Stories and Anecdotes about Nonconsumers/howlies

[7Wannabe5]

@chenda:

Yes, both of those options seem appealing. I guess I was imagining something more like this.

[chenda]

Yes that definitely has homeless vibe about it. I grew up near a very controversial road building project back in the 90s, and the 'New Age Travellers' as we called them would camp out near the construction site in protest camps not dissimilar to that. Although they were mostly university graduates so the local community regarded them generally positively afaik.

[AxelHeyst]

Worth remembering that in the US, it’s generally legal to camp in the forest wherever you like. Hence it’s just called ‘camping’. Stealth camping in the US almost strictly means ‘urban camping where you aren’t supposed to and almost always in sketchy parts of town where, often, mentally unstable unhoused populations also live.”

My understanding of the UK and EU is that camping in the forest is generally not legal, but not in a big deal kind of way so lots of people do it. But since it isn’t legal you’ve got to keep it on the down low, hence “stealth camping”. But most of the UK/EU ‘stealth camping’ isn’t in sketchy parts of town, it’s in beautiful forests and glens and such.

So stealth camping on one continent means something very different than stealth camping on the other. Very few US people think solo female *camping* is particular dangerous.

Two peoples separated by a common language and all that.

[chenda]

My understanding of the UK and EU is that camping in the forest is generally not legal, but not in a big deal kind of way so lots of people do it.

I think the rules vary a lot, but you are right I think stealth camping usually refers to a rural camping outside an approved site.

[theanimal]

Worth remembering that in the US, it’s generally legal to camp in the forest wherever you like. Hence it’s just called ‘camping’. Stealth camping in the US almost strictly means ‘urban camping where you aren’t supposed to and almost always in sketchy parts of town where, often, mentally unstable unhoused populations also live.”

This is very much true west of the Mississippi. Less so to the east, which has a small fraction of public land and higher population densities. East of the Mississippi it often very much is stealth camping in the European sense, whether in a forest preserve, a city park, or a farmer's field.

Circling back to Robin's journey, most of the places along his route are rural, low population areas with lots of public land. It's not much different than doing a thru-hike on the long trails, which well over a thousand women (mostly solo!) do each year.

[loutfard]

My understanding of the UK and EU is that camping in the forest is generally not legal, but not in a big deal kind of way so lots of people do it.

Freedom to roam suggests many similarities between north America and the part of northern Europe governed by the rule of law. Sparsely populated areas generally have a kind of all man's right, versus less so in more densely populated areas.

[7Wannabe5]

Worth remembering that in the US, it’s generally legal to camp in the forest wherever you like. Hence it’s just called ‘camping’. Stealth camping in the US almost strictly means ‘urban camping where you aren’t supposed to and almost always in sketchy parts of town where, often, mentally unstable unhoused populations also live.”

Yes, this is what I meant. I am not afraid to solo camp in the forest. My friend who recently stealth bike-camped took a route that goes through two quite decrepit rust belt cities. Since, I have previously attempted permaculture projects in two other quite decrepit rust belt cities, I know that I was just barely brave enough to spend the night alone in a metal camper on a vacant lot in a decrepit neighborhood in the city. The rust belt cities in my region, including the one where I recently lived and tutored the disadvantaged left-behind children , often run right up to very rural areas without a circle of more affluent suburbs, so the urban poverty and crime runs right into realms of rural poverty and crime, so not unusual to see a drug deal taking place or somebody sleeping in their car full of trash bags in one of the dirt-road turn-offs within a federal bird sanctuary. Imagine the inhabitants of an even worse, more rural, trailer park like the one Eninem grew up in just north of 8-Mile in Detroit (I also was brave enough to walk alone through a neighborhood south of 8 mile to tutor children at a school where it was too dangerous for the kids to go outside for recess), kind of like Deliverance meets Gangland meets some scary, surreal, traveling Carnival.So, I am not brave enough to solo stealFoth tent camp along the highway in the rural outskirts of any of these isolated cities where the economic apocalypse has already happened.

[chenda]

The rust belt cities in my region, including the one where I recently lived and tutored the disadvantaged left-behind children , often run right up to very rural areas without a circle of more affluent suburbs, so the urban poverty and crime runs right into realms of rural poverty and crime, so not unusual to see a drug deal taking place or somebody sleeping in their car full of trash bags in one of the dirt-road turn-offs within a federal bird sanctuary.

That's extremely interesting @7. Is there an example of such an area I could view on street view ? The borderlands between rural and urban areas have long interested me.

[7Wannabe5]

@chenda:

I'm not sure if it is as vivid in Google Maps as real life, but try starting at Genessee Forest Mobile Home Court in Flint, Michigan, then travel along Pierson Rd. heading west until you hit the Cracker Barrel off of I-75 and turn north towards Westwood Heights Mobile Homes. Or search Zillow for houses in Saginaw, MI priced at less than $20,000 and then zoom out until you can see the Shiawassee National Wildlife Refuge.

[chenda]

@7w5 - Thanks that is interesting to look at. Its a type of semi-rural low density development I have never seen before. I am guessing a lot of it was once prosperous and fell on hard times over the last 30 years or so.

[7Wannabe5]

@chenda:

Yes, more like 40 years, as documented by Michael Moore in his 1989 "Roger and Me." There are also several documentaries about the more recent lead in water crisis in the city, and "Flint Town" (2018) features filmmakers embedded with the police force in the city. Since the population of the city has been declining since my childhood in some parts of the city there has been no new building or renovation since that era, so there are abandoned shopping centers with facades from the 1970s, and it's kind of like a glimpse of an alternate apocalyptic past. The route I outlined above was roughly the edge of the area being developed just before the crash.

The good news is that the river is actually quite clean, there is a small thriving hipster community, a world-class farmer's market, a resilient arts history/facilities, a brand new public library, an amazingly well-stocked and staffed maker-space, full breakfast for $3.99 at several diners, a free public beach, a decent public transportation system, a large new state park being developed very close to the center of the city, a highly motivated workforce, and the location is extremely good for climate change. If I was younger and healthier I would be gung-ho about investing in revival, because pretty much gateway to the north for the hordes of the future escaping intolerable wet bulb temperature situations. You can currently buy a whole block of houses for the median single house price in the U.S. I was too chicken to spend the night by myself in the project I was working on before it was structurally sound/sealed, because somebody kept breaking in and stealing the copper and other stuff, but I totally would have done it with a couple other people.

[Bonde]

Becoming Rob Greenfield by Robin Greenfield.
How to reach top wheaton level?
In his early days Robin had a worker doing about 20h/week SEO work on his web site robgreenfield.tv (11:25 in video). He also did some "bad stuff" including "black SEO" and paying for facebook likes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=benfy_xfHs8

[7Wannabe5]

@Bonde:

I'm finding his Truth/Transparency series rather fascinating. I think the fact that he initially paid for social media exposure is very interesting in terms of systems perspective. I don't find it any more shocking than, for example, discovering that a female friend paid for aesthetic procedures on her way to becoming a Hippie Mom who concocts natural cosmetics, and then becoming a Wetlands conservationist and photographer.

IOW, what might be of some utility would be considering how his (ENFP?) path towards using his skills/temperament in best alignment with his values is similar/different to that of the more INTJ centered ERE path as systems level functioning is achieved.

[7Wannabe5]

Rob Greenfield's tranparency series post on his sexual past is also quite interesting. I was kind of surprised to learn that focus on consensual sex wasn't fully integrated on college campuses as late as 2005, older Millennial era. There were already Take Back the Night marches way back in the mid-80s during my older Gen-X era, and the AIDS epidemic also contributed to increased emphasis on sexual communication during that era. In alignment with full transparency, I would at this time like to communicate that if it is the case that an enthusiastic verbal "Yes!" is the boundary of consent, then I was guilty of violating this boundary on multiple occasions during the course of my first marriage (and on one occasion in my post-divorce dating life when I mistook request that I wear the gentleman's old football jersey as a too short pajama-like dress as indicative of consent.) If I was able to rewind the tape of my past behaviors, I would now choose to cheerfully and straight-forwardly dissolve contract of monogamy prior to/instead of engaging in sex under circumstances of only grumbling consent.

It was also quite interesting to me that although Greenfield put his total number of lifetime partners at around 50 at his current age of 39, he only experienced a female partner entirely taking the lead in terms of initiation and carrying the encounter enthusiastically forward just a couple years ago. He indicated that he found this experience very healing. Since I am also in retrospective mode approaching my 60th birthday, I attempted to rewind/search the tapes on my encounters with my approximately 25 lifetime partners, to locate an encounter in which I pursued/initiated/enthusiastically-forwarded encounter with a male partner, received a clear and enthusiastic "Yes!" indicative of consent, and then continued to carry through without eventually being flipped? I wonder whether consent to be flipped would also be currently considered best practice under such circumstances? Would flipping yourself then constitute a form of bait and switch harrassment absent verbal agreement? I have little difficulty with fluent verbal communication, but the Boomer era G.O.M. with whom I generally partner might or might not like the vibe if when they ask, "Why did you stop, Babe?" my reply approximates, "Your 'Yes" was a bit lacking in enthusiasm. Let's try again, shall we? Do you consent?"

[Bonde]

This is one of the best videos about growing all of your own food.
Alik Pelman from Israel grows his food on only 750m2. It takes him on average 8 hours per month. Most calories come from wheat, fava beans and olive oil. Besides his farm he works full time as an assistant professor.
https://youtu.be/TNR8JfHah00?si=W0bO_fovJp13fRfH

His two publications about the small farm:
https://doi.org/10.3389/fsufs.2024.1424879
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pstr.0000066

@7w5
I find them fascinating too. I guess that I had been naive about this. Of course his life would be different than on SoMe but him having several thousands worth of silver coins buried under his tiny house was beyond my imagination. His borderline penny stocks fraud around ten years ago was even more surprising. At least he says that all of the money went to good causes.

[7Wannabe5]

@Bonde:

One of the reasons I found his sexual revelations so interesting was that if memory serves me, he was the example suggested as somebody who likely wouldn't be able to get laid because not earning or spending enough money to attract the ladies, on some years-ago thread here entitled something like "Can ERE men get dates?" So, I felt a bit validated in my intuition/argument that he almost certainly was having little difficulty in that realm. OTOH, I was also just a bit surprised that he went through an almost classic promiscuous-male-azzhole-amongst-other-promiscuous-male-azzholes phase. I was less surprised that many of the comments attached to the video were reflective of perspective of younger-than-me females who are zero-percent accepting of this phase. Although, this is not in anyway to imply that I promote a blind "boys will be boys" take by any stretch. Much more an informed perspective on the developmental differences based on sex, brain chemicals engaged (and almost always compounded towards the negative by alcohol intake), and cultural field of motivational carrots and sticks. IOW, it is my perspective that traumatizing their partners is not the purpose of the vast majority of young male sexual behavior, although it very certainly may have that result.

The older women who left comments were a bit more muted or various in their response/reflection, likely because more capable of entering into the perspective of choosing (or more likely not!) to engage in sexual encounter with a 22 year old male as a 42 year old female, therefore in a context with very different power dynamic (unless the 42 year old female is extremely immature/inexperienced/circumstantially-weakened and/or vice-versa.) OTOH, I feel zero-percent empathy for the idiocy of older men who continue to behave in this manner, especially in relationship to much younger women, and believe that being judicially relieved of some percentage of their power-structure is not an inappropriate outcome or nudge towards potential for personal development. I went through a brief phase where I attempted a post-anti-fragile relationship model in which I "used" a younger male "partner" for money and I "used" an older male "partner" for sex. This kept me amused for a couple months, but actually did not work as well on the basis of being "unexpected" as I thought it might, and I suffered the natural/deserved female-eNTP consequences of sometimes being a bit too much like a scheming nerdy teenage boy (or maybe more towards character in French farce?) in my own sexual behavior.

[sky]

Thank you for that video. Here are my notes:

750 m2 garden
1 day a month
200 m2 wheat
350 m2 fava beans
olive tree 50 m2
vegetable 150 m2

production
50 kg wheat
90 kg beans
20 kg oil
500 kg vegetable

September
plant winter crops
vegetables
1st quarter of garden
weedwhack
apply compost 1 cm 10l per sq m
pull out hoses
water
shallow tilling of garden
rake
sow

4 cu m compost for entire year
1 cu m from composting toilet
3 cu m from mushroom farm
eight months a year

4 sections of garden area, sow:
1/4 march
1/4 april
1/4 may
1/4 june

irrigation for vegetable garden only
50 cu m water per year

9 olive trees
200 kg olives
oil press
50 kg oil
prune trees after harvest, every other year

december
shallow till
seed wheat and fava
seed wheat with seeder machine hand operated
second shallow till
no compost
no additional work till may
harvest in may
harvest wheat with sickle
threshing machine with diesel engine, from china

electric fence
pests mainly attack vegetables
rotation cropping
40 types of vegetables
grow 20-30% more than you need
don't water too much, just as much as needed but not more
perennial herbs attract insects that will feed on pests

10 kg carob sweetener

storage
stainless steel containers for oil
barrels for beans and wheat

aqua fava, reduce to right concentration and it acts like an egg for cooking or to make mayonaise

[7Wannabe5]

@sky:

What are you going to substitute for olive trees in Michigan? I think sunflowers might be easiest and most generally useful* (as opposed to Black Walnut at other end of spectrum), but would require more acreage and pest management. This is why pioneers in our region often kept a hog or two and/or settled by rivers or other fishable waters. It's more difficult to survive as a locavore vegan in Northern regions. I planted some rapeseed, and it is easy to grow, but pretty much impossible to safely process without modern methods. I also think potatoes are much easier than wheat, although not as generally useful. Maybe oats and potatoes?

*Also ornamental.

[sky]

I have not worked out how to do this in my area yet. I would need to change my diet to fit what is available here. In the past my garden focus has been on vegetables, thinking that it is cheaper to buy beans and wheat/flour. Oil has never been a staple food item in my diet, to me oil is what keeps food from sticking to the pot, and I only use just enough for that purpose.

There are many black walnuts for the taking, but when I foraged them, I never used them because they require so much work to crack and pick out the nutmeat. I ended up donating the cleaned and dried nuts to my local squirrel population in February, and they excitedly started collecting and hiding the nuts with great determination.

I am reading the publications which go through the process of design of the diet and crop choice. Understanding the process is probably more useful to me than the actual plant species choices, since it is a different climate.

[7Wannabe5]

One of my ex-FIL's cousins in rural/farming Michigan county constructed his own old school sawmill on some wooded acreage he owned, and also created a machine for processing black walnuts. However, I think his interest was more towards historical re-enactment than apocalyptic prepping. The county he lived in (which is also where I raised my kids and where their father's family were some of the original European settlers trading with the Potawatomi and the Quakers assisting with the Underground Railroad*) is almost like a historical re-enactment county. I often felt like I had gone through a portal into a Norman Rockwell illustration during the years I lived there, because the mature tree lined streets were so lovely, and young children could roam around safely. Although my brain would sometimes fry when I was a member of the PTO which was debating continuing the traditional Halloween parade for the kids, with objection lodged along the spectrum of "children who can't afford nice costume and/or lack a mother with sewing skills** will feel bad" to "members of our church to not engage in Devil worship." Also, my kids later informed me that in spite of the reasonably affluent Pioneer-1930/40s facade, the town wasn't lacking the occasional meth production facility more commonly found in other of our state's rural realms. OTOH, I couldn't quite make up my mind whether I minded the fact that the local police would stop anybody driving over 25 on the main street through town, but would only issue tickets to out-of-towners.

*The house three doors down from me still had access to the hidden tunnels. Our basement/cellar had a weird room with stone walls and wooden benches built along 3 sides, but they might have just been for 1920s cub scout meetings.

**Evidence that this was somewhat towards a nonconsumer community would be that the PTO mothers competed more on the basis of sewing skills than purchasing ability in the realm of Halloween costumes. Evidence that this was more towards a pre-consumer re-enactment community rather than a post-consumer enactment community would be the fact that nobody mentioned the possibility that one of the fathers might possibly sew a Halloween costume. Okay, if I thought of it in the moment, I might have mentioned that possibility at PTO meeting, but the result would have likely been blank stares, pained expressions, rolled eyes, and maybe just the not-so-secret-alcoholic Mom laughing.