tag archive: self-reliance

Scott Burns writes:

Train yourself in self-reliance. Most Americans would be endangered if they lost their income for a month, their electricity for a week or their access to a supermarket or gas station for a few days. We rediscover this in every major snowstorm or hurricane. We simply don’t think about sustaining ourselves in our homes in the event of utility failures or worse.

It’s time we did.

Oh, I think about it. I’ve lived in Minnesota my whole life and these past few years I think a lot more about what would happen if we lost power or gas for an extended time in subzero temperatures. With the prospect of an aging infrastructure and little money for proper maintenance, I worry about “service interruptions.”

But how far should I go? Should I get a small generator? Kerosene burners? A whole-house generator?

Maybe I should start by picking up one of the books that Burns recommends:

Just in Case: How to Be Self-Sufficient When the Unexpected Happens, by Kathy Harrison. …

“I was simmering, simmering, simmering. Emerson brought me to a boil.”– Walt Whitman
A while back, a coworker lent me a book called Self-Reliance, “The Wisdom of Ralph Waldo Emerson as Inspiration for Daily Living.” Edited and introduced by Richard Whelan, who says that he loves Emerson’s essays and has read them many times over the years but found eventually he could get the same and even better experience by just reading the many sections he had underlined over the years. He writes:

I came to think of the essays as gardens in which the underlined passages were magnificent flowers — and all the rest a rampant and choking growth of nineteenth-century rhetorical weeds and vines that were best rooted out and cut back. It was then that I realized that an abridged edition of the essays could introduce Emerson, and make his down-to-earth wisdom accessible, to a readership that might otherwise be put off by his …