You might think the pursuit of self-sufficiency and business creation are contradictory. Tom Greenwood shows how entrepreneurship can create a healthier model for society.

Sustainability, Renewable, Eco-friendly, Zero waste, Organic, Permaculture, Conservation, Composting, Energy-efficient, Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Carbon footprint, Greenhouse gases, Biodiversity

Should we try to be more self-sufficient? During my school holidays as a teenager in the 90s, I used to love watching reruns of the old BBC sitcom The Good Life on daytime TV. If you haven't seen it, the main character is a chap called Tom, who worked as a draftsman in an engineering company. Disillusioned with the drudgery of corporate life, he one day has an epiphany of how to escape the rat race. He excitedly runs home to his wife and announces his idea. It's self-sufficiency, Barbara! His vision is that if they could grow their own food, as well as make and repair the things they need, then they wouldn't need money and he could escape from his soul-destroying job. Barbara, being both loving and slightly mad, somehow agrees to give it a go and so they embark together on an adventure to try and live a self-sufficient life in the suburban town of Surbiton in South West London. Looking back, it's quite amusing just how closely it parallels my own life. I too am called Tom. I grew up not far from Surbiton. I started my career as an engineering designer and I persuaded my Barbara, my wife Vinita, to join me on a slightly mad journey to escape the conventional world of employment and create a more self-sufficient life. Like Tom and Barbara, we dreamed of a future where we would grow our own food, generate our own energy and collect our own water, but unlike Tom and Barbara, we accepted that realistically we would still need to earn money. In the spirit of self-sufficiency, we would do that by starting our own business. That business is Whole Grain Digital. You might think this pursuit of self-sufficiency and the creation of our own business are a little contradictory. I think it's fair to say that most people think of self-sufficiency as the act of living a simple life in harmony with nature, in contrast with entrepreneurship which is often seen as the very essence of capitalism. And this is where we find a very interesting paradox. These two things seem like they're at opposite ends of the spectrum, but as I look back I think that entrepreneurship has been largely misunderstood. Yes, there are entrepreneurs who are motivated purely by the materialistic rewards of money, power and status, but there are many for whom this is not the case. I know lots of business founders and owners whose motivations are more aligned with Tom and Barbara's aspiration for freedom and independence than with any megalomaniac dreams. When we look at the origin of the word entrepreneur, we find that this makes sense because it simply means to undertake a project. Self-sufficiency therefore is itself a form of entrepreneurship, and this fact is rooted deep at the heart of my long-held belief in the idea of sustainable business. In his incredible book Weapons of Mass Instruction, John Taylor Gatto presents the idea that self-sufficiency is a mindset more than an activity. A mindset of seeing yourself and those around you as producers rather than consumers. A mindset of striving for independence rather than dependence. He states that people in early federal America held the idea of self-sufficiency as the very pinnacle of achievement. The ideal household aimed to produce its own food, clothing, shelter, entertainment, transportation, medical care, education, child care and social security. In contrast, he asserts that modern society is now composed of persons who cannot design, build, repair or even operate most of the devices upon which their lives depend, and that most things are in truth literally unintelligible to them. As a result, us modern people must accept a great number of things on faith, as our way of understanding is now basically religious rather than scientific. This is a very uncomfortable perspective for those of us who pride ourselves on living in the age of science and like to think that we have a pretty good grasp of how the world works. But in fact, most of us have far less true understanding of the world than people from societies of the past. This is of course particularly true of indigenous tribes, past and present, who are often referred to as primitive yet have an incredibly deep understanding of the world. An understanding that enables them to be self-sufficient within their communities and live as a harmonious part of nature. By comparison, business entrepreneurship is of course a very crude form of self-sufficiency, but I do believe that it's a very practical way of starting to move our mindsets in the right direction as part of a broader cultural shift in which we seek to deepen our own understanding of the world and to develop our own creative solutions and practical skills in all aspects of life.