[DriveElectric]

FX 30 Days

Wednesday July 13, 2005 on FX

Two 30-year-old professionals who are friends and typical Americans—i.e., ravenous consumers of fossil fuels such as gas and electricity—go ‘back to the future’ and learn to live without the natural resources that will be depleted from our earth in the not-too-distant future. To do this they’ll uproot themselves and move to an ‘eco village’ in Missouri to live 100% OFF THE GRID. As they set up house in a former 3,000 bushel grain bin, they will sustain themselves on a clean power such as solar and wind, recycle all their waste (both food and human), live in a car-free culture, grow and eat only organic foods and conserve their water use with solar showers and rain-catch systems. Can these fossil fuel addicts wean themselves from their consumptive habits without their lives falling apart? Will they thrive in a community that is the total opposite their New Jersey neighborhood? And will the ecological solutions they learn stick once their Thirty Days are up?

[I renamed this thread to something more descriptive - BabyPeanut]

[I_Like_Plants]

OK that's Morgan Spurlock's series, cool!!

I remember "frontier house" on PBS, one of the guys freaking out because he was losing weight and could see a few of his ribs, he insisted on being checked by a doctor etc he totally hit the panic button. Frontier House was for something like 6 months or so, though. I'd rather see some of these series be "90 days" or "A Year In Their Shoes" or something.

[Ludi]

Yes! Dancing Rabbit eco village, they are so inspiring!

http://www.dancingrabbit.org/

[cube]

*clicks on link*

I'm getting flashbacks of the 60's and I wasn't even born then.

errr NO!

I'm happy living off of fossil fuels thank you very much.

[gnm]

I caught a bit of that "frontier house" at a freinds one time... looked like a pretty entertaining bit. Guess they were finding out just how much it sucked back then!

-G

[I_Like_Plants]

"Frontier house" was an experiment, and a year was not nearly long enough. Remember the original homesteaders had generations of knowledge to draw from. In "real life" the homesteaders would have been well ahead of the curve to hunt more and stock up jerkey, canned (in mason jars) meat, etc., and farm a little, a sort of half farmer and half hunter-gatherer existance. I seem to remember it being mentioned that they were not allowed to hunt in the show, which introduced an element of unreality. Supposedly the one lady's kids were not getting enough to eat but they were extremely well fed, hate to say it but kids who are really hungry get a lot skinnier, and get good at foraging.

It's amazing that most of us Americans come from ancestors who were overjoyed to get the chance to settle land out in the middle of nowhere and start out with a sod house, and I honestly do think most modern Americans, no matter whether their ancestors came from England or Swedan or Vietnam, would sit down and starve before they'd live like that.

[KiddieKorral]

I've seen other episodes of this show, and I've been disappointed. They definitely don't give the people a long enough time frame. That said, this episode might turn out well.

[BabyPeanut]

Wow, first Oil Strorm, a lousy beat-around-the-bush docu-drama inspired by Peak Oil and now this, a lousy "reality-based" documentary that's also just a dissapointment for those already in the know and a joke to those who know nothing.

[Ludi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('I_Like_Plants', '"')Frontier house" was an experiment, and a year was not nearly long enough. Remember the original homesteaders had generations of knowledge to draw from..

[k_semler]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('I_Like_Plants', 'O')K that's Morgan Spurlock's series, cool!!

I remember "frontier house" on PBS, one of the guys freaking out because he was losing weight and could see a few of his ribs, he insisted on being checked by a doctor etc he totally hit the panic button. Frontier House was for something like 6 months or so, though. I'd rather see some of these series be "90 days" or "A Year In Their Shoes" or something.

[I_Like_Plants]

You can make a tea that's got tons of vit. c from pine needles, or basically getting any kind of wild greens will do it. What country person doesn't nibble on grass stems and munch the odd bunch of sorrel flowers? There are all kinds of things out there to use in salads etc., this is another example of how they really were not out there long enough to emulate country people, the real settlers had lots of "folkways" behind them.

[BabyPeanut]

http://www.tomvalentine.com/html/vitamin_c1.html
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')n the 1940’s, Dr. Masquelier became fascinated by the tales of deadly scurvy destroying the French sailors during the 16th century expedition of North American explorer Jacques Cartier. Expedition writings told of an Indian saving the crew from scurvy by preparing a tea from pine tree components for them to drink.

There is no measurable vitamin C in pine needles or pine bark, so Dr. Masquelier sought to find the chemicals that stopped scurvy. He originally isolated the OPC compounds from pine tree bark. However, he also found the same family of compounds in grape seeds and learned that this second commercial extract contained certain beneficial gallic esters, which are unique to grape seed.

[NeoPeasant]

30 Days with Morgan Spurlock is going to do a show on FX where 2 city dwellers go live off-grid in an eco-village for 30 days.

Thanks to Energybulletin.net

[some_guy282]

Should be interesting and entertaining...but I don't get FX!

Speaking of which, didn't they do Oil Storm? I still havn't seen Oil Storm...

[BabyPeanut]

*threads merged*

Please only one thread about this TV show, thanks.

[mgibbons19]

I'm looking forward to seeing it tonight.

I loved frontier house. I hated the kentucky woman. The california guy was the one that freaked out over his weight, but in the end it was his family that was most open to the experience. The mixed couple was really cute too.

Shows like that do a great job of reminding us that (as BJ says) the good ol days weren't always good. It's easy to get nostalgic for a lost past, but those were darn hard times for a lot of folks. Gives me respect for the old timers and a hearty pound of salt for good-old-days-dreamers' visions.

[BabyPeanut]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mgibbons19', 'S')hows like that do a great job of reminding us that (as BJ says) the good ol days weren't always good.

[Doly]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('BabyPeanut', 'S')eems that progress just moves all the problems around. The hard things become easy and the easy things become hard.

[ubercrap]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('k_semler', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('I_Like_Plants', 'O')K that's Morgan Spurlock's series, cool!!

I remember "frontier house" on PBS, one of the guys freaking out because he was losing weight and could see a few of his ribs, he insisted on being checked by a doctor etc he totally hit the panic button. Frontier House was for something like 6 months or so, though. I'd rather see some of these series be "90 days" or "A Year In Their Shoes" or something.

[Kez]

I just saw the show, it was pretty good.

There was one man and one woman, unrelated, who went to the Missouri camp to rough it out.

The man was from the Bronx and was freaking out because there was no meat and eventually shot and ate 2 rabbits, and at the end he finally got some local people to sell him some steaks.

The woman was having issues because they told her they didn't have a sewer or water treatment system, so she couldn't use any shampoos and whatnot that she always depended on. Her perfumes were making some people ill, so she had to give those up as well. The first few days for these 2 was pretty rough, but they got used to everything after a week.

The show talked alot about basics - consumption, pullution, and fossil fuel dependencies, but didn't mention peak oil or when we'd ever run out. The camp had a lot of solar panels, and they helped install a couple and saw it in action. All the light bulbs were compact flourescent. They also had biodiesel and vegetable oil cars, recycled their own waste using buckets and sawdust, and of course they had large gardens.

They never fully showed a chicken coup. There were so many vegans there that I'm not sure if I saw one. I never saw them eating eggs either.

They also never talked about air conditioning. It seemed like a really comfortable time of the year in Missouri. Nobody ever seemed to be cold or hot at all. They used a wood stove to heat their water, which most people tried to conserve by taking showers just once every 5 days.

They had water, and a big pond, but they never said how the water was treated or if the source was a well or what. They took road trips to get more vegetable oil from restaurants as well as looking through dumpsters for stuff.

Overall, I think the show did a lot to open people's eyes about what life would be like in that situation. A lot of the people I know and work with would not be able to survive that kind of a life for more than a year, just too harsh and requireing too much work. They would either go insane, starve to death, get sick, or get kicked out of the collective.

They also showed honda's hydrogen car, but didn't get into the details of how the hydrogen is created, how long the cells last, etc., just the normal hype about it with none of the problems mentioned.