Recipes for Alternative Sustainable Living

national | miscellaneous | news report Sunday March 31, 2002 00:50 by matthew brilliant at stlimc dot org st louis, mo, usa

Are You (or your group) Self-Sustaining? I am looking to compile a ‘cookbook’ for creative and non-traditional self-sustaining ventures. If you are interested, please read on…

Hello. I am interested in compiling "recipes’ for creative and non-traditional self-sustaining ventures, to be distributed for free in both the print and online medium.

I think most of us know the traditional approach: go to school, get hired at a job, climb the ladder of promotions and raises, save money, borrow some more from banks if you need to in order to purchase things to supply yourself and your immediate nuclear family with transportation, sustenance, entertainment, shelter, clothing, education, and security.

What I am interested in is deviations from this course. Specifically, I want alternative methods people can follow to:

-pay the bills/have no bills
-pay off/eliminate their debt or loans
-pay their rent/have no rent
-pay for/acquire entertainment/shows/music events
-pay for/acquire healthcare
-pay for/acquire transportation for short-distance and long-distance travel

I would like recipes that accommodate all of the following life choices that people make:

-having/wanting/needing money

-not having/not wanting money

-cooperative (group) ventures

-individual (solitary) ventures

-proven successes (things you’ve seen working)

-dreams, visions, theories

Each recipe may accommodate one or all of these choices, but I am striving for a balance of options for this cookbook. Some people are ready to live in the woods in a house they have built far far from modern society, others want to live in the heart of the city with a computer, a phone, and a DSL line. I would like the cookbook to contain recipes which are appealing to either taste.

This cookbook is meant to be a practical guide. Each entry will include the following sections:

INGREDIENTS: a list of the materials, ideologies, people and know-how that is needed

INSTRUCTIONS: step by step directions in the proper order for making the thing work.

HOW MANY PEOPLE IT SERVES: some projects can encompass a whole neighborhood, others are more suited to one or three people.

To sum up, I am concerned with how so many of the projects in the ‘radical’ community must fall into the category of ‘hobbies’ because of the way in which so many of us must still work doing things we don’t like to do to make money to pay for things we want to have or need to have to be able to do these other projects.

So I would like to put together this cookbook--something that can lay out some very practical steps people can take to ‘make ends meet’ and achieve abundance while working from the starting place of this culture, this society, these present if undesirable circumstances.

If you have a recipe you would like to send me, or have questions about this project, please email me at:

[email protected]

Thank you so much, and I look forward to learning from all of you!!