Living Like Robin Greenfield Could Solve the World's Major Issues
Still Life with Peaches by Pierre-Auguste Renoir
Our world faces huge issues like environmental collapse, governments perpetuating genocide, extreme wealth inequality, corporate greed. The list of huge problems quickly feels insurmountable, but there is hope. These problems do have solutions. Often the solutions feel completely inaccessible, unclear, or abstract though. Robin Greenfield, an activist, successfully grew and foraged all of his own food for a year. This could be a blueprint or at least a glimpse of the solution.
Almost every part of modern life contributes to the death and destruction of the planet and humanity. These systems need consumers and people to continue to buy into them. The most logical step would be to simply boycott almost everything, but this seems impossible while living within those systems. By growing and foraging all of his own food, Greenfield, was able to step out of the system completely and not contribute to the harms we’ve discussed above at all. He was even able to do this in the completely urban setting of Orlando, Florida using people’s unused frontyards.
In addition to all of this he lives below the poverty line in the US, which means he doesn’t have to pay federal income taxes which actively fund the military, genocide, oppression and destruction. When people are able to grow and forage more of their food, an added benefit is they no longer need to spend as much money at the grocery store. This can make successfully living below the federal poverty line more accessible, and thus also avoiding paying federal taxes. Food is really our main necessity as humans. Everything else is secondary. If we all slowly shifted towards living like this, we could cure our planet.
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Tags: life , sustainability