My buddy told me about an episode of "30 Days" he thought I'd enjoy since it featured VW diesels for a portion of it. I'm not generally at all interested in reality TV. I prefer the fake reality that I immerse myself in to escape from the reality of being a responsible adult human person to be fake, but if it's about VW diesels, how bad can it be.

Anyway, two grossly wasteful New Yorkers spend 30 days living in a little eco-village trying to see how the other half (well, really it's about 0.1%) lives.

Dancing Rabbit EcoVillage is an experiment in wasting not, wanting not, and recycling your own shit. From what I could see from the show, it looks to be a really cool project where the 30 or so people there seek to live completely off the grid in as sustainable a manner as possible. They're all vegetarians because domestic cultivation of meat is "inefficient" (just accept it, ok, no explanation is needed nor given). They drive all diesel vehicles running on biodiesel (during the run of the show, they converted their 98 VW Jetta TDI to run on waste fryer grease (WVO). They shit into a bucket, cover it in sawdust and then use it for fertilizer. They buildings they live in are all left over structures from when the farm they live on was in use and they are insulated with mud and straw. The only electricity is that which can be gotten from solar panels. Overall, it is quite intriguing and there are some clever ways that waste is recycled to a useful purpose.

The Dancing Rabbit denizens intend the ecovillage to be the proverbial light on the hill, showing how sustainable living is possible. The irony is that the low-tech/no-tech lifestyle practiced at the ecovillage, while sustainable is not scalable. Can you imagine trying to compost all of NYC's shit into humanure? Let alone trying to eek out enough lettuce and carrots to feed all those millions of people. DR style living in a concentrated urban center is a sure recipe for anarchy. A number of the admirably clever efficiencies the DRs make use of are necessary strategies for overcoming the overwhelming inefficiencies in other areas of their lifestyle.

But, there is yet another irony. Because the failure of the Dancing Rabbit lifestyle only serves to re-iterates it's primary point. Modern Western society isn't sustainable, due in part to inefficiency but also due to the sheer numbers of humans there are. We've been breeding like fucking rabbits and we've reached a point where we require technology to not only sustain ourselves for the moment, but eventually to bail ourselves out of the mess we're in. Being an alarmist and catastrophist, I prefer to think of the day when disease or war undercuts the foundations of technological society and reduces our numbers back to a level manageble by DR style living. Those shiny, happy people who prefer to find solutions to problems will point out that it's just as likely that we will find new, efficient sources of energy and new technologies (mechanical, computational, and agricultural) to make more efficient use of that energy. Either way, I commend the Dancing Rabbit eco-villagers not just for their choice of automobile, but for actually having the balls to do something about something they believe in strongly.