Off the grid life on the mesa

I just finished watching this documentary about a group of people [upto 400] living on a mesa in New Mexico. These people live in a community without the modern conviences, no or little electricity, no running water. Here is the trailer and if your able do watch this movie I saw it on the Sundance movie channel:



I do think these people have the right idea but they don't seem to have a united direction, I would solve the no running water issue first thing. Then I would investigate how to make a township out of this area [15square miles], but I do give these people credit for living life as free as they can.

I see a bunch of nuts living in a garbage dump. If they can't even clean the junk out of their yards how could you expect them to organize a project to bring running water to their homes/trailers ?

Living on a mesa that only gets about 10 inches of rain per year pretty much prevents you from collecting that as a water source, and the remote location would make it difficult to run a pipeline for water.
By the looks of the place I also doubt they could afford the cost of setting up a reliable supply line, water storage and purification facility.

I don't want to be too critical, after all, they are living the way they choose.
Though they're wrong about living without rules other than their own. They fall under all the same laws and rules that every other US citizen does.

I saw the same documentary, I thought it was great. The fortitude this ppl have is awesome, reminds me living on the farm!

That definately is worth watching...do you have a link to the full documetary/episodes??

Originally posted by anxietydisorder
I see a bunch of nuts living in a garbage dump. If they can't even clean the junk out of their yards how could you expect them to organize a project to bring running water to their homes/trailers ?

I saw plenty of solar panels in the documentary and the Rio Grand river was five miles away, seems to me they could hook one of the cells upto a pump and lay some pipe to a central collecting point within this community, it would not cost a huge sum of money to do this, they seem to have enough money for booze and uh other extra circular activities, they need to start a fund to achieve this.

Living on a mesa that only gets about 10 inches of rain per year pretty much prevents you from collecting that as a water source, and the remote location would make it difficult to run a pipeline for water.
By the looks of the place I also doubt they could afford the cost of setting up a reliable supply line, water storage and purification facility.

I would set up a series of pools of water going into the next pool would go through some type of filtration kind of like a aquarium I would also have living plants living in these pools to help purify the water, plus carbon and other cheap filtering media.

I don't want to be too critical, after all, they are living the way they choose.
Though they're wrong about living without rules other than their own. They fall under all the same laws and rules that every other US citizen does.

This is why I posted they need to form a township, they just need to get organized more with a direction to head in. If they have a reliable water supply they could grow much more food and sell it on a roadside market and use the money to better all of there lives.

[edit on 28-5-2008 by LDragonFire]

Originally posted by citizen smith
That definately is worth watching...do you have a link to the full documetary/episodes??

It was just released this month here is the dudes myspace off the grid so I doubt that the full documentary is free online yet.

I'm seriously considering moving out there. I've had it with the big cities and most of our government.

These people seem to have the right idea, a real community, each helping where he/she is able and each free to be themselves.

As for becoming a township...why the hell would they want to do that? It will only bring more government restrictions and laws and regulations.

Pack up a bag or two, hitch a ride or take a bus...meet me tonight in Freedom City!

400 people? A bunch a city-slickers! Where my family's from there's not 80 people in 50 square mile area. Nearest neighbors who aren't family are about 18 miles away. From my brothers house's, there's not more than 3 people in any directions in 3 miles radius. Even the local meth-heads are afraid to go down the road my lil' brother lives on. Might be all the boar and deer skulls he's got stuck upon top of the fence line posts. You can hear the trucks at night on the old US highway, 8 miles away. I lived there and it's spooky quiet at night. Those yea-hoos wouldn't last a week down at the EL Vacero without an 'accident' happening to them.

Jugding by the trailer, I see about the same thing as anxietydisorder does. A bunch of nuts living in a dump with no central or decentralized organization or order. How can they expect anything positive to come from living lawless in a dump of a community?

There is nothing free about removing rules and laws and living out in the desert shooting at stuff with shotguns. If you want to create a healthy community where you could live and raise kids free from the boundaries of the world around you, you need to organize it properly, learn to clean up after yourself and have collectivly issued rules that bind the individual... if you do not have that, any community will transform into something higly authoritarian very fast. And it will end with either the members of the community destroying themselves, or the government law enforcement destroying it for them.

The idea of moving off the grid and organizing your own communities based on your own ideologies, being self sufficient and free is positive in itself, but you should adhere to the laws of the nation you are living on, or at the least create some sort of order for yourself. "dont steal from your neighbor and dont shot your neighbor" sort of doesnt cut it. Apart from the concept of trying to create a community for themselves, I saw nothing positive or constructive about that gang of people. It did not look like a good environment to live in, or at least not to raise kids in. It didnt strike me as a community with any potential to prosper.

I realize we should be mindful of what real facts we extract from a simple trailer though, or even the full documentary. Documentary film makers tend to dig deep for the shocking, unusual and backwards behavior. We don't know if what was in the trailer was representative for the community as a whole at all.

reply to post by me_ofef_seraph


MOS, you're applying your Euro-Western social standards upon folks who are rejecting them. Just like the Europeans did when they arrived and started conquering the Native Americans. We all know how well that worked out. The then US gov't stuck them in the worst places they could find with no access to their traditional watering sources or sacred religious sites on many reservations and told them to live with it.


These folks will either learn to get along all by themselves without gov't interference or perish. Given all the problems that are created by modern societies rather plastic social norms which have become law, their desire to live under a simple social code doesn't seem all that bad.

Originally posted by crgintx
reply to post by me_ofef_seraph

 

[...]

I'm not "applying" my euro-western social standards upon anyone. But I am applying my euro-western standards (among other standards) to how I think and feel about other communities, yes. It's hard not to. We are all shaped by our environment. I am simply offering my opinion on what values and factors should be maintained for a community to prosper and become something positive. Reading my post, I guess I came down quite condecending on these people, but that is only a result of how unappealing their community was to me judging by that trailer. This is only my opinion about how these people choose to live.

Offering my opinion about a group of people who live in a seemingly chaotic community with few rules and no adherrance to US or state laws (these are Americans we are talking about) can hardly be compared to what the Europeans did to the native Americans. The European conquest of North America was an entirly different thing, of which I do not think highly of to say the least.

It can't even be said to be very ethnocentric of me. I have a clear insight into alternative communities and living. I have lived for months in squats myself, I have lived a few days in a tree village in the UK and I have a lot of friends who live in communities with ideas very much like these folks. That doesnt mean I am an authority on this, but it does show that I am not attacking the general idea of the people organizing their own communities. I am not necessarily critizising these people with a base in a middle-class euro-western culture (of which I grew up in and currently live in I guess), but rather from a base in the culture of values and organizational efforts I belive should be present in any community seeking to free itself from the boundaries of the mindless and slavebound lives most people in the west live. In my opinion, there are better examples of freedom-seeking groups organizing communities of their own. I guess it sort of strikes me as odd that these guys are fronted like this.

I guess I am very negative to un-orderly and chaotic communities in relation to well organized or less radical communities. Many of the communities I have lived in in the past have been communities I in retrospect would view as #ty and totally non-constructive, and a lot of them where organized outside the law, but that is just how my take on society has developed.

Mind, this is of course purely a subjective view upon this community, and a view that may very well change in light of more detail about the community. How these people look upon the world, how they relate to it, what politics they have and how they relate to relegion is also unknown, but irrelevant to developing an opinion on how good I believe their community to be.

If what they are doing is right or wrong is an entierly different discussion. Clearly they think they are not subject to US or state laws, which is an error in itself, but I would not say that disobediance to the law is wrong. Disobediance to the law is healthy, or at least keeping disobediance to the law as an option is. Respect for the law, or at least respect for the concept of law and rules should always be present in larger collectives of human beings though, less we see a high degree of authoritarian and chaotic tendencies push through.

I don't percieve my own scandinavian society to be the best there is, and I try to understand how other people choose to live and how their culture is, based on attempted understanding of the culture/society in question, but some factors I feel should be present for me to applause an autonomous community... Like security, law/rules, democracy, order, organization, collective effort.

I guss there is a reason why i choose to live in somewhat mainstream society, even though I do not like everything about it.

[edit on 30-6-2008 by me_ofef_seraph]