Erstellt am: 20. 4. 2011 - 11:34 Uhr

Today's Webtip: Lifeboats

a memoir of life on The Farm.

To quote Michael Stipe, "It's the end of the world as we know it..."

Again.

Predicting the end of the world is nothing new. I would be willing to bet that people have been doing it since the very beginning. Some of the reasons and stories are more interesting than others, and so far all of them have been wrong.

To a degree.

The world (and people) are still around, many civilizations, empires, cities and cultures have found their end. The last couple of years have seen more than a few catastrophes that didn't take place, or aren't likely to. The year 2000 came and went, and 2012 looks like it will go out with the bang of fireworks rather than the end of history.

Of course, that doesn't mean that people aren't still preparing for the worst. The recent developments in the Middle East, peak oil, and the decline of the dollar has a bunch of people convinced that our current system is on the brink, and they are making plans to survive. One of these people has a blog. Cluborlov.com is the home of a man who survived the collapse of the Soviet system, and is now preparing for the collapse of the U.S. empire. He writes well, is entertaining, and people who collect conspiracy and disaster theories will probably enjoy it.

It also has some articles by guest writers. One of them, Albert, has written something that might be of interest even to people who aren't planning for the end of industrialized life. It's his memoir of life on The Farm. A commune founded in 1971-72 by 50 busloads of Haight Aishbury hippies who decided to get back to the land. It's an amazing story of a bunch of city slickers who managed to pull some interesting feats of low tech living, building up a functioning system from next to nothing.

It's a story of some early attempts at sustainable community building, with one or two surprises, including some ingenious communications and the fact that they actually pulled it off.

And now, because I can't get the song out of my head, here is an R.E.M. video.