Chalenge30: California Dreaming

Chalenge30: California Dreaming

Every time I hear, "The Mamas And The Papas," song I think of sunshine and Hippies.

A self sustaining Hippy culture seems to have been ingrained in the Mythos of California.

Will they secede from the Union as it has been suggested and go it alone.
Or will the Trump Jackboot come hard down on their Hippy necks.
Time will tell.

In Spain they have been adjusting to the reality of unemployment and very little jobs in different ways.

There is an Eco village in Spain, one of many springing up in Europe.
And it is called Matavenero.
Everything is off the grid. Everything is recycled.
Everybody sharing the same vision

Then there is the other side of the vision, bartering.
We are back in Spain in an area called Asturias.
It lies between Galicia and Cantabria along the north coast of Spain.

They are using among other things an online Bartering tool called Rastru.

"Rastru is an alternative economic system based on free exchanges of goods and services between people, companies or associations without need of money."

I know people on Steemit get totally fixated on Cryptocurrencies and lose sight of the reality of life

People need to eat. So if you have food to Barter you are in business.
Its not Crypto but it is a currency. The rest just follows on.

What intrigued me was the fact that the young people who had left the land/forests were coming back.
As there was no future for them in the Big Spanish Cities.
Except unemployment.

So the youth are coming back and re-igniting a love for the land.
Not a bad thing at all.
There is no future in an Agri-Society that has expectations to go to the Stars.
But we do have to go back to basics. And what better than a barter system.

Read On:

Will Spain's coal belt survive through online barter?
The sons and daughters of miners in the deserted coalfields of northern Spain face two choices: leave to find work, or innovate to be able to stay.
Now, they have developed an online barter economy, which they say is helping them return to their rural roots. But can it really work?
Javi Fernandez's small house is surrounded by edible plants. Among traditional winter crops grown in this area, like verza, a kind of cabbage, there's also mustard, Jerusalem artichokes, and shiitake mushrooms.
It's a small patch of bounty amid miles of empty, rolling hills.
Rather than study engineering to work in the coal mines like both his father and grandfather, Mr Fernandez studied agriculture in Cuba.
"I couldn't afford to go to a paying university so I studied for free at the ISCA University, in San Jose de las Lajas," he beams, digging through the 400 sq m (4,300 sq ft) of artichokes he has planted.

Ghost towns
Asturias became a centre for coal production in Spain in the late 19th Century, but waves of closures have left whole towns deserted and hundreds of thousands of miners unemployed.
And the EU is ending all subsidies for the coalfields by 2018, sounding the death knell for the industry in the region.

Read the whole Article:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-38731808

Images from Pixabay & kevinfaingnaert.com

Challenge 30 is a 30 day writing challenge issued by @dragosroua to write and post every day in January.

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