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 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. A good life is one filled with love, joy, and beauty.
In practical terms, Labishire is a homestead common, i.e., a community of people who are homesteading collaboratively. There is no financial requirement to become a member. 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? Is regenerative living really possible, if so how?
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).