I've been thinkin of putting some volunteer time into the community rights movement. seems like one of the best things happenin. the cure for depression is to feel like i'm making a contribution to the essential work of transforming culture. course i need enough to survive, but i'm happy to live a bare-bones material life if it means i can put more time into good work. i can pretty easily get by on $10K a year if i'm doing cool things that are making a difference. even less if i'm not paying for food and shelter, like on a farm, or camping out in a moderate climate. the material is just a poor substitute for the real thing, as you know. food / clothing / shelter, a bike, backpack, some music instruments, computer access, and i'm pretty set. just need to get back to where i can live outdoors year-round, and stop payin rent. creating islands of sanity is great, but without taking the toys away from the big boys, they gonna fuck it up for all of us. the community rights movement, instead of demanding change, just says "we're not allowing that shit" on a local level, and so far, the state and feds have not managed to have much effect on it. and the cool thing is that it works hand-in-hand with the transition movement and also personal responsibility, cause if we stop the big boys, we're gonna need to replace what they've been selling us with sustainable alternatives. so it's good to put energy into both, cause without doing both it won't work. if we ban the corps from selling us their slave-produced, earth-destroying products without having alternatives to those products, we're gonna have nothing. and if we just create the alternatives but don't stop the corps, they will eventually roll over us. A great talk on Community rights: https://soundcloud.com/extraenvironmentalist/permaculture-convergence