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I met a family that’s doing just that.

JULES DERVAES: Some more tomatoes here, we’re about 90% self-sufficient in the summertime because this is all our bounty.

Jules Dervaes lives in Los Angeles, right next to a major highway, but he’s turned his backyard garden into a farm.

JULES DERVAES: These are heirloom squash from Italy, and they hang from the trellis here. Just watch your head.

He’s got two daughters and a son.

REPORTER: How do you like this yourself?

MAN: I love what I do, so I can’t complain. I got a green thumb.

They grow 350 different fruits, vegetables, herbs and berries. They all survive on what’s grown here.

JULES DERVAES: This is our barnyard. It’s in the city, so we’ve got a nice little animal enclosure here. We’ve got five ducks, eight chickens and two goats.

And while I’m there looking at these goats and chickens, I can hear the traffic next door, whoof whoof up and down the highway, but you could be in the middle of the countryside.

JULES DERVAES: We’re looking at a planet that has run amok. So you have to be sensitive about which direction you’re going. If it’s going the wrong direction, it’s either you’re going to turn around early or you turn around at the edge of the cliff.
Come up here to our store on the front porch – Nice to meet you.

They obviously had a fear for the future too of what’s going to happen. But they’re going around it in a different way.

JULES DERVAES: This is a completely different dream, we’re talking about self-sufficiency, we’re talking about neighbourliness, we’re talking about a community of helping one another.

WOMAN: It has the herbs from the garden. And we’ve already made some ice-cream. Yeah we have a hand-cranked. It’s cool, yes, it works for us. But it’s a little scary because out there, it’s no. It’s, you know – you could actually forget about the bad things out there.

There seems to be this common strand running through America right now – A fear of the future, and a sense of doom. But I saw people responding in very different ways – from preparing to hide from change, to preparing to make change happen.

JULES DERVAES: So we figure we’re preparing ourselves to live simply. I mean this here is riches, but people don’t understand. If you look around, you’ll see riches here but it’s in the form of tomatoes and peppers and animals. So we’re going backwards, and I say a step backwards is progress.

Transcript: http://www.sbs.com.au/dateline/story/transcript/id/600742/n/Future-Fear

http://www.sbs.com.au/dateline/story/about/id/600742/n/Future-Fear