I read the 30 theses and the Appalachian Confederacy with great interest. I am thinking of moving from Europe to Asheville or thereabouts. I’m a deep ecological future primitive teacher and writer. What is happening now in your development and with the Appalachian Confederacy? Anything?

Hope to hear from you.

Suzanne

I’m originally from Oakland, ended up somehow in Portland.

I love the Mendocino area, and would definitely be interested in exploring options there.

At this point, the Fellowship of the Coast is still very much a work in progress, and I won’t spend much time hashing over the various incarnations it could take, if that indeed is what you were talking about.

E-mail me if you wanna chat about what you’re planning on doing, I’d love to hear! slumberelegy at gmail.

- Chuck

Before I go into more detail about our community & our land-buying plans, I want to learn more about y’all and what you’re planning.

Re. “sustainability insurance,” we’ve come up with the same idea. HGs could also engage with local school systems and teach the kids of agriculturals and villagers: in addition to the obvious skill sharing, this is also “proactive community defense”: the agriculturals won’t attempt to conquer the tribals if they feel the tribals are part of their “we,” and no better way to do that then by building strong bonds between the children of agriculturals & villagers, and those of the tribals & HGs.

Re. tribal telecom: I’m a telephone systems engineer with a decent amount of historical knowledge of the field, so this presents a very interesting set of challenges. In our group I’ve told the HGs, half-jokingly, “don’t worry, I won’t pester you to have telephones in your huts & treehouses, we’ll just set up a telephone/internet hut near your site so you can use it when you choose and ignore it otherwise.”

This is one potential model: an independent telephone & data network, hard-wired, and potentially using 1930s-era technology on the telephone side (we have the capability to make that happen, and we know people who have the materials on-hand to do it).

Another potential model is the oldschool posts: regular mail & messages carried on horseback between villages. This would have to run on a daily basis with three to five day delivery to any point in the local region in order to be of much use, but in theory it’s possible for a region to do it. And the way to avod trouble with the US Postal monopoly on first-class letter mail is to call it “intra-company mail” or “courier service.”

For rapid communication between villages, don’t forget the use of sunlight and mirrors. It should be possible for each village within sight distance of others, to build a wooden tower containing a simple apparatus consisting of a mirror (or polished metal surface) attached mechanically to a telegraph-like key. You aim the device to focus the sunlight on a target in the tower a few mountain tops away, and then proceed to communicate in Morse (oldschool ASCII:-). This also has the advantage of security compared to drums. And in theory it could operate on clear nights by moonlight, if your methods allow the use of ground-glass lenses i.e. terrestrial telescopes or binoculars by which the recipient could watch the sender more closely to ascertain the flickerings of moonlight reflected in Morse. I could go on in more detail if anyone’s interested… (and the foregoing is just off the top of my head at 2:00AM).

So, is anyone still reading this thread? Anyone still interested in northern California?

E-mail me at slumberelegy at-sign gmail period com. We’ll correspond.

(Hopefully that beats any spambots!)