It's all very well for us to want to grow our own food, collect our own power, and the like, but one of the great drawbacks to relatively isolated living conditions is that one must maintain contact with wider society in order to obtain precision-engineered tools or parts, whether for construction, repair, or as implements for daily life. Unless one is prepared to forego modern technology
in toto (which I am certainly not) there are certain things you need to have and the result, if you can't make them yourself, is that you can't fully unplug from the Machine.
That dependency, however, is going to change. For well over a decade, now, research has been continuing on methods of bringing manufacturing to the desktop level: using computer-controlled extrusion and cutting tools to enable precision engineered parts to be built in your garage. The RepRap project and the Fab Lab are the two pre-eminent examples of this, although their are others.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fab_labhttp://reprap.org/The basic idea, if it's new to you, is centered on a 'rapid prototyping' machine, essentially a 3D printer. You can buy these alone for a couple of thousand dollars, but generally the feedstock is something very specific (some sort of plastic, usually), turning out products of a questionable practical nature. The reprap is an example of an open-source technology of this class, aimed at the idea of being able to make all of its own parts and, thus, be more or less self-replicating.
The fab lab is somewhat more complex, and of course larger. While a reprap might be the size of a fridge, a fab lab would take up the space of a large garage, perhaps; however, inside it you have the tools to work with essentially whatever materials you want. What it really is is a well-stocked workshop, centered on a computer-aided manufacturing device that can produce the parts that you (or someone else, with designs taken freely from the internet) can design, but no human touch can actually manufacture.
Naturally, a fab lab is quite a bit more expensive than the other designs, however at around $20,000 or so it is cheap at the price considering that it would allow the community to produce practically whatever it needed out of whatever raw materials it had lying around; to fix and repair items that might otherwise have to be junked; to modify existing implements or create specialized tools; and, in general, just really expand the range of what we can do. On top of this, being a new and rare technology, it would be something that our neighbors will have never seen, but (once they get a look at what it can do) they will probably want to use, thus providing a further economic link to the surrounding area.
A final note about use: I've never used one before, and don't know anyone who has. However, the the interface (which I believe is all open-source, for either the fab lab or the reprap) is explicitly designed to be as intuitive as possible. Neal Gershenfeld, the main actor behind the fab lab, set them up in inner city American communities, illiterate Indian farming villages, African slums, and the like and the results were generally that the locals were able to use the technology very effectively with minimal instruction.
