paghat wrote:

I remember visiting a commune not terribly far from Eugene that pretended
to be an Eco-friendly self-sufficient village capable of sustaining a
hundred people, but usually had no more than ten to twenty unbathed
over-the-hill hippies in insufficient housing. The dream or plan sounded
lovely if a little bit cultic in that they would literally promise "inner
wealth" in trade for all the money you could bring their marginal outfit,
& used all kinds of far-left ecological catch-phrases mixed with
Rashneeshi-like promises of perfect happiness, in a shockingly
religious-sounding rather than environmental context. The fact that they
lasted thirty years instead of vanishing like all the other Eugene
communes of the 70s sounds impressive, until one realizes their
"self-sufficiency" is actually reliance on lumberjacks & saw mills as they
sell off the trees surrounding the place. I kept in touch with a friend
who lived there some years (fellow science fiction nerd) & she was gung-ho
at the beginning, but disillusioned toward the end. I used to get a
well-produced little magazine from her which was less about country life &
shared community than it was about the cultic & political jargon &
pipedreams on how they would "soon" have achieved a hermetic balance of &
never need the outside world at all, so send money now.

It seems strange to me that "normal" people so rarely buy into the
self-sufficient cooperative idea. It's so often either antisemitic klan
types trying to get away from the mark-of-cain ******s & world-taking-over
yids, armed to the teeth & waiting for the Feds to break down the doors &
kill everyone; or else complete stoners who never outgrew the far-out-man
hippy era or wish they lived in an L-5 colony which you just know would be
a leaky rancid-smelling rustbucket losing airpressure rapidly at their
level of competence, & waiting for the Feds to rush in & arrest everyone
because of the marijuana crop hidden at the end of a labyrinth of
blackberry briars.

The latter type of eco-lefties in Oregon might actually have turned their
cooperative ranches into successful wholesale nurseries or hybrid
rhododendron farms & actually achieved something for themselves, as it
rains so perpetually that one wouldn't have even have to water the nursery
stocks. But when have you seen stoners succeed at anything. It would be
nice if regular sober middle-of-the-road folks with NEITHER the cultic
eco-jargon nor the fear/hate agenda could have rural eco-friendly dreams &
then really achieve them, but one rarely sees that; if it exists it
doesn't advertise itself as loudly. The real dream of course would be to
live harmoniously with each other universally, not to drop out with either
stockpiles of military gear or magic mushrooms.

You write pretty well, but you suffer from acute
logorrhea and thus write too much; far too much.

I'm reading this in misc.rural, where people frequently
inquire about living "off the grid". I think they are,
for the most part, overly taken with the American
frontier mythology. They all want to be Jim Bridger or
Kit Carson. I have no doubt that if a Wenzel propane
stove (http://tinyurl.com/ytfl) had been available in
their time, Bridger and Carson would have used them.

You wrote, "It would be nice if regular sober
middle-of-the-road folks with NEITHER the cultic
eco-jargon nor the fear/hate agenda could have rural
eco-friendly dreams & then really achieve them, but one
rarely sees that; if it exists it doesn't advertise
itself as loudly." I think it does exist, and I think
you correctly identify the issue: it doesn't advertise
itself. There was an article in yesterday's L.A. Times
(http://www.latimes.com/la-me-greenbu...,5190938.story)
about a man in South Carolina working to promote "green
burial", in which only simple caskets, or no caskets at
all, are used. Successful life simplification usually
occurs in small, unseen ways, not in a paradoxically
grandiose movement "off the grid".