Off The Grid
Nov 25th, 2006 at 10:02 am by Susie
Most of my friends live a conscious, intentional lifestyle: Hybrid cars, vegetable gardens, recycling, low energy use… I’m probably the single most wasteful person they know. Yet they’ve had their effect, even on me. I go out of my way now to turn off anything using electricity (okay, so it takes an extra 90 seconds to turn on the modem box in the morning - big deal). I don’t always turn the TV on for background noise.
Years of camping at the Philadelphia Folk Festival have made me conscious about wasting water. After all, when you have to carry five-gallon jugs up a steep slope, you really have to be committed to every ounce you use. Camping showers are an educational experience, because you only turn on the water to rinse. Washing pots and pans is a lot harder when you can’t give them a long, luxurious soak in a sink full of hot, sudsy water - but it uses a lot less.
So I was interested in this WashPo magazine piece on an energy-conscious commune in North Carolina. Yeah, I knew lots of people who did this in the Sixties, and most of them did eventually come back to “civilization.” But there’s a lot of value to that kind of experience, and I wish more people had it.
When you live like this, you think differently. You think about energy. You think about where it comes from and where it goes.
I couldn’t distinguish between a watt, amp or ohm before we hit the road, and now I can predictor our daily energy budget within 10-20 amps. If we cut every other tax and merely taxed (fossil fuel) energy use, we’d cut carbon emissions by 80% in no time. It mainly takes knowledge and will. I say that as someone who lacked both for the first forty years of her life. What a difference two years makes.
I agree. I am very grateful for the odd, alternative lifestyle 70’s subculture communal life of my own youth. This is a very good article.
I love this part: “It is essential, he says, to ‘bring the effects of our actions within the horizon of lived experience.’”
It sounds like a distressingly ad-hoc commune. What got me (aside from the “half an hour drive to the nearest town” bit — what’s the point of crunching your electricity use if you have to drive that far to get to, well, anything?) was the way the hydropower was set up. Why walk “a few hundred yards” to the freezer over by the plant when you could set up an inverter and get that electricity delivered to your house?
There is something to be said for convenience. It’s certainly worthwhile to be painfully frugal when it comes to power consumption (in my house, the largest source of carbon emissions is the fuel oil we use to heat the house), but a lot of this ecovillage seems to be doing sackcloth for the sake of doing sackcloth.
Don’t worry, Susie…
Soon enough, this type of living will once again be the norm.
Sooner than any of us want it to happen.
I’m moving to the country, and within 5 years, I expect to be not only off the grid, but, selling energy back to the TVA, here in Tennessee.
Every person, everywhere in America needs to get the hell out of debt, and work their butts off to become energy self-sufficient.
That’s a start.
Turn your yard into a food garden, and start raising a few chickens for at least eggs…
It’s what we all must do, and it WILL make a difference.
We, as Americans, CANNOT keep on our “Happy Motoring,” Suburban lifestyles.
And for God’s sakes, people… STOP moving out into the country if all you want is Suburban life trappings with a Strip Mall and a WalMart nearby– you are screwing up everything. If you really do not want the country lifestyle… STAY IN THE CITY.
Don’t like Hunter’s gunshots? Don’t like wildlife in your yard— DON’T MOVE TO the Newly built COUNTRY McMansion Ranch. PLEASE… We WANT you to STAY AWAY.
Simple.
–mf
Energy conservation is often difficult, time -consuming and requires sacrifice. Few Americans are interested in consuming less because it causes them inconvenience. My experience has been that those who conscientiously work to simplify and conservative their energy use are treated as being outside the norm. The bicyclist, for example, accepts the idea that pedaling to work in a rainsuit may be a self-less and satisfying act, but the neighbor who simply accelerates a vehicle to work by depressing a big toe couldn’t care less less about the cyclist’s sacrifices. Recycling and driving fewer miles is great start but not enough. Maybe the new generations of Americans will take conservation to the next level.