“[Y]ou can have stability, you can have security, you can have your needs met in a radically different economy than what we’re taught is our only option. I’m just so glad that I found it… I was really disillusioned with the life that I thought was my only option: getting a job, getting a career and a house and a car and all that… the economy is so unsustainable and so unjust, and I don’t see how capitalism can be fixed from the very core of how it’s structured to grow, to consume.” – LEF cofounder Debbie Piesen
For the members of LEF, the economic system in which a society exists is inextricably tied to its relationship to the environment. Global industrial capitalism is the underlying threat to environmental stability as well as social equality, according to Zeigler’s book, Integrated Activism. They believe that the solution to the global climate crisis and social inequality can be found in an alternative economic system, one that is composed of small, sustainable villages with shared economic control. The mission of the Living Energy Farm is to exemplify this type of economy as a model for future communities. It accomplishes this through three types of economic interaction: selling seeds, labor trade, and bartering.