I just watched this, and my god are all these people retarded. This should be required viewing for all white supremacist fags whenever they spout garbage about black people living in shanty towns, the mesa makes somalia look like a paradise. People have been living there for decades, and the best they've managed to build are pathetic shacks that'd look shitty in a refugee camp. Anyone with half a brain could genuinelly build something better in a week. The stupid rednecks blowing up cars, the crack whore getting pregnant by a 35 year old paedo drifter, the fucking imbecile who tried to set his greenhouse on fire when the cops raided his cannabis factory, and ended up burning down his house and burning 12 of his dogs alive... fuck me sideways, I've never witnessed such human garbage on the box in my life.
This is why part of preparing should be mentally (skills, knowledge, attitude, etc.), together with the material stories. If you're utterly clueless and can't do better than a hideous shanty town that wouldn't look out of place in Liberia then you are doing it wrong.
Have any of you fine fellow read "How to live off grid" by Nick Rosen? It's pretty good as long as you bear with his slightly idealistic viewpoint, but there's a sequel/prequel (Can't remember which) in which he goes to the states to visit off-grid communities there, and he finds pretty much exactly this sort of thing IIRC, all the people are idiots or demented and haven't put any real thought into what they're doing.
Case in point: On the mesa, they have no water. NO WATER. They have to go to the rio grande to wash, meaning some of them don't wash for weeks. They have to haul all their water to their disgusting shanties by truck.
Second: NO FOOD. LITERALLY NO FOOD. They survive by picking up supermarket and farm rejects once a week from town and trucking it back to the mesa where people pick over it.
One guy had what he termed a greenhouse, then claimed that "it could feed four, five families, easy". When the camera goes inside, the greenhouse is tiny, has no roof, and he's attempting to grow tiny carrots in the terrible sandy dust they have for soil there. It's clear that it couldn't even feed one person for a week.
The mesa isn't off grid at all. It survives totally dependant on the grid. No petrol? No free food from the wasteful society? No mesa. It's a parasitic community in every sense of the word. These morons have absolutely no chance of survival should anything happen to the outside world. Absolutely none.
I think it backs up what I've said before - that if you think some plan will work and you might rely on it sometime then you should test it out. Can you really live on what your greenhouse makes, for instance. I'd imagine there are a few people who mistakenly imagine being able to easily ramp up production when they've never had to rely on it or maybe even attempted it on such a scale. Same goes for everything else.
As you pointed out, you'll otherwise end up a scavenger and that only lasts as long as there is something to scavenge. They have a society that is as fragile as the one it depends upon.
