A Yuppie Heads 'Back to the Land'

[Orwellian_Ghost]

A Yuppie Heads 'Back to the Land'
By Anneli Rufus, AlterNet. Posted April 5, 2008.

Author Doug Fine traded his metropolitan lifestyle for an eco-lifestyle on a New Mexico farm. If only the rest of us could afford to do the same.


When Doug Fine decided to move cross-country from his native New York to an arid rural outpost 20-plus miles from the nearest town, he brought along "four big goals" for the coming year, which were:

Use a lot less oil.
Power my life by renewable energy.
Eat as locally as possible.
Don't starve, electrocute myself, get eaten by the local mountain lions, get shot by my U.N.-fearing neighbors or otherwise die in a way that would cause embarrassment.

That's one behemoth of an ambitious plan for a man who admits right up front: "I like my Netflix, wireless email and booming subwoofers" and who can't imagine living without toast, ice cream or toilet paper. How, then, on earth to achieve it?

...

And while it's exciting in a fairytale way, this notion of legally owning your surroundings as far as the eye can see and transforming them into a solarized organic Xanadu, it lends the undertaking a certain "well ... but" dimension. Well, we all aspire to sustainability, but how many of us could actually afford to buy 41 acres? Well, property in rural New Mexico is less expensive than in much of the United States, but how many of us could afford taking a year or more off work just to see whether we could hack it? Well, getting off the grid is great, but who among us has the bodily stamina to manage, while living solo, animal husbandry and organic gardening and the aerobic, acrophobic, bloodletting workouts (think: windmills, wrenches, tanks, pipes, panels and pumps) required to transition a ranch from electrical to solar power?

Fine bought solar panels "to power my new, fabulously expensive solar-powered well pump. The pump came from Denmark, where they don't employ slave labor and where they don't retail at Wal-Mart. Poor people in Chad don't own this pump. The boutique device was ... buried a hundred forty feet below the ground" -- at further expense, presumably. These expenses just pile up. In order to get "serious about kicking unleaded once and for all" -- quite an aspiration when the nearest town, and thus the nearest supply outpost, lies across "spine-rattling New Mexico dirt roads" and requires fording an actual river -- Fine had to ditch the Subaru and buy a four-wheel-drive diesel Monster Truck. Purchased secondhand, the Ford F-250 -- it dwarfs Hummers on the freeway -- was still "quite a bit over Blue Book." Replacing its standard fuel system with a biodiesel fuel system that allowed it to run on food grease salvaged from restaurants cost another crate of ducats: The website for Albuquerque Alternative Energies, where Fine had his conversion done, lists the charge as $4,000 plus installation.

Add the price of building materials, fencing, animals, feed ... and the whole project, to borrow Fine's own adjective, starts to sound a bit boutique.
...

http://www.alternet.org/environment/81278/

[Wapsie B]

1. Ah isn't that wonderful? Brings a tear to my eye.

Some of us have yet to find the brass rings in life let alone grab for them. I've always viewed stories like this with more than a little cynicism. Why the hell do people like this have to either live in such congestion as NYC or literally in the middle of nowhere? Isn't there some happy medium somewhere?
Why do people have such a guilt complex over how they've lived their lives such that it supposedly requires such radical changes? But then it's been the trendy thing to do these days.

[Bruce McAuley]

2. Happy medium...

A small town in the middle of nowhere.
You still got fast Internet and low land prices plus access to health care.
I know because I did it for 20 years in North Central Washington State. I couldn't afford the 4WD monster truck, but a $400 Subaru always chained up can get just about anywhere, or a cheap snowmobile for when the snow's too deep.
Water came from a surface well a couple hundred feet away, and had to be hauled up to the house. It was 24 miles to town. We went about once or twice a week max.
No payments for electricity, we had used solar panels for energy which was enough for a VCR and radio and lights for reading at night.
It's good he's only doing it for a year, that's when most newcomers burn out, so he'll be ready to return to civilization...

Bruce

[El Pinko]

11. I don't so much have a problem with his location...

Nothing wrong with the story, on the surface...


But what has he done with his wealth to help see to it that the majority of people can share more equally in America's wealth.

It's all about doing stuff for ME, ME, ME.



The way we're going, we may eventually have 20% of the US living in solar-powered palaces, driving hydrogen cars, while the rest of us live in rows of polluted crapboxes. (or cardboard boxes)


But I guess these people feel "progressive" because they live "green".

[bobbolink]

15. Absolutely! You are soooo on target. He could have started a fine community, and included homeless

people who can teach others some things about reality, and humility.

BUt NOOOOOOO, he gotta do the RUgged Individualism thing...

Heston with a pump..

:rofl:

[Javaman]

25. Nail on head...

in a recent article about a home here in Austin, a "contractor" that "turns" houses green states "it an affordable option for people who can't afford to buy a prebuilt green house".

You want to know how much this green "conversion" costs? $500,000!!!

What I find amusing, is that this house was converted by the very people (the workers) who could probably benefit more from going green than the tool that paid for this over priced con job.

The going green scam is the new snake oil salesmen of our era.

[MasonJar]

3. I would have tried a horse, much more fun and certainly less expensive.

Also I would have had to be somewhere that has grass and trees and green---going green without green would not be my cup of tea.

[bobbolink]

16. What???? And put all that methane in the air???? You, you, YOU... you wastrel you!

:rofl:

[Two Americas]

4. the death throes of modern liberalism

This is a great article, because we can see exactly where modern liberalism, taken to its logical and somewhat absurd extreme, leads us.

It is probably a good thing that the 35 year experiment in self-actualization and personal choice as a substitute for traditional left wing politics is finally playing itself out and running its course, because this opens up the opportunity to rebuild the traditional left.

A "solution" to social problems that is only available to a tiny percentage of the population, and that is based on personal choice and privatization, is of course no solution at all. These types of solutions have dominated public thinking and driven from our consideration any effective political action.

Politics is, and always has been, about power and economics, and social change is effected by mobilizing for mass action and fighting for it, not by self-actualization and personal choices. The opposition fights hard and deadly and is unrelenting. There is no escaping that, and success requires us to fight back just as hard and to be just as serious and committed as the right wingers are on behalf of their wealthy and powerful clients.

[Karenina]

5. Bingo!

[Orwellian_Ghost]

6. Yes

It is a great article as it exposes the cornerstone of liberalisms creed.

Once the layers are peeled off we are back to Manifest Destiny only with solar panels in this example.

Moreover the narrative that is posited by the subject of the article is nothing more than the mythical "American heroic cowboy" (in this case well-funded eco-entrepreneur) staking out a claim in the hinterlands (raising propery taxes along the way) with an assorted array of aspirations used to rationalize such an expense- and such a cost

:toast:

[Two Americas]

7. anything to avoid pulling together

I think that we have been trained to fear and avoid each other, and much of the "get off the grid" mania is fear of people. We think that if we empathize with others, that we might "catch" loserdom, or poverty as though they were contagious diseases. We see our own personal survival as dependent upon - well, dependent upon not allowing ourselves to be dependent on one another, yet we are for each other the only true source of what we need.

We must only associate with "winners" so that the "winning" will magically rub off on us. We must only "think positive" so that we can "visualize abundance" and wealth will then flow into our own little pockets so we can escape the human community, run from our fears, distance ourselves from our neighbors, and triumph over others.

People will go to any ridiculous extreme to avoid pulling together with others, to avoid working as a team, finding common cause, forming groups of mutual defense and support.

There are thousands of small progressive family farms, struggling and desperate for labor, all working within the parameters of a threatened public agricultural infrastructure, dedicated to the public welfare - inspection, public water and soil management, research-driven sustainable practices, and community-based cooperative effort for the purpose of feeding the people. There is a desperate shortage of new farm owners, and much help available for those willing to commit to a life of contributing to the public welfare in an unambiguous way and meet the personal challenges required. Help is needed getting the food to the people, and getting people closer to the food source.

We need people on the front lines of the battle for justice, and human survival depends upon it in this growing crisis and time of much suffering and deprivation. There should be no tolerance anymore for people retreating into expensive, self-absorbed and self-centered fantasies and worlds of self-delusion, and indulging in these at this time is no less than a crime against humanity.

[readmoreoften]

8. And you know what really pisses me off...

The new meme IT'S HARDWIRED IN US. I've seen this comment more times in liberal circles than I care to address. We're hardwired to be hateful, selfish, greedy, and antidemocratic! How convenient! No reason to fight for anything. It's all in the human wiring. The best we can do is hire really large armies to protect us from the other hardwired assholes so they don't kill us all and take our stuff. Maybe we should go one further: let's take their stuff preemptively since we already know they'll kill us if we don't.

Talk about cynical, nihilist, pseudoscientific crap. Talk about a line of thinking made by neoconservatives. And how do you refute it? They saw it on the discovery channel.

Thanks for this post. I never connected the off-the-grid thing to individualism. I suppose because most of the folks I know who have done this stuff are communitarian types. It's still silly. (I'm not big on communitarianism either. As one of my favorite writers often says "no one cared more about his 'community' than Adolf Hitler. That seems to me like a fantasy set-up as well. As if the answer is to segregate into groups of 'like-minded people'. Like pluralist democracy but with neighborhoods. I can think of about 50 different reasons why this won't work. First of all--it sounds too much like a market segment. Why work so hard to avoid the neighbors you happen to have now? What makes it so impossible for you to want to know them? To me, these are the big questions...

[Two Americas]

9. thanks

Glad to see this thread generate some interest and good commentary. Excellent point about the "hard wiring" excuse. Recently we had a thread asking people if they thought racism could be eliminated, and many answered that no, it could not, because it was "human nature." That idea is a product of libertarian premises infiltrating and corrupting and perverting liberalism: everything is seen as "personal choice" so that means that to change society we must change human nature so that people make the "right choices." Once we are all "like minded" utopia will be achieved. Until then, we worry about ourselves and do "small things" which are presumed to be "better than nothing" even though they are often much worse than nothing.

Aside from the fact that reforming human nature is traditionally (and appropriately in my opinion) in the realm of religion and not politics, it also happens to be congruent with corporate sales and marketing ideas - we can pander to "human nature" but we can't change it, therefore we cannot effect social change. Most liberal activism takes the form of tent revival evangelizing - converting people to our belief system - or snake oil salesman hucksterism - selling people on our ideas. Modern people actually cannot even imagine any alternative to those approaches.

Come September, all good Democrats will be called upon once again to play Jehovah's Witnesses, going door to door evangelizing people, or telemarketers, doing "phone canvassing." Of course, people hate those two approaches more than anything else. Politics in the neighborhoods I work takes place in the local church, the union hall, Grange Hall, the local greasy spoon, and at the coop. But I am not trying to convert people to the religion (oops, sorry - "spirituality") of modern liberalism, nor trying to sell people on anything.

Notice too that it is only our most base and selfish urges that are called "human nature" and therefore unchangeable, and never our better urges. After all, compassion is every bit as much "human nature" as greed and selfishness are - I would argue more so - yet that is never seen as inevitable and unavoidable. Compassion is inevitable and unavoidable, though.

Modern liberalism is libertarianism with an "organic" label slapped on it.

A few months ago there were a couple of revealing threads here.

In one, the OP asked "are there any circumstances under which you would be willing to risk your life for the sake of your country?"

That thread quickly filled up with dozens and dozens of people vehemently and angrily answering "no!" I think TahitiNut and I were the only two who answered "yes."

Then, shortly after that there was a thread asking "would you be willing to go to jail for your political beliefs?"

Again, we had dozens and dozens of people answering "no" and just a couple who said "yes."

Yet many would have me believe that they are "saving the planet" by riding a bike, and become angry and defensive when I express reservations about that.

[readmoreoften]

10. We should definitely keep this conversation going.

(Maybe people in flight from GDP will join in.)

But I couldn't agree more (especially about the liberalism as libertarianism with an organic label.) That's priceless. And unfortunately true.

What we really need to do--in my opinion--is turn to other countries to see how they're fighting. I'd say turn to our own past, but our own past is a more distant nation in many ways than, say, South Africa and certainly any Latin American nation. I'm not sure if I'd die for a country, but I will die for a truth. People get all weak in the knees when you mention truth these days. (But what about Hitler--he thought what he was doing was true! I answer, well you're pretty committed to the right to vote--you think that's 'true'!) But truth is pretty easy to sense.

For example. I went on strike because I was presented with an enormous lie. The lie was: "you're not really a worker." My response was. "But I am a worker." And they said, "Well you do work. That's true. But you're not a worker. So you don't have a right to a union." And when the other not-workers like me voted to strike, I knew I was in a going to lose my job--lose everything in fact. But I struck like everyone else. Why? Because, as Winston Smith says, 2+2=4. As long as you still know 2+2=4, then you're free. When we went to war with Iraq, we all knew they were telling us 2+2=5. This shit isn't rocket science.

I don't know if you ever read a book called "Ethics" by Alain Badiou (published in the US in 2000), but it really changed my perspective on everything. He's a mathematician, political militant, and philosopher, but it's a super accessible book--it was a big inspiration in the current South African Shack Dweller's movement. The book is a diatribe against Western liberal humanism, which it takes to basically total nihilism. It also has its own ethic which is basically 'fidelity to your truth.' He likens awakening to a political truth as being a bit like falling in love in that you can't express it, it disorders your life, it's usually against your own selfish interests, and it transforms you into something larger than yourself and your animal being (but yet never forgetting your animal being!) But the most important thing as that you are faithful to it. In Zapatismo, they call it "the ethics of the search." Both lines of thought believe that the best way to be global is to be local. Both lines of thought don't look for vanguard movements, but believe that any two people are capable of coming together and working together for a common goal, despite their differences. Because globalization is global, it can be fought anywhere at all. Like you said. It just starts with two people. :)

I'm glad we're talking. This is the most real conversation I've had on DU in years. Let's definitely keep it up! I'm glad Orwellian started this thread.

[bobbolink]

21. "liberalism as libertarianism with an organic label" The profundity in this thread is legion.

And, of course, we'll all go to hell for it.

:hi:

[readmoreoften]

23. I think the most important thing we need to start doing...

is understand that the method we're using right now to communicate, cannot be an effective organizing tool as far as really speaking candidly to one another and dreaming up methods of resistance. The internet is a great tool for commiseration and advertising, for information warfare and learning that you're not alone. But we can't ORGANIZE over the net. The reason for this is very simple and obvious. The internet was originally ARPANET and ARPA was the precursor of DARPA. In other words, the internet is a military-industrial invention. We're giving up information over a spy system in order to chat with one another. We're infinitely traceable and trackable. This is no place for us. Trust is barely possible face to face.

It might not be a bad idea to form an online reading group where we can read about past revolutions and revolts and become students of them. The group could be imaginative and creative and we could speculate--like good political fiction writers--and we could, say, fantasize, about possible things that, say, could be done by real historical people. Of course it would have to have a disclaimer that it was for pure entertainment purposes. We wouldn't want a violently radicalized homegrown terrorist to take our imaginings seriously. No, no, we most certainly would not want any of those types around.

[Two Americas]

26. avoidance and denial and escapism

No matter how people dress it up, much of modern liberalism is no more than an expression of people's desperate need to avoid facing reality, to avoid thinking about the need for resistance and self-sacrifice, mixed in with a need to deny our own complicity and assuage our guilt about that.

Were it not for that, things would not seem so complicated and unworkable and difficult to understand or analyze, and people would be able to get clarity, and from that clarity we would no longer be so frustrated and so unable to reach consensus or pull together and work together. The people who do not want clarity, because they know what the frightening implications of that would be, construct elaborate castles in the air of convoluted theories and beliefs and ideas - modern liberalism. By creating a fog, a smokescreen of confusion and fuzzy thinking, all effective political action is blocked at its source - in our ongoing national political discussion, all of our thinking and our communication is muddled and corrupted.

"The group could be imaginative and creative and we could speculate..." Yes. As it is, very little creative or imaginative thinking is permitted. It is immediately ridiculed, attacked and dismissed, and the speaker threatened with ostracization or banishment. This effectively breaks up communication, enforces social conformity, and keeps people in a state of terror and confusion. Then all of that is denied, and anyone pointing it out is ridiculed, attacked and dismissed, and threatened with ostracization or banishment.

[bobbolink]

32. And those of us who are in a nowhere land, with no support, can either die trying

or give up.

I don't disagree with what you're saying, but..... it leaves some of us absolutely nowhere.

[bobbolink]

42. I thought that was worthy of a thoughtful reply, but I guess not.

:shrug:

[bean fidhleir]

45. Can you think of any reason for these answers other than "bad people"?

A few months ago there were a couple of revealing threads here.

In one, the OP asked "are there any circumstances under which you would be willing to risk your life for the sake of your country?"

That thread quickly filled up with dozens and dozens of people vehemently and angrily answering "no!" I think TahitiNut and I were the only two who answered "yes."

Then, shortly after that there was a thread asking "would you be willing to go to jail for your political beliefs?"

Again, we had dozens and dozens of people answering "no" and just a couple who said "yes."

Can you really think of no reason for such answers other than that the answerers are defective?

[bobbolink]

20. "We need people on the front lines of the battle for justice"

I don't even know how to reply......that is the most profound thing I've read on DU for a very long time!

:applause:

"People will go to any ridiculous extreme to avoid pulling together with others, to avoid working as a team, finding common cause, forming groups of mutual defense and support."

You really do have a book in you!

And we can say, "We knew him when...."

:applause:

[Blue_Tires]

30. good points n/t

[bobbolink]

18. "Manifest Destiny" with solar panels... There's a book in there somewhere....

:hi:

[Orwellian_Ghost]

24. So who gets to tell the story?

This was an interesting comment found at the article. There are others as well. I recommend looking at the discussion that comes after the article.

Any experience that shows affluent urban dwellers that they can't control everything is a step in the right direction, IMO. If Doug Fine is telling everybody to do likewise, he's full of manure. (OTOH, composted manure can help good things grow.) If his example gives lots of people some insight into what they're doing -- great. The worth of a symphony or a painting or book doesn't depend on its ability to make people run out and compose their own symphonies, paint their own paintings, write their own books, or otherwise follow in the creator's footsteps.

We do have a little problem here, and Anneli Rufus seems to have overlooked it. I can't overlook it because I live in a place where many affluent urban people come to get away from their affluent urban lives, and in creating their alternatives they've made it hard-to-impossible for the rest of us to live here. What I can't help noticing is that nearly all the stories about such places are written by the affluent urban people who move in, not by the people who've been there forever (or at least for a long time). There are many reasons for this. One is that even those of us who have stories to tell and the skills to tell them well have a real hard time getting the kind of access to agents and publishers and big-circulation magazines that the Doug Fines have, and when we do get it, we're expected to tell the stories that the agents and publishers and big-circulation magazines think their readers want to read.

Affluent liberal oh-so-well-intentioned readers, from "yuppie farmers" to eco-tourists, don't like to be compared to imperial colonizers -- the ones who arrive in a new place, don't recognize that it's already inhabited by sentient beings, and proceed to make it over into their idea of paradise. So we don't get to tell our side of the story. We do get bit parts as "local color" in other people's stories.

Oh yeah -- and we get to read liberal commentators taking each other's inventory in print. Big fun!

[Two Americas]

27. there is the challenge

I can't overlook it because I live in a place where many affluent urban people come to get away from their affluent urban lives, and in creating their alternatives they've made it hard-to-impossible for the rest of us to live here."

That is the ongoing war in rural areas. So many people are not so much voting for the Republicans, as they are voting against the self-righteous and arrogant city slickers. Suburban Democrats and liberals are oblivious to their own prejudice and bias, and more so than any other segment of the population they angrily deny having any prejudice and bias - they are officially the tolerant ones, don't you know?

Those of us who have stories to tell and the skills to tell them well have a real hard time getting the kind of access...

There is the challenge we are facing, and while it can seem enormous and insurmountable, it would be relatively simple to overcome. It would not take "connections" or status, it would not take massive financing, it would not require us to become "somebodies" so that we had clout.

The only thing we need to do is to stop insisting on seeing ourselves and our compatriots and allies as "nobodies."

So long as we are timid and compliant, and think that we must play the game and work within the system, the system that only allows "somebodies" to be heard and that calls us "nobodies" we are supporting and promoting the system that is designed to thwart the aspirations of the people for freedom and justice. Following those who are "somebodies" and striving to become a "somebody" so that you can "do good things" is self-contradictory. The cause of the social problems is in this "becoming a somebody" and in our ideas as to who is a "somebody" and who is a "nobody."

[bobbolink]

33. From what you know of me, I'm sure you know my opinion on that.

I get bashed here because I keep wanting the underdog's story to be told.

A fucking lot of good that does.

x(

[El Pinko]

12. Yup.

NT

[bobbolink]

17. well, that's just a real downer....

:rofl:

picking a nit... REAL self-actualization is actually (heh) a REAL left value.

It's the yuppie version that's giving me a rash. :)

[KoKo]

39. You make a good point. Those who "opt out of 'the Grid'" have the money to make the choice

and the "hell with the rest of us." But, that doesn't mean that the example can't be downsized for others individual circumstances. We've seen how "Media Attention" for "TRENDS" can do wonders to create new MEMES.

I think it's kind of funny that it's only been about 20 years since we've been CONSUMER NATION that we are now looking back to the "Back to Nature Movement" that was strong even during Ronnie Reagan's Presidency! It was the "Dot Com Revolution" that threw us off track with that and Cheap Goods from China and the Explosion of all the new Fast Food Restaurants during the BOOM that got us eating out (with food based on bounty from BIG AGRIBUSINESS ..Chicken & Pork Megalopolises and Monsanto's great Tomato's and other GMO Produce. UGH!)

Back to Nature...fits easily in many of our "time frames" as we've journeyed. I still have all my "organic Gardening books" from the 70's and 80's on my shelf. And my Canning Pot is in the attic along with the jars from my Mom and Grandma... I also own a "sewing machine." It's a beauty from the 1930's that was "electrfied" with all the "attachements. :D I know how to cook, sew, can and make do with less. But...I love to eat out if the food is NEW and FRESH and the staff is offering something different and I've bought Chinese when it didn't pay to buy the fabric and make the product myself in the Clinton and Bush years. But...I know how to survive...I had good teachers...and we all can find ways of coping and learning stuff because the books are out there in the "Used Book Stores" for CHEAP..

[ThomWV]

13. Articles like this disgust me.

A person would just as well read Peter Pan or maybe the Swiss Family Robinson. Rural life, particularly for a person who wishes to leave a small footprint, is not the disneyland experience this damned fool paints it to be. Craig List goat indeed and depending on bio diesel in a place 20 miles from the closest deep fryer.

As a fellow who was born in Washington, DC and lived in Miami, FL (city boy) before reading similar shit to this 30 years ago (is the Mother Earth News still in print?) I can tell you this snare has rotten bait. The work is harder, the injuries more painful, the crops do not yield as much as you need, the rains don't come when they are needed and it floods when they are not, half your neighbors will be asshats; 1 out of 25 will be a thief. Predators will kill your livestock and when that fruck breaks down you better know how to fix it yourself because a 20 mile tow bill over dirt roads will eat up the wallet of even a rich man.

[bobbolink]

14. "Poor people in Chad don't own this pump." How very .... "progressive"

And people wonder why I get so pissed on this forum!!

:nuke:

The elitism of environmentalism. :nuke:

I suppose we'll get another round of "how cool we are, and why can't those poor people just TRY, and they, too, can own a cool pump."

:nuke:

Thanks for posting this. I wasn't feeling angry enough today.

:rofl:

[BlooInBloo]

19. Hahaha - yah, like it's his fault that eco shit is so expensive....

... Good ol DUers - rip on people who tear up the environment, rip on people going above and beyond the call of duty to save it. No pleasing DUers.

[Two Americas]

22. the issue is privatization

This is a political board, and we are having political discussions here. Lifestyle choices, personal preferences, and the like are no substitute for astute political analysis.

The issue is privatization, and the self-centered ethic of rugged individualism, not whether or not we approve of the specific things that people do with their rugged individualism.

The environment is being destroyed by libertarianism - the ethic of every man for himself, with a de-regulated and privatized society. "Greening" libertarianism does not change anything, does not arrest the ongoing destruction, and if we are serious about saving the planet, rather than being content with merely feeling good and being right about it, then the political implications of this article must be discussed. Anything less is irresponsible and anti-social, and places the well-being and survival of millions of human beings at risk.

[Ikonoklast]

28. Yep, don't even try

And if you do, the politically correct here will tear you apart for their perceived slights to those not 'invited'.

But we can think great thoughts and be pleased with ourselves for doing so.

[blindpig]

29. You think a handful of rich dipsticks gonna save the planet?

In all honesty that dude's little deal is a waste of resources. He wants to feel good about himself, his efforts are insignificant for anything else. And what resources went into all of his high tech doodads? And where did his money come from, anyway? And would not the locals, human and otherwise, be better off if he stayed from whence he came? Self-indulgence poorly disguised as virtue.

We're not gonna buy our way out of this catastrophe, that's how we got here. Only by ratcheting down the consumerist treadmill, designed not to deliver goods but rather to yield high profits, and by assuring that all people have a equal share and access to the necessities of life including medical care and work with dignity might we, together as a people, make the best effort to maintain the viability of the Earth. Elitist posturing like this just gets in the way.

[Cerridwen]

31. Did he buy a "pristine" piece of property?

One thing I notice about these stories is that the people in them buy "pristine" land to "get away from it all" which increases, rather than decreases, the human "footprint."

I rarely read about people buying existing, non-"pristine" properties, cleaning them up, then remove themselves from "the grid." Yes, I know, building codes, etc. But wouldn't rehabilitating a structure/property make a bit more sense if you truly want to reverse/reduce human impact? Couldn't quite a bit of "going green" be accomplished in spite of building codes, etc.? Perhaps even using it as an opportunity to change/enhance/educate building departments?

[bobbolink]

34. What are you trying to do, put the real estate dealers out of bidness?

:+

Good to see you again!

:hi:

[Cerridwen]

35. Naw, you know me. Just trying to save the planet one snark at a time.

LOL


Hey, you! Good to see you again, too.

:hi:

[KoKo]

37. Good Question and see post #36.

[KoKo]

36. Why leave NY...I grew the best Veggie Garden I ever had in NYSTATE, Mid Hudson Valley

and I've lived in New Jersey (America's Garden) and now NC and yet have never been able to grow the quality stuff I did there in NY State. But, I guess since I lived there NYS Real Estate Values must have gone so high that the author of this needed to move to New Mexico to buy the acreage he couldn't afford in New York State. But, you don't need alot of land to grow enough to can and dry to save no matter where you live...unless you are in an apartment/high rise in a Condo...or maybe otherwise "land impared."

Good Article, though.

[Cerridwen]

38. Good point.

What you said about "land impaired"; I don't remember where I heard it, but someone I know was talking about her grandmother's coffee can garden. She had a small patio on which she placed coffee cans and grew, tomatoes, squash, eesh, I can't remember the list but you get the idea. She was in a retirement community at the time and shared here bounty with her neighbors. Some of her neighbors started their coffee cans...apparently, they had quite a healthy and varied diet.

Anyway, being "land impaired" should not be an obstacle. My brown thumb; now that is an obstacle. LOL

[bobbolink]

40. "Anyway, being "land impaired" should not be an obstacle."

Right you are.

I have a garden growing in my glove compartment.

:)

[Coexist]

41. he's going to have a hard time of it.

why would he leave NY?

[bean fidhleir]

44. "Why would he leave NY?"

Because he's a self-indulgent putz.

[mitchum]

43. For an alleged humorist, he's not very funny...

but he is indeed a smug yuppie