As a boy, I had a fantasy of living off the land. It was an unformed idea, a mixture of Huckleberry Finn and making camps in the woods, and I never got far with it. I had a friend who held on to it longer, because his dad was planning to move to Alaska and live off the sea. His dad did it, too; he went to live on an island near Ketchikan, leaving his wife and kids, including my friend, back in the suburbs of Seattle.

         It seemed a lonely thing to do.

         At the university I met a libertarian who was living in squalor, smoking dope and living on pizza. His enthusiasm of the moment was to create a self-sufficient farm. He had never lived on a farm and knew nothing of farming. He didn’t even have a garden, and I thought if he wouldn’t get off his butt to sweep the mat of dust under his furniture he wouldn’t make it as a farmer. Even then I knew that self-sufficiency means work.

         Some folks have done it. For water, they have rainwater tanks, wells or a handy creek. For power, they have solar panels, windmills, diesel generators or car batteries. For heat they have wood. For waste they have an outhouse or a composting toilet.

         I can imagine the satisfaction of unplugging from the electric utility and turning on my own power. Independence! I remember the day I began telephone service over my Internet cable and cut the wire that connected me to the telephone monopoly. It felt good, though it was only swapping one connection for another. What if I had moved off the grid?

         In his new book of that name, journalist Nick Rosen sets out to find off-the-gridders and tell their stories. Rosen has sympathy for them; he is attracted to ideas of radical simplification, and as he seeks out interview subjects he keeps an eye out for land for himself. Rosen is British, but he cannot do this in his home country. “In all areas of the UK,” he writes, “one simply cannot get permission to so much as pull a trailer onto a lot, never mind to reside there full-time in it.”

         In America you can do that, in some places. The places Rosen visits tend to remoteness — Maine, west Texas, New Mexico, Colorado and the redwood country of northwestern California.

         Much of this book is about reasons and motives. Rosen himself is an anti-corporate green who detests “the hyper-consumption of the past 30 years” and people’s dependence on corporations and the state. “I want neighbors who solve their problems themselves instead of calling the police or county commissioners about every little thing,” he writes. 

         He is emphatically not a commune-ist. He visits a commune in Maine, and the people are stuck in a meeting. “I must confess my heart sank,” he writes. “Much as we may all rail against the impersonal State, to which we hand over so much of our individual power, the alternative requires that we exercise that power ourselves, and in a responsible way.” And in a commune, that means meetings and voting and rules. “I am not into cleaning schedules, interminable meetings and the need to reach a consensus with others about every aspect of my life,” he writes. “I don’t want to join a social experiment.” He just wants to decouple.

         Most of his subjects, he writes, are “pro-market, pro-environment and pro-freedom, and merely want to live a decent life, free of debt, free of utility bills, growing some of their own food, and making a living according to whatever skills they have.”

         He sets out to find them.

         Some are part-time off-gridders. One is Denise, who works in Manhattan as a tattoo artist, living in a tiny room. In her off time, Denise retreats to her 10 acres in Connecticut, where she has a cabin and a tree house in the woods along a river. Why has she bought the land? “Freedom,” she tells Rosen. “Privacy. I want as little government involvement in my life as possible, and that sounds like a really Republican thing to say, but it’s not. I’ve been trying to make a life where I can disengage from corporate and government serfdom as much as possible.”

         Rosen said this was “one of the most political statements” he heard. It is also one of the more rational.

         Another subject is Jim, 50, a Ron Paul voter who moved out of Brooklyn to upstate New York. Jim is a scrounger whose life, Rosen says on his web page, “is dedicated to not paying the market price for anything.” Jim has built his house from bricks of “papercrete,” which is made of sludge from the local paper mill and 20 percent masonry cement. Jim worries about a societal “spiraling down” to collapse. He has stashed away a year’s worth of rice, barley and oats, and has plans to convert his car to fuel he can grow. He tells Rosen he “feels increasingly aligned with the Amish.”

         One of Rosen’s subjects is Amon, an Old Mennonite who uses horses to power machines designed for electricity. Another is Jassen, a Colorado libertarian who lives out of his car. Rosen respects the Mennonite for his achievements but dislikes the clannishness. The car-dweller’s lifestyle, he writes, “feels exciting to me, albeit slightly artificial.”

         Rosen puts much of himself in his book, which could be annoying but isn’t. He is critical of his subjects but leaves the final judgment to the reader. At bottom, he is a reporter and writer, and lets the ills show through with the zeal.

         Consider Carolyn Chute and her husband, Michael, of Parsonsfield, Maine. Chute is the author of the novel, The School on Heart’s Content Road. It was reviewed in the New York Times, Nov. 21, 2008, which has a photo of Carolyn and Michael dressed in country rustic and proudly carrying guns. The Times reviewer seems put off by the weaponry but likes the novel. She calls it a “depiction of contemporary American poverty: of the slow, relentless grind of never quite having enough.”

         Rosen visits the author, and finds that the poverty she portrays is her own. In the past, that meant Carolyn got no care during a pregnancy and her baby died. She and Michael decided not to try for another child because “it’s a mean world.” Now they are getting old and will need looking after. They don’t want to sell, and are considering doing a deal with the commune: in exchange for care, the commies can inherit their land. But there are more risks in this than in a simple capitalist sale.

         Then there are Daniel and Kirstin, “urban homesteaders” in Springfield, Mass., who live in a city house they have taken off the grid. They have no car and no TV. They eat mainly homegrown food, light their house with candles and heat with wood. In the winter, they are cutting and hauling wood all the time. They don’t have health insurance, life insurance or a pension plan.