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Nature Commune Living: The Modern Pipe Dream

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posted on Mar, 17 2010 @ 03:25 PM
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Rather than add my thoughts to the existing thread, where they will doubtlessly be drowned out by the influx of people thinking that guy has a great idea, I thought it far better to start a thread here.

So, to begin: Man oh man are you guys delusional. Seriously. You ever look at the list of Global Intentional Communities? You should sometime, it's an eye opener. Here, I’ll even link you: www.ic.org... Compare the ones that are solid and still around with the massive number of “forming” ones. That should tell you something.

Really, there’s a great number of factors the average person doesn’t even begin to consider until the 2nd or 3rd year of working on a project of this magnitude (A friend and I have been investigating for several now). I’ll list the most obvious ones here, and then you can choose to do your own investigating or ignore me and go back to dreaming.

1. The first issue is the cost. The upfront cost is horrendous. To start a community that has any chance of surviving it's first year you'll need to put down at least 100K instantly for supplies, tools, and other material (This is before the horrendous cost of buying the land alone, factor in anywhere from 500K to 1M for that). You skimp out on this absolutely crucial step, and you will fail. Heck, you might even Die if you are out of reach.

2. The second issue is inexperience. Don’t worry, it’s perfectly natural for the person just stumbling across this to go “Hell yeah! Lets go live with tree’s, whoo!”. Now that you’ve done that though, you really need to think to yourself “What do I bring to the table?”

-Can you grow food? (Do you KNOW agriculture, not learn it, KNOW it)

-Can you design and build solid housing? (Key, your first buildings need to survive all types of weather without collapsing)

-Can you Hunt, Fish, or gather edible plants? (Far different from picking berries, berries won’t feed 20 people through 3-6 months of winter)

-Can you cook, prepare, or preserve raw foods so that they are not only edible, but able to be stored through the winter? (You won’t survive without preserves built up)

-Do you have other “Basic” skills that can be leveraged by the community?

If you have any of those, then great! You’re on the right track. If you don’t, then don’t bother considering founding/joining a Ecovilliage (the term Commune is outdated) until you do. You will be useless until you have a viable skill, and if your entire group is made up of “learners” then your community will fail, or Die.

3. So, you’ve made it past the first two stumbling blocks, you have a great funding source and a group of skilled people ready to forgo society and rough it for a few years while building a haven. Great! Now where do you want to live?

You could decide to go completely off grid In a 2nd or 3rd world country. Of course, in this case you will have to deal with the deadly creatures, the virus’s and bacteria infesting the water and plants, and the roaming gangs that will rape you, shoot you, and pillage your village. Sure, the land is cheap, but the costs outweigh the benefits by far.

You could buy land in a 1st world country, but here you’ll be looking at very, very expensive land prices. Here in British Columbia, for example, 80 acre’s of semi-wooded land will run you a cool $1M dollars up front. Additionally, Governments are taking a hard line with off-grid communities here in North America, you’ll have to jump through a lot of hoops or you will be denied permission and thrown off your own land (or even put in jail!).

4.Wherever you decide to plop down however, you need to do a comprehensive survey. BEFORE YOU BUY THE LAND. You need to know:

- The exact composition of the soil, the clay content, etc. (This will tell your agriculture expert whether your land will be able to support crops, or whether you will starve. Additionally, if you are building with cob, you need soil with significant clay deposits somewhere. )

- The length of the growing season. (You can’t survive if your growing season is too short.)

- The average rainfall for at least the past 5 years. (Optional, but a great benefit. The land may look green now, but it could have just come out of a 50 year drought, especially if you are stupid and go with land in a 3rd world country or below the equator).

- Additionally, you need to survey the land to decide where you should build. Are there marshes on the land? Land that would become a marsh in heavy rain? Where is the soil the best? (Don’t build your houses on the best agricultural land!) etc etc


5. Now, you’ve taken care of all of that, you’ve got a great plan set out. How are you going to generate revenue? You WILL need revenue. You will need to buy new tools, you will need agricultural supplies, you will need spare parts, repairs to your infrastructure, new solar panels. You will NEED money down the line, how will you get it?

- Tourism is the way most communities do it right now. Charge a few hundred a pop for a few days retreat, or a few hundred to a few thousand for a course on something “natural”. This is not a dependable stream, however, especially as the economy continues to deteriorate.

- You could grow enough produce to sell to markets or wholesalers at market price. It will take a few years to get to this point, however, and small scale farming is one of the least profitable things on the planet.

- You could create artisan crafts and trinkets and peddle them. This is even worse than the first two, however, and unless you have great talent is highly unrealistic.

- The options are endless. If you aren’t completely cut off, many modern members in communities have online businesses of some sort set up, generating their income through web design and whatnot. Depends on how invisible you want to be.


Really, I could write a freaking book on the whole subject, but I think you can get the gist of it up there. The short of it is: Unless you are dedicated, have the money, and talented in at least a few area’s, you are going to risk everything and possible even DIE depending on how you go about this. You simply cannot traipse off into the woods with a train of other people and expect to set up shop and start surviving. That kind of thing is great fun when you are 10 with your friends, but at the end of the day you always went home to a warm supper and a tuck into bed by mommy.

A few more points before I go:

- You will HAVE to pay land taxes anywhere in the 1st world. See point 5.

- The first 2-3 years will be unbelievably hard. Harder than anything you could imagine. Half of your group will probably leave. You will all give up, or Die if you are unprepared in the slightest.

- Realistically, heavily wooded settings are not optimal. Ticks, shade, and detritus from the tree’s make scratching a living out very hard. There are experiments in woodland agriculture, but they are not scalable to full community size.

- If you have kids, or plan to have kids, don’t do this. This is tantamount to child abuse. You will be putting them through 3 years of hardship or risking their lives if you currently have children, or setting them up to be permanently stunted compared to mainstream society if you have children in the community. Plus, you could very well die in childbirth if you are in the middle of nowhere without a doctor.

- If you can’t find a doctor, don’t bother. Living in the middle of nowhere with zero medical advice is nominating yourself for a Darwin award.


Finally, I’m not saying don’t go for it! Getting off grid is one of the best things you could do, especially with the steadily degrading nature of modern civilization. I fully expect to be prepared to do so in the next decade or so, and then I will be doing so.

All I’m saying is cut with the neo-hippy sillyness and get with reality. It isn’t all sunshine and roses when you’re trying to squeeze life from the earth.



posted on Mar, 17 2010 @ 04:18 PM
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Well said.
I think there are people here how do know what it takes to go out and survive like this but i think more people have watched survivor man and read a book so therefore they know "everything".



posted on Mar, 17 2010 @ 05:37 PM
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reply to post by zaiger
 


Thank you. I apologize for the poor formatting, trying to get all that out while at work took a bit of finagling, didn't have time to add section headers and whatnot.

Got a little incensed at the pure ignorance I see sometimes around here. And really, I'd hate to see some poor sod go through with their dreams and end up dead or homeless as a result, especially with how many people with children were considering this foolishness!



posted on Mar, 17 2010 @ 05:50 PM
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reply to post by D.E.M.
 


the formatting was fine but i think people get confused when it comes to "survival". Most survival books fall under certian themes.
Boy Scout- How to look like a survivalist on a weekend camping trip infront of your firends.
Rescue- How to hold out for a few weeks (at most) untill rescue comes
lost- How to get from where you are stranded to help

Very few survival books focus on how to live in the wild permanently. While it is good to know what plants you can eat it is better to find out that your body will shut down or start to eat its self should it not get the proper ammount of callories, protein and everything else.
These commune ideas are good for a very small group of 10-12 anything beyond that you start building a village which will inevitably try turn into that which you originally left in the first place.



posted on Mar, 17 2010 @ 06:21 PM
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Amen! Most people have no clue what it takes to live off grid even in the 1st world just a few miles from a modern town. It takes a lot of hard work and definite skills. Most people that have done it had to do it in a slow transition and hold down a job whole they learned the skills needed and learned to cope with the intense personal responsibility it takes. Solar electric is not cheap and takes maintenance and batteries wear out and are not cheap.

Communes generally don't work unless they are based on some mutual belief system and usually religious and still most don't work. What does work but is pretty much non existent these days is the small town model that built America.

Everyone was autonomous but worked together voluntarily and traded amongst each other. If you didn't pull your weight you starved. If you needed help due to circumstances like injury or illness your neighbors voluntarily helped you till you could get back on your feet. There was usually a town council or assembly to deal with each other but it was not a democracy so you could vote to oppress your neighbor out of the fruits of his labors, it was a forum to agree or not to deal with each other fairly. It was all voluntary no coercion unless you violated others rights. And then justice was often harsh as stealing the fruits of others labor often put thier lives in danger.

[edit on 17-3-2010 by hawkiye]



posted on Mar, 17 2010 @ 06:36 PM
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I can't believe you seriously think living in nature would cost $100k or more. That's not "nature living," that's rebuilding civilization in the woods.

You city people have no roots left to your past at all.



posted on Mar, 17 2010 @ 06:50 PM
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reply to post by bsbray11
 


Oh my dear, dear poster. Trust me, once you've considered the costs of the tools and material needed to construct a habitable standard of living with no connection to society for more than 1 person, the costs are higher than that.

Sure, you could go live like a caveman, but you would DIE. It has nothing to do with living in the city. Most of BC is rural in the extreme outside of Vancouver, and I've spent my life around BC.

It's a simple fact, if you want a standard of living that is comfortable, you need to shell out for the components. Solar panels are not cheap. Batteries are not cheap. Tools, simple tools, are not cheap. Etc etc etc. If you are starting this from scratch, 100K is the minimum you can expect to put down.

It's not rebuilding civilization, it's making sure you don't poison yourself and can eat through the winter.



posted on Mar, 17 2010 @ 07:40 PM
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Originally posted by bsbray11
I can't believe you seriously think living in nature would cost $100k or more.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking, such as: when the economy finally collapses and we riot and burn civilization to the ground, how we all gonna get our hands on that kind of cash in order to start our new lives the day after that happens and we are sent running into the forest to hide and survive (which somebody will also eventually burn down too I suppose)?



posted on Mar, 18 2010 @ 03:07 AM
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Originally posted by D.E.M.
Oh my dear, dear poster. Trust me, once you've considered the costs of the tools and material needed to construct a habitable standard of living with no connection to society for more than 1 person, the costs are higher than that.


Trust me, no, they're not. Look man I've been researching this stuff for years and if you give me $100 I can buy enough electrical conduit from Lowes to build a geodome, go out into the woods, dig up some ground, level it out, and build the geodome, cover it with tarp and then bury it with dirt.










"Really? $100?"

Yes. A 10-ft. section of their lightest electrical conduit sells for less than $2. That's a little less than $1 per 5-foot section that builds an 8-ft tall dome. And you'd need about 60 pieces for it. So that's really about $60 but of course after it's all said and done it might take $100 for other things, might not. And I already have tarp and a shovel, and nuts and bolts are only a few dollars.



And if you want more space (I don't, I'm trying to AVOID being seen), you can ramp up the dimensions or even build more than one and link them together, though of course that goes over $100.





Sure, you could go live like a caveman, but you would DIE.


Maybe you would. Then again I have a feeling you haven't graduated high school yet either. What do you say?



It's a simple fact, if you want a standard of living that is comfortable


See, you are just talking about trying to recreate your lazy ass way of living in the wild. That's not going to work in the first place. No one that lives this way is sitting around by an electric stove watching DVDs on a flat-screen TV while browsing the internet on their lab top. Yeah, I'm sure that would take $100k or more before you felt pampered enough. Like I said, you are totally out of touch with your ancestors. Even my grandparents survived with barely anything but a wood stove and clothes during the Great Depression in rural Virginia. You have no conception of this kind of living. Homeless people live on the streets in worse conditions even still today.


Solar panels are not cheap. Batteries are not cheap.


No electricity, sorry. Oh no, the end of the world!

Even if I wanted an electrical system, I'm an electronics engineering major. I've already done all the calculations for how much power I would have to generate to run appliances like a stereo, small low-power TV and DVD player, dehydrator, 20-watt guitar amplifier for several hours a day every day. The complete system, batteries, meters, AC/DC converters and all, runs about $1000. The price of a cheap but functional vehicle. I'm no longer interested in pursuing this for a number of reasons, one of which being that by living amongst nature I plan on getting AWAY from these kinds of things which I feel are just distractions that keep the masses occupied when they aren't locked into their 9-5's. But nonetheless, by your extravagant reasoning you would've probably told me that electricity alone would set me back a few thousand, if not in the 10's of thousands.



Tools, simple tools, are not cheap. Etc etc etc. If you are starting this from scratch, 100K is the minimum you can expect to put down.


I already have tools and access to machinery that I'd need. Which would not be much. $100k is what you need if nature living isn't for you in the first place.


It's not rebuilding civilization, it's making sure you don't poison yourself and can eat through the winter.


Yeah, like people couldn't do that before central heating and twinkies were invented. The only way it would require as much money as you are saying is if you are spoiled rotten and would never make it in a survival scenario or living amongst nature in the first place. You're not SUPPOSED to just carry over your current lifestyle to the woods. Nature commune living. Living amongst nature. It doesn't mean what you think it means. It's something infinitely better.


Ever read Walden? Another great example. Thoreau went out and built his own shack in New England, brought some seeds to grow some food, and he had little else than that and some books and writing implements. And he lived like that for at least a year and wrote of his experiences. It's a literary classic. Did it take him $100k? Hell no. Was he spoiled rotten so that he couldn't live without his TV and electricity? Hell no, TV and electricity weren't even around back then. Must be pretty incomprehensible to you huh?

[edit on 18-3-2010 by bsbray11]



posted on Mar, 18 2010 @ 03:25 AM
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reply to post by D.E.M.
 


Although you have many relevant points in your post, I think a lot of people know exactly what to expect in this kind of move. Most of the people who wish to live this pipe dream are tired of living in a society where technology is held over us on a rubber band, and every time it drops just low enough for us to grasp, it bounces back out of our reach. They are tired of paying for the comforts you speak of at the cost of their dignity and humanity.

Yes, you are right, most of us are not prepared, not trained and are still learning. I can't really speak for anyone else on that subject though. As for me.. Sure, I may die trying to make out a decent living out there in the wild, but I would rather die knowing that I died trying to achieve something than die in my sleep with the AC on and television buzzing in the city any day.

As for bandits, and threats of violence.. well, most of us are Americans. I think ego would be the biggest threat out of anything.

Well made post, made me think some.

[edit on 18-3-2010 by LeTan]



posted on Mar, 18 2010 @ 03:41 AM
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I was involved in a situation similar to an intentional community, and the thing that is the killer is not so much the physical things you need as it is the personalities of the people involved.

I am convinced that the only way such a community can survive the initial stages is if there is one person who is the "visionary" and who also has a huge amount of organizational skills and immense practical knowledge of how to do things... and whose word is final. Which means the people involved have to give up a lot of freedom...in the quest for freedom.

It is not an adventure to be taken lightly and the people with the skills to make it work..are few and far between.



posted on Mar, 18 2010 @ 05:09 AM
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reply to post by bsbray11
 



Good luck living on one of those especially middle of winter. Used to eating everyday are you? Have fresh water to everyday? It takes time and preparation to have a sustainable life style year after year.

The Op is not talking about recreating the same lifestyle of modern society just maintaining the necessities of life. You can read all the crap you want on the internet but you don't have a clue till you have lived off grid for a year or two. Anyone can camp in a tent for a little bit and say gee this isn't so bad but to live that way permanently is something very few will tolerate. And why would I want to live like a homeless person? They depend on handouts from those who work in society and most have given up on life period and live a miserable existence. Sure people can have some miserable existence but most people prefer some meaningful life even if it is old school like our ancestors.

Sustaining a self sufficient life style takes skill determination and most of all hard work. It also takes money of 're to try and prepare first. Unless you know where to dig iron ore and smelt it into tools or maybe you were going to use stone tools? It doesn't happen by buying 60 bucks worth of conduit and some tarps and heading out into the woods.

Even the wood stove your grand parents had would cost you some money today for something comparable. And you need a truck or vehicle to hual it out there, gas for the vehicle etc.

Where you going to get food and water and heat and etc? What if you get a tooth ache do you know how to take care of it? What of you get sick do you know what local herbs may heal it? What if your water source is frozen? What of your saw or axe is broken? etc etc etc. it takes preparation not some internet BS about an electrical conduit geodesic dome and some tarps.



posted on Mar, 18 2010 @ 05:16 AM
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Originally posted by hawkiye
Good luck living on one of those especially middle of winter. Used to eating everyday are you? Have fresh water to everyday? It takes time and preparation to have a sustainable life style year after year.


Yes, I know. You guys should really stop projecting your own inexperience when you talk about this stuff. I am used to eating every day now but there have been times when I was not, not like you would know anyway. I have been homeless myself, and I did NOT get government hand outs or anything else. I lived alternately between my car and outdoors when I was out of money for about 4 months -- during the winter. And I know how scarce edible food is, in the winter. I have all the field guides for wild edibles in this part of the country and I am familiar with their content and finding them and eating them in practice. I also know how cold it gets. I also know how hard it is to chop wood and what it's like to walk for miles just to get where you need to go. Food and heat are the most basic top priorities for survival and I never said anything to indicate that they weren't, so I don't know how you get off chastising me unless it just pains you to think about how you would be unable to cope in such a situation yourself, so much that you assume because you're too pansy to do it I must not be able to either. What do you know about living outdoors?


The Op is not talking about recreating the same lifestyle of modern society just maintaining the necessities of life.


Electricity is not a necessity. Enough said. The OP is trying to pamper himself in the woods. What he says is not at all required for living outdoors. You must forget that all of these conveniences are commodities of the last few hundred years at most.


You can read all the crap you want on the internet but you don't have a clue till you have lived off grid for a year or two. Anyone can camp in a tent for a little bit and say gee this isn't so bad but to live that way permanently is something very few will tolerate.


And you somehow already know that I wouldn't be able to tolerate it. Again, you should stop projecting.


And why would I want to live like a homeless person? They depend on handouts from those who work in society and most have given up on life period and live a miserable existence.


This is a stereotype and not universally true.


Where you going to get food and water and heat and etc? What if you get a tooth ache do you know how to take care of it? What of you get sick do you know what local herbs may heal it? What if your water source is frozen? What of your saw or axe is broken? etc etc etc. it takes preparation not some internet BS about an electrical conduit geodesic dome and some tarps.


Really, keep the whining and the crying coming it, I'm loving it.

You're just one less person of the millions in this country I have to worry about competing with when SHTF huh? With all your moaning about how impossible it is to live without electricity I can already tell you wouldn't last.

[edit on 18-3-2010 by bsbray11]



posted on Mar, 18 2010 @ 05:36 AM
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reply to post by bsbray11
 


Gee I must of hit a nerve by the mentally challenged rhetoric coming from you now. Why do you assume you know what my experience is? Did it ever dawn on you that I just might be speaking from experience of living off grid and a self sufficient lifestyle and not regurgitating some internet BS? Apparently that thought never crossed your mind.

And LOL at the BS about how superior you think you will be when TSHTF. You have no clue but hopefully you'll get one before the great die off happens and wise up enough to realize you aren't anywhere near being prepared for the SHTF.

Peace.



posted on Mar, 18 2010 @ 05:43 AM
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Originally posted by hawkiye
Did it ever dawn on you that I just might be speaking from experience of living off grid and a self sufficient lifestyle and not regurgitating some internet BS?


From the way you put on like electricity is a necessity, "off the grid" to you probably just means generating your own electricity, and honestly I doubt you even do that. You just talk a bunch of crap. You gather or grow all your own food and water, ride a bike to get where you need to go, sleep bundled up in a million blankets at night? No.

No, you whine too much about how hard it would be to actually be doing that. And you must not be too damned far "off the grid" if you are still using the internet.



posted on Mar, 18 2010 @ 10:45 AM
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reply to post by bsbray11
 


Bsbray, I'm going to let you in on a secret. I graduated high school years ago. I've visited several communities over the past few years. Some very close friends of mine grew up in a commune. I've numerous books on the topic, real, hardcover books. Hell, I've even taken courses on the subject.

In short, take your mightier than thou attitude and go elsewhere. You can try and tell my I have no experience all you want, but you are exactly the type of person who would get a community killed if they followed your advice.

This thread wasn't created for the individual hermit who wants to go live alone. That's an entirely different style of life that requires considerably less investment to maintain. This thread was created to point out the problems associated with building a living, sustainable community off the grid. That situation requires a hell of a lot more preparation than $100 worth of electrical conduit.

Are all of those 20 settlers going to have everything they need before they set out? No, they are going to have to buy a great many things, which is where that $100K comes in. $100K for the basic requirements to sustain 20 people for the first 3 years is a very low ball. That's just over $1500 a YEAR per person in material. Really, that's an insanely low amount considering that you will be starting from nothing and have no income. Really.

I notice that you still haven't addressed Hawkeye's point, nor mine, that maintaining the community requires a continuous investment in new tools and other material. Without a forge, you aren't going to be making a new plow next year, you have to buy it. What if your Woodstove Cracks or Explodes? They do that, you know.

So, in short, while your experience may very well be suited to a nomadic lifestyle that is somewhat dependent on the handouts of society whether you want to admit it or not, it is NOT applicable to the topic at hand.

Before I go, electricity is a highly useful convenience that only a fool would give up. Why the hell would I want television in the forest? I haven't had a TV for over a decade. The ability to preserve food in a small cooler/freezer (which is about the maximum I could expect to power with only 1 or 2 cheap and small solar panels) and thus prevent bacterial buildup and food wastage, however, is a benefit that cannot be measured.



posted on Mar, 18 2010 @ 02:03 PM
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Originally posted by D.E.M.
Bsbray, I'm going to let you in on a secret. I graduated high school years ago. I've visited several communities over the past few years. Some very close friends of mine grew up in a commune. I've numerous books on the topic, real, hardcover books. Hell, I've even taken courses on the subject.


Yet you can't envision living amongst nature without electricity or other commodities costing in the range of $100k, when people do it all the time FOR FREE -- AND they survive!! This whole thread is BS, and not like my initials. You just keep trying to say it would be absolutely necessary to pay all this money to have all these nice things, when really it would not be necessary at all to survive indefinitely, and that's the sum of this whole conversation.


In short, take your mightier than thou attitude and go elsewhere.


Well what do you know, here I am replying to you despite your orders anyway.



This thread wasn't created for the individual hermit who wants to go live alone. That's an entirely different style of life that requires considerably less investment to maintain.


Right. And there is a whole spectrum in between. As in, in between pampering yourself no different than a well-off city life, and roughing it with no money at all. And infinite options in between. Coming on here and telling people they'd need $100k+ just to live in the wild is only telling me that you're not the kind of person who would actually want to really live out amongst nature in the first place. At least not in the same way a native would think of living amongst nature. You're just trying to bring the city with you and thus the basis of you saying it would cost a damned lot of money.


This thread was created to point out the problems associated with building a living, sustainable community off the grid. That situation requires a hell of a lot more preparation than $100 worth of electrical conduit.


Again, not necessarily, no, it doesn't. If you're trying to build a modern town in the mountains then yeah, that's going to be ridiculously expensive. If you want to mimic native tribes, then no, it wouldn't cost much, if anything at all. But you apparently frown and spit on traditional ways of living close to nature because they are not "comfortable" enough for you. And like I said there are infinite possibilities in between here.


I notice that you still haven't addressed Hawkeye's point, nor mine, that maintaining the community requires a continuous investment in new tools and other material. Without a forge, you aren't going to be making a new plow next year, you have to buy it. What if your Woodstove Cracks or Explodes? They do that, you know.


I actually am not planning on having a wood stove at all. I'm going to build a geodome this summer and I'm going to place a fire pit adjacent to it.

I'm not fooling with a forge or mining or any of that, but you can rest assured that if someone were hell-bent on it, as I'm sure many individuals in this world already are, you could create all of that the same way the first people did. That's also not impossible by any means. It's just more back-breaking labor, which is why I don't even want to fool with it.

All I'm really saying here is that you intentionally neglect an infinite number of other possibilities just to try to make your point. And so your point is worthless. Because no, it wouldn't necessarily cost as much as you say to live amongst nature, even in a community. It would only cost that much given all of these requirements you are making up and calling necessities, like electricity for example. You don't need electricity to survive. But you guys are trying to say this is another "necessity." Yeah, right. You can just stay at home in the city, it's really no skin off my back. I just don't buy your "it would cost a hundred thousand dollars" bull.


So, in short, while your experience may very well be suited to a nomadic lifestyle that is somewhat dependent on the handouts of society whether you want to admit it or not, it is NOT applicable to the topic at hand.


Can you tell me how I was dependent on "handouts" and what exactly was handed out to me? No, you can't, because you're talking out of your rear end and you don't even know me. The only money I have EVER received from the government is money they owed me from paying too much in on taxes. I paid for my own car, I paid for my own gas. Anyone telling me I was being given "handouts" all those winter nights I was freezing cold and alone and hungry, can kiss my ass, really and truly.



Before I go, electricity is a highly useful convenience that only a fool would give up.


Highly useful, yes. Only a fool would give up? I wonder what a Hopi Elder would say about that, but I guess in your eyes he would just be a fool too. Imo someone who is incapable of giving up electricity is just weak. I admit it's very useful, but if you can't ultimately live without it then that's an issue. And at any rate it's not a necessity. It's a luxury.


The ability to preserve food in a small cooler/freezer (which is about the maximum I could expect to power with only 1 or 2 cheap and small solar panels) and thus prevent bacterial buildup and food wastage, however, is a benefit that cannot be measured.


That would be definitely be useful but it's still not the only or even most efficient way of preserving food.

[edit on 18-3-2010 by bsbray11]



posted on Mar, 18 2010 @ 02:45 PM
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reply to post by bsbray11
 


Sir, I tire of replying to your very broad generalizations of me. You do not know me, my background, or my experience and your painting of me as a "City Boy" who "Spits on spiritual beliefs" and other such attacks are quite frankly demeaning and below both of us.

As you have repeatedly failed to address the hard points in my argument, such as the breakdown in funding I stated in my previous post:


Are all of those 20 settlers going to have everything they need before they set out? No, they are going to have to buy a great many things, which is where that $100K comes in. $100K for the basic requirements to sustain 20 people for the first 3 years is a very low ball. That's just over $1500 a YEAR per person in material. Really, that's an insanely low amount considering that you will be starting from nothing and have no income. Really.

Coupled with your continued cherry picking of my points to suit your agenda (which I still cannot fathom), I feel no need to continue to respond to you.

If you would like to return and be more civil and logical in your responses, then by all means I will take you up on your points. As it stands, it seems you can only respond by insulting me and refusing to concede to any of my very valid concerns, thus I can only presume you are a troll.

As I've stated time and again, this thread was created with the intention of giving people who are interested in creating an off-grid sustainable community a good look at the challenges they are likely to face. Not to address the issues (both practical and mental) associated with becoming a roaming hermit or taking a group of people into the backwoods with no preparation or long term survival plans.

Comparison with existing or historical native groups is also not a good foundation for your argument. Modern inhabitants of western civilization do not have the foundation of skills from birth that those people did, and it takes many years to learn them. I addressed this point, however, in my opening post. Simply saying "The Hopi did it, so Joe Creation and his Wife from Denver can do it too if they try hard enough!" is foolhardy, and the kind of thinking that gets you Killed. Fast. By your own Ignorance.



posted on Mar, 18 2010 @ 03:02 PM
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reply to post by D.E.M.
 


Tell you what. You keep throwing around these numbers like you've crunched them. Show me what exactly you are buying for this and how much you would expect to pay.

Let's see what exactly you are basing all of these numbers on, and what's really necessary and what's not.

[edit on 18-3-2010 by bsbray11]



posted on Mar, 18 2010 @ 03:18 PM
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I could live in my own commune of one, off the grid, for the price of a hammock and backpack.

I think the OP raises some great points, and I would hope anyone considering commune living would do a lot of research, especially into where a lot of the communes we read about are actually at today. I was just reading up on some commune called shambhala shasta, and it looked so cool.

But the last reference I found was from a couple of yrs ago.

It seems these places pop up and bam egos collide, eventually.

I grew up near an American utopia, or should I say former failed American utopia. It had a cool outdoor bushes maze. But the utopia failed, and a utopia is much like a commune.

People who want to get back to nature would do better spending as much time as possible camping or other more solitary/only couple of folks types of ventures.

But I wont rain on anyone's parade, and I support anyone's choice to live they way they feel called to live.

If those people fail to research this lifestyle before they live it, that is on them.



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