Off The Grid

Off The Grid - Just the other day I came across an interesting article about a village in Bavaria, in the south of Germany which clearly marches to the beat of a different drum compared to the rest of the country. As long as 25 - 30 years ago the inhabitants of Rettenbach im Allgäu decided to switch over to alternative resources and put solar panels on their roofs. Today they can easily sustain themselves and have an impressive surplus of self- generated power which is fed back into the grid. The majority of their cars are hybrids and run clean, and whoever still prefers to cruise around in old cars fuels them with canola oil. The people in Rettenbach grow almost all of their produce themselves and basically need no food imports. What's more, the 500- people village even created their own currency and has been faring astonishingly well by keeping all of their capital amongst themselves. What a great concept this is, and most of all, it works! After decades of globalization, a process of numbing and dull unification, I seriously feel that the time has finally come to slowly reverse it. Too much is undoubtedly at stake these days with us living as economically attached and imbedded as we presently do. Once in a while my husband and I talk to a friend who works for the local power company number one in Upstate NY and who certainly knows what's going on as he sits right at the source. According to him, who keeps transferring power grids all day long, it's just a matter of time when - not if - we will see a major overload and consequently an unprecedented outage leaving most of us in the dark for quite a while. This is just one of many threats which will inevitably wreak paramount havoc on most of our conventional energy supplies. Being cut off all essential life lines will eventually plunge entire nations into a state of anarchy of epic magnitude with no more structures whatsoever to hold onto. In order to avoid an apocalyptic scenario like that, we might want to give models like the one in Bavaria a serious thought. By living autonomously meaning detached or off the grid, communities would be able to break that vicious circle after all. Going green has been Europe's mantra for the last few decades, and more and more countries all over the world are slowly replacing common sources of energy with alternative ones. Thank God, the US, too, is gradually moving into the right direction by consciously choosing the same path. - Just today we were discussing the issue of over- taxation here and elsewhere, when my husband suddenly expressed a brilliant idea. Let's say, all the landscapers of a city, town, village, etc. came together once a month and voluntarily took care of all the public lawns, gardens, parks, and so on. This way we wouldn't have to pay anyone else to come and perform those jobs which are often done unwillingly and half- heartedly anyway. As a result our taxes would come down quite a bit. Of course, this is just one example, but I think the idea behind such an endeavor speaks for itself. No doubt, one of the major tax problems remains unsolved until finally tackled seriously on all parts, and this is undeniably the increasing burden of school taxes. Most school buildings or facilities are paid for by now and should no longer be included in our taxes. I'm aware that a huge junk covers the employment of teachers as well as currently running programs, but slashing the overall ridiculously blown- out- of- proportion budgets by half would create the kind of balance needed as to maintain a certain clean stripped standard concerning teaching and a still easily manageable tax duty for US home owners. We do not need all those hyper costly sports events - which rather self- explanatorily - swallow tons of money starting with the required equipments, gear and tools, maintaining numerous gigantic and super modern places, fields, pits, stadiums, etc, and broadcasting those events on top. If we focused more on the actual motif of schooling instead which is in fact nothing but explorative and hands- on teaching, we could easily manage our taxes reasonably and enjoy more of our lives. Back to that mesmerizing example of autarky in Germany, I definitely plead for more individualization rather than globalization as this appears to be the only successful solution for a prosperous future.