so that we are not taking from Mother Earth but giving to her to make her more fertile and diverse).
Real success in this project is when this way of living works so well that there is demand for it everywhere and we are able to replicate it far and wide so that humanity can transition to a more ecological and just social organization. In the best-case scenario, such a transition will happen in time and we will help to avert climate collapse. A more likely scenario is that post-collapse, access to communities such as ours will enable enough humans to survive so that we can rebuild human civilization along less ego and greed driven lines.