Our market-driven economy enshrines consumer choice as one of its highest virtues. The other day I was standing in line at the grocery store, looking at the bottled water, and I just had to take a snapshot of what I was seeing. This is only a portion of the water case.

I can buy water from Italy or France or Fiji or Hawaii or Iceland. I can buy water with odd molecular super powers: it’s oxygenated or alkaline or…something? Buying a bottle of water in certain stores in Los Angeles in the year 2016 can be as exquisitely nuanced a process as buying a bottle of wine.

When it comes to buying water, I have tons of choices–as long as I have no problem with generating utterly unnecessary plastic waste, or with flying my drinking water across the world (a gesture that even Marie Antoinette may have found excessive), or with paying exorbitant sums for this folly.

In other words, I am perfectly free to buy into this group psychosis which is our contemporary culture.

What I cannot have is a free sip of water from a functioning water fountain. They are as rare as hen’s teeth in these parts-or perhaps I should say, rare as pay phones.

What I cannot have is tap water in my home which I can drink without filtering it.

What I cannot have is clean water running in my streams and rivers, or even an ocean clean enough to forage from. Sometimes, it’s not even clean enough to swim in it.

But oh yes, I have plenty of choice.

A beautiful fountain at Mt. Wilson Observatory. Like most beautiful old drinking fountains in public places, it is no longer functioning.

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The original Survive LA logo.

Today, July 13th, is the tenth anniversary of our blog. In that time we’ve published 2,731 posts (and have abandoned drafts of 700 more!), numbers which are surprising even to us. Turns out that adage about a journey of a thousand miles starting with a single step is true.

We’d planned to do more to celebrate this milestone, but I’d be lying if I said this was a good week, or that I am in a celebratory mood. My elderly mom is not doing well and our lives are focused on caring for her. As a result, Kelly and I may not be doing much blogging in the next few weeks.

But I don’t want to let this anniversary pass without saying something. Writing this blog has been a tremendously positive experience. The subject matter we cover, a somewhat scattershot collection of the home arts and random opinions, somehow attracts very kind and talented readers, and it is your enthusiasm that makes us keep writing. We’ve been able to meet many of you in person and I hope to meet more of you someday.

A Short History of Root Simple
On the afternoon of July 13th 2006 I had a flash of inspiration. I realized that my disparate DIY interests could be gathered together into a blog. I felt like I had discovered a kind of unified field theory of home economics. That day I began the Survive LA blog that was later became Root Simple.

It took awhile to find our voice. Survive LA had a jokey, tongue-in-cheek prepper vibe. Some of my early posts make me cringe today. Coincidentally, I just found on my hard drive an incredibly embarrassing, downright offensive mission statement dating from the first few months of the blog that I wisely decided not to publish. Ultimately, I found it more productive to take our subject matter seriously and dispense with the posturing. It just takes a while to find your voice. Thankfully Kelly started contributing to the blog, and she’s a far better writer than I.

I should note that this blog had one false start: a blog about our parkway vegetable garden. That 2005 blog went to two posts before becoming an internet ghost site that I’ve lost the password to access and can’t delete it. The parkway itself is, ironically, still a work in progress. Our podcast, now in its 89th episode as of this week, also had two false starts but is going strong.

Much ink could be spilled on the influence on bloggers like us of events such as 9/11, Katrina, Y2K, climate change and the 2008 economic meltdown on this blog and others like it, but that will have to wait for another post or even a book.

Another blog post could be written on how Facebook has siphoned off readers from our blog and others like it. Hopefully we’ll all figure out a way to make the interwebs non-hierarchical again and send the Silicon Valley robber barons packing.

How the Books Happened
When this blog was young, Kelly and I went to a party at the house of the Jodie Willie and Adam Parfrey, independent and creative LA-based publishers. They read the blog after the party and commissioned a book from us, because we were covering territory which they wanted to include as part of their Process Media Self Reliance series. Unlike most publishers, Jodie and Adam are risk takers. We owe them a big debt of gratitude for taking a chance on two first time authors. The book that they commissioned, The Urban Homestead, published in 2008, went through many printings and is still selling copies.

After the success of the first book we got a lot of offers to write a sequel (or just another version of the same book for bigger publishers!). We ended up writing a how-to book for Rodale called Making It.

Thank You!
Root Simple is a group effort and there are many people to thank: our web designer Roman Jaster and our logo designer Eric Thomason. Caroline Clerc did the cute cartoons that adorn our masthead. And we thank our publishers Process Media and Rodale. We’ve also met many fine journalists after the book came out, such as Michael Tortorello who wrote a nice piece about us for the New York Times and Johnny Sanphillippo kindly made a video about us that went viral.

Most of all we thank you our dear readers for your support over the past ten years.

A note from Kelly:

Erik has said it all well, but I just wanted to add my thanks to his. Thank you, all of you, for your gracious and continual input, support and love. Somehow we’ve been blessed with an incredible community of readers and commenters, and we are so grateful for you all.

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