All of these factors combined into a single epiphany.

Her efforts to be politically involved was a huge learning process wherein she found that there wasn't any real desire to fix the problems that exist. There is just greed (for power over people and wealth). I had reached this conclusion years earlier, but she had to find out we cannot change the system. Her interest in "natural food" lead her to "organic food" research which resulted in us both reading DOZENS of books and concluding that "American table fare" is absolutely AWFUL for you and the environment. Being down to just our mortgage allowed us to start buying organic food. We instantly starting losing unwanted fat, and our general health improved.

My intense survival activities (building a food pantry that was very well stocked, extensive bug-out bags, etc) resulted in me starting to question the "internet philosophy" and "truths" of preparing for disasters. I started asking questions like: where are you going to go if you bug out? What happens if you have 3 months of food stored and "it" lasts 6 months?

We sat about trying to "live more independently" on our 1/8th acre sub-division house lot. We grew a raised bed garden, and planted some fruit trees. We started considering how to use every square foot of space on the tiny lot for food production and considered putting a storm shelter in the ground (the house didn't have a basement).

One evening after working on our tiny raised bed garden, and after spending a lot of time drawing plans in CAD on how to use EVERY SQUARE FOOT of our 1/8th acre lot to grow a fruit and vegetables we concluded that this wasn't going to work.

We had already spent an enormous amount of time trying to find a way to build an economically feasible house on the 2 acres (about 25 minutes from town) that we eventually sold. We felt the 2 acres would enable us to have a large garden, fruit trees, etc. This plan failed miserably and we sold the lot at a huge loss.

Simultaneously, we also became interested in environmental issues and "1800's homestead lifestyles". We started visiting orchards, vineyards, etc to observe what it would take to actually LIVE a simple self-sustaining lifestyle instead of just buying products made by someone else.