WorldChanging has an interview with James Howard Kunstler. Very worth reading. Straightforward, to the point, and sharp. Anyway, it’s funny I just ran into this interview, considering I just finished watching The End of Suburbia mere minutes ago. (Kunstler plays a big role in the documentary.)
More of The End of Suburbia later, maybe.
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This is pretty great.
“Hart Sharp Video, the company that distributed Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me on DVD, has signed a deal for a long-term relationship with the director. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Spurlock and Hart Sharp will distribute documentaries with “distinct social relevance and importance to society and the world today” under the new “Morgan Spurlock Presents … ” banner. While some of the films will have received theatrical distribution prior to the DVD release, others will get their first non-festival exposure via Morgan Spurlock Presents …“
So, I am now officially writing for DVguru.com. DVGuru is a blog-style (what isn’t nowadays?) video technology-specific news site. Yippee for easy money! (Wink.)
Yahoo… just realized this, but Who Killed the Electric Car? is opening in New York on 6/28, with more cities to follow at later dates.
The Dancing Rabbit visit is officially over. Now that I am back in the ‘real world’, the ecovillage feels like it is worlds away, part of some strange dream I conjured up… Yet it was just two nights ago that we were staring into the sky, pointing out constellations and watching shooting stars race by (with the occasional satellite, too)…
I don’t necessarily feel like writing up some grand old summary of the experience for the moment… But it certainly was one of the best and most enlightening three weeks I’ve ever experienced. If anything, it has given me an even stronger sense of being and purpose…
What would drive a person to live in an ecovillage? A lot of the folks I know might not understand the desire to do such a thing. Hopefully, little by little, I can clear up the reasons… It’s really not that radical or crazy. It’s actually a reasonable lifestyle choice. You might even realize that living in the suburbs or city is simply crazy. Crazzzy!
The life you are living is unsustainable. (Same for me too, of course, or for anyone that lives within the confines of mainstream society.) We are living a kind of binge lifestyle, voraciously consuming all of the natural resources that the planet Earth has to offer at increasingly rapid rates. (Did someone say oil?) The mass industrialization of the planet has led to the overwhelming exploitation of these non-renewable resources, and helped to increase the staggering pollution of the air we breathe and the water we drink. Politicians and government sit and watch and keep the general populace from knowing too much. Corporations run rampant, filling our heads with meaningless advertising as they try to sell us the products that will help “better our lives”.
Oh yea… Oil, the driving force behind almost all of these inner workings of the civilized world, is running out. Can you imagine the day when it costs you $10, $20, even $30 a gallon to fill up your car so you can simply drive to work? What about the day when oil becomes so expensive that it ends up costing companies more money to “produce” (read: extract) it than to sell it, simply because the oil wells are nearly dry?
Gulp.
I think it’s time to start doing some serious questioning.
Maybe it’s time to become more self-sufficient, no?
Maybe it’s past time…
Here’s a little something that ties into some of the ideas I talked about previously… maybe you’ll want to visit an ecovillage in the middle of nowhere after more reading like this?
Dancing Rabbit is based outside of the town of Rutledge, and Rutledge has a whopping population of 103 people. But that number only includes people living in the actual town itself, and it doesn’t include farmers living around the outskirts, or the DR community itself. Over half the Rutledge population consists of Mennonites. The Mennonites have a similar history to the Amish, although some of their beliefs differ. They are also more “modern” and use electricity and drive cars, whereas the Amish live more simply and without modern “conveniences”.
The main town of Rutledge is fairly desolate, with a lot of the older storefronts long abandoned. The main hub of all activity is a store called Zimmerman’s, a Mennonite-owned grocery store and cafe. Lots of the locals meet up in Zimmerman’s on a daily basis. It’s a pretty surreal experience to walk into the Zimmerman’s cafe and look at the menu, where prices look like they’re from another time period. Coffee is a whopping fifty cents, and entire breakfast meal will run you about $3. Everything is dirt cheap.
Today a group of us biked/walked into town for one of the local resident’s small birthday gatherings outside of Zimmerman’s. A lot of the folks still living in Rutledge are much older, and the younger folks have moved on elsewhere. (They’re all quite friendly, too.)
It’s really interesting to experience the dynamics of a rural setting after living in the suburbs for forever…
