SurviveLA did not get a wink of sleep last night while staying in the Joshua Tree National Park campground due to a bunch of Boy Scout dads who stayed up talking and laughing until 2:30 am in spite of the presence of dozens of other nearby campers. Thanks Boy Scout dads for setting a nice example for your kids, some of whom also stayed up until 2:30 engaged in a loud multi-player game boy tournament while others chased desert mice, and a special thanks to the Scout who accidentally kicked out the supports of our tent at midnight causing it to collapse upon us.

While we applaud the dads for getting the kids out in the wilderness for the weekend, we at SurviveLA just can’t get behind the vile and outdated Boy Scouts, whose ongoing attempts at being more relevant backfire so pitiably and whose founder, Robert Baden-Powell, was an anti-semitic, fascist, pedophile.

If we had kids around the SurviveLA compound, in keeping with our self-sufficiency goals, we’d form our own SuriviveLA Scout troop. Here’s how the SurviveLA Scouts would differ from the Boys Scouts:

1. SurviveLA Scouts are coed. Men and women have gotta learn to work together and you might as well start early. As Barbara Ehrenreich once said, “Men alone in groups are bad company”. It’s also no fair that the girls have got to whore themselves selling cookies.

2. Let’s teach our kids to make the world a better place without the Norman Rockwell fascist veneer.

3. Hipper uniforms. We suggest something like this.

4. An urban cycling merit badge.

5. All activities are outdoors. Lots of nature experiences. No computer merit badges and certainly no copyright merit badges.

6. Lastly, the SurviveLA Scout mission statement, borrowed from Edward Abbey:

One final paragraph of advice: Do not burn yourself out. Be as I am-a reluctant enthusiast… a part time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it is still there. So get out there and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains. Run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to your body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those deskbound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards.

“Los Angeles is an army camped far from its sources of supply, using distant resources faster than nature renews them . . . Our region today is so dependent, so uninhabitable, yet so inhabited, that it must transform or die. Sooner or later it must generate its own food, fuel, water, wood and ores. It must use these at the rate that nature provides them. It can . . .”
-Paul Glover Los Angeles: A History of the Future as quoted in the LAEV Overview

SurviveLA dropped in this weekend on a block party thrown by the apartment homesteading pioneers at the Los Angeles Eco-Village. Founded in 1993, the Los Angeles Eco-Village is a so called “intentional community” of folks who, basically, give a damn and are interested in improving our forlorn, polluted, and abused city.

The block party featured ecologically savvy and self-reliant touches such as solar ovens to cook the vegetarian buffet and photovoltaic panels to power the amplifiers of the bands entertaining the crowds on Bimini Street. The fine folks at the Bicycle Kitchen had a repair stand to fix people’s rides, while at the other end of the block the smell of spray paint filled the air as kids got to go nuts making art on some old sheets of plywood.

But what impressed us the most was the booth touting LAEV’s participation in plans to improve humble Bimini street with such things as trees, park benches, traffic calming measures and public art all made possible with a grant from the city and the MTA. Called SNAP, or Station Neighborhood Area Plan, this initiative provides grants to make the streets along a corridor around the congested and decrepit Vermont and Hollywood Boulevards, more pedestrian friendly. The reason the MTA is involved with this is the hope is that with these improved pedestrian amenities more Angelinos will abandon their Escalades and take public transit. SurviveLA wishes the best of luck to the Eco-Villagers in implementing this plan and we hope that the SNAP concept will spread to the rest of the city.

It’s time for all of us to follow the lead of the Eco-Villagers and throw our own block parties and make our streets fit places to meet each other face to face. Community building, i.e. breaking the walls that stand between us, is the first step in the transformation of ourselves and our neighborhoods.

“I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.”
– Henry David Thoreau, “Excursions”

We found this amusing graffiti on our morning Xtracycle ride to the market. Which gives us a brief opportunity to clarify the SurviveLA mission. No, SurviveLA does not take responsibility for this high-brow tagging. In fact, while we believe in the forest and the meadow, we believe in growing the corn in the city. Unlike HDT, we like cities and we enjoy the amenities that go with urban living, mainly a critical mass of creative and interesting people living in close proximity. They’ll be no heading off to a remote cabin. We have no Walden Pond here, just Echo Park Lake.

That being said, it is our goal to bring Walden Pond to the city, that is to bring the amenities of rural life, i.e. nature and agriculture, to our lives here in this somewhat ugly but interesting place we call home, the City of Los Angeles. In short, we intend to put the Urban in Urban Homestead.

By the way, to the transcendentalist gangbangers who did the tagging – nice handwriting – you are obviously not the product of the same public schools we are.

Root Simple is in Wendover, Utah this weekend on business and it’s here, in this hallucinogenic landscape of salt flats and casinos, that the artistic/architectural thoughtstylist collective known as Simparch has established a self-sufficiency experiment they call Clean Livin’. Located on the remote South Base section of the historic Wendover Airfield on land leased by the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Simparch’s project proves that self-reliance is possible in what must be one of the harshest climates in North America.

Clean Livin’ features a set of solar panels, batteries, a solar shower, a refrigerator, and a composting toilet all housed in and around a repurposed WWII era Quonset hut. Water is biked in with specially adapted cargo bikes. Solar power pumps the water up to the tower where it is heated by the sun in a black drum. A solar panel array and batteries provide more than enough power, all day and all night, to run power tools and pump some tunes out on the powerful stereo system.

The composting toilet features, what must be the most stunning view to be seen from any toilet seat perch in the world – the decomissioned Wendover Airfield’s munitions bunkers and the endless salt flats beyond.

From an exiled Kalifornian in Toronto comes this image of some riotous folks taking back the street. Homegrown Evolution sends a shout out to the folks at Streets for People who are responsible for this bit of street theater, but we could do without the hippie font. We also suggest a little more . . . bling.

In the interest of our revolutionary vision of home economics we suggest taking the streets LA style with the Homegrown Evolution Hollywood Stretch Hummer Cornfield:

It’s economy of scale the Homegrown Evolution way!