Welcome to Hippie Jam Fest 2007!

So, this is what I pay 8% sales tax for?

The seminar is sponsored by the City of Binghamton, Cornell Cooperative Extension, the Sierra Club and the Hancock Permaculture Center.

In [Albert] Bates' own words, the future might look like "Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit," an animated feature revolving around local gardens in the north of England.

"We can't go with oil for much longer," Bates said. "What is next is going to be a whole package of renewables. It makes for quite a large change in our lifestyles -- how we run things, how we travel, how we grow our food."

Moving away from an economy and a lifestyle fueled by petroleum, Bates said, will require people relearn skills lost en masse a century ago. Growing food and medicinal plants and caring for animals will again be useful skills, Bates said. Now is the time, he added, to relearn those skills.

The City is sponsoring some hippy-survivalist's Dark Age fantasy? The future might look like Wallace and Gromit?

Bates' badly designed website reveals that his "Ecoville Training Center" is located at "The Farm", a real-life bearded hippy commune founded by hundreds of tye-dyed San Franciscans.

The Farm was established after Gaskin and friends led a caravan of 60 buses, vans and trucks on a cross country speaking tour across the US....From its founding through the 70's, Farm members took vows of poverty and owned no personal possessions, though this restriction loosened as time passed. During that time, Farm members did not use artificial birth control, alcohol, tobacco, man-made psychotropics or animal products. The Farm installed its own water system, but outlawed 60-cycle alternating current beyond the main house that served as its administration office and publishing center. Communications within the Farm were carried out via CB radio and later with an old plug wire phone system donated by a local town. Kerosene lamps and outhouses were standard for the first few years. A 12-volt trickle charge system charged used golf cart batteries in homes, which in turn powered automobile tail light bulbs hanging from the ceilings and walls, with newly-charged batteries being delivered each day. Visitors were housed in an army surplus two-story tent. Many of the buildings on the Farm were unconventional, ranging from converted school buses to yurts....They also ran a "soy dairy", which developed and later marketed a soymilk ice "cream" called "Iced-Bean". A crew constantly manned the gate where all traffic passed and was logged.

Got to have electricity for the important stuff, I guess, like printing propaganda.

Predictably, "The Farm" went broke in 1983 and demanded that the members start earning their own livings instead of living through the "central bank", at which point members began fleeing.

You can't make this stuff up. It's like an episode of South Park. What's to sponsor? Hasn't he figured out how to live without money yet?

Update: The Man himself.


Given that the lede to this story says that Bates says the "Great Change" "isn't a cause for alarm", someone at the Press & Sun Bulletin should probably note that his website advertises the subject matter as "catastrophe" and cites a quotation framing it as being worse than The Great Depression. It also references something called a "Cuban/Amish Lifestyle", whatever that is.