{"id":621,"date":"2018-09-02T18:11:48","date_gmt":"2018-09-03T01:11:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/?page_id=621"},"modified":"2025-07-20T16:20:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-20T23:20:08","slug":"off-the-grid-2010","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/off-the-grid-2010\/","title":{"rendered":"Off the Grid (2010)"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0A common libertarian fantasy is to move away from civilization and live \u201coff the grid.\u201d In 2010 came a journalist\u2019s book about it, Nick Rosen\u2019s Off the Grid: Inside the Movement for More Space, Less Government, and True Independence in Modern America. My review of it appeared in Liberty, October 2010.<\/i><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t

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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.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It seemed a lonely thing to do.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0At 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\u2019t even have a garden, and I thought if he wouldn\u2019t get off his butt to sweep the mat of dust under his furniture he wouldn\u2019t make it as a farmer. Even then I knew that self-sufficiency means work.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Some 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><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I 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\u00a0off the grid?<\/i><\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In 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. \u201cIn all areas of the UK,\u201d he writes, \u201cone simply cannot get permission to so much as pull a trailer onto a lot, never mind to reside there full-time in it.\u201d<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0In America you can do that, in some places. The places Rosen visits tend to remoteness \u2014 Maine, west Texas, New Mexico, Colorado and the redwood country of northwestern California.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Much of this book is about reasons and motives. Rosen himself is an anti-corporate green who detests \u201cthe hyper-consumption of the past 30 years\u201d and people\u2019s dependence on corporations and the state. \u201cI want neighbors who solve their problems themselves instead of calling the police or county commissioners about every little thing,\u201d he writes.\u00a0<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0He is emphatically not a commune-ist. He visits a commune in Maine, and the people are stuck in a meeting. \u201cI must confess my heart sank,\u201d he writes. \u201cMuch 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.\u201d And in a commune, that means meetings and voting and rules. \u201cI am not into cleaning schedules, interminable meetings and the need to reach a consensus with others about every aspect of my life,\u201d he writes. \u201cI don\u2019t want to join a social experiment.\u201d He just wants to decouple.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Most of his subjects, he writes, are \u201cpro-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.\u201d<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0He sets out to find them.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Some 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? \u201cFreedom,\u201d she tells Rosen. \u201cPrivacy. I want as little government involvement in my life as possible, and that sounds like a really Republican thing to say, but it\u2019s not. I\u2019ve been trying to make a life where I can disengage from corporate and government serfdom as much as possible.\u201d<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Rosen said this was \u201cone of the most political statements\u201d he heard. It is also one of the more rational.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Another 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, \u201cis dedicated to not paying the market price for anything.\u201d Jim has built his house from bricks of \u201cpapercrete,\u201d which is made of sludge from the local paper mill and 20 percent masonry cement. Jim worries about a societal \u201cspiraling down\u201d to collapse. He has stashed away a year\u2019s worth of rice, barley and oats, and has plans to convert his car to fuel he can grow. He tells Rosen he \u201cfeels increasingly aligned with the Amish.\u201d<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0One of Rosen\u2019s 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\u2019s lifestyle, he writes, \u201cfeels exciting to me, albeit slightly artificial.\u201d<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Rosen puts much of himself in his book, which could be annoying but isn\u2019t. 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.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Consider Carolyn Chute and her husband, Michael, of Parsonsfield, Maine. Chute is the author of the novel,\u00a0The School on Heart\u2019s Content Road.\u00a0<\/i>It was reviewed in the\u00a0New York Times<\/i>, Nov. 21, 2008, which has a photo of Carolyn and Michael dressed in country rustic and proudly carrying guns. The\u00a0Times\u00a0<\/i>reviewer seems put off by the weaponry but likes the novel. She calls it a \u201cdepiction of contemporary American poverty: of the slow, relentless grind of never quite having enough.\u201d<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Rosen 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 \u201cit\u2019s a mean world.\u201d Now they are getting old and will need looking after. They don\u2019t 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.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Then there are Daniel and Kirstin, \u201curban homesteaders\u201d 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\u2019t have health insurance, life insurance or a pension plan.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t

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\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u201cBecause of their purposely low income,\u201d Rosen writes, \u201cDaniel and Kristin know they will never put their kids through college. They have thought it through and are happy they are not subscribing to that particular con.\u201d<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Will their daughter, 14, or their son, 6, ultimately appreciate this? Daniel and Kirstin are homeschooling them, sort of. The kids are learning by doing. As they teach their daughter to follow a recipe, they ask her to double it, Rosen writes, \u201cso math is incorporated as well.\u201d<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Maybe college won\u2019t be an issue.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Reading stories like this, I ask: Is this worth it? Bob and Wretha retreated to the Texas hills to be away from regulations and rules. Bob says, \u201cI like being able to build what you want without having to get permission from Nanny.\u201d That\u2019s swell, but they live in a shack among \u201ca mess of old appliances, salvaged lumber, and other junk\u201d and they eat nothing but canned and dried food.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0It is a lifestyle issue \u2014 and also an intellectual issue, an issue of consistency, if you care about that sort of thing. The rule that off-gridders are trying to follow is to be disconnected not just from the utility grid, but from the\u00a0economic\u00a0<\/i>grid of global capitalism. And they can\u2019t do that.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Here is Melinda in Big Bend, Texas. She is off the utility grid \u2014 but makes a living by doing research on a laptop, connected to the Internet through the Wild Blue satellite service at $60 a month. She powers her laptop with a diesel generator. I draw a parallel to myself. I heat my house in Seattle with natural gas, which is piped from Alberta. I am\u00a0on the grid<\/i>. If I switched to fuel oil, like Melinda has switched to diesel, would I be in that respect\u00a0off\u00a0<\/i>the grid? The way Rosen uses the term I would. But in my view, that my fuel would come by truck rather than in a pipe is not important. I am still on the economic grid, and so is Melinda.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Carolyn and Michael in Maine are living on the royalties from Carolyn\u2019s novels, which have been promoted by the\u00a0New York Times<\/i>. Is that being off the grid? Is the actor who makes a living in Hollywood and has a million-dollar house in the Rockies with its own power plant off the grid? His house may be disconnected from municipal water and power, but is that what matters? A Hollywood actor making a living from global film royalties is not\u00a0off the grid<\/i>.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0And how about the scavenger? He is scavenging the castoffs of global capitalism. If mass consumerism weren\u2019t creating all this wonderful throwaway stuff, scavenging wouldn\u2019t pay.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Rosen recognizes this. He asks: is it a fatal flaw? \u201cI don\u2019t think so,\u201d he says. \u201cThere will be avid consumers for years to come.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Surely he is right about that. But there will also be water and power companies for years to come.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The urban homesteaders, Daniel and Kirstin, are more fastidious. They refuse to scavenge or patronize thrift stores because such acts are connections to global capitalism. Rosen writes: \u201cI am not sure if I agree with his logic, because if you take it all the way, if Daniel is seriously committed to severing his dependence on the global economy, shouldn\u2019t he have built his house himself?\u201d<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0That\u2019s right. And if Rosen refused to use petroleum-fueled vehicles and a laptop computer while researching this book, and instead had pedaled a bicycle from Maine to California, and taken his notes with a pencil \u2014 well, then, where would the bicycle and the pencil come from? As anyone who has read Leonard Read\u2019s famous essay, \u201cI, Pencil,\u201d can attest, even a pencil is tied to world trade.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Rosen\u2019s answer is not to demand consistency \u2014 of his subjects or of himself. And it is a sensible answer. Off-griddism is not an idea you can pursue consistently while living a modern life. Rosen couldn\u2019t make a living off this book if he refused to fly and rent cars and use a cell phone and a computer. So he does those things. He lives with the uncomfortable fact that his anti-corporate book is published by Penguin, which is owned by Pearson plc, a London-based multinational corporation that owns\u00a0The Financial Times.\u00a0<\/i>And I don\u2019t complain either; but I do point it out. His ideas can be pursued only so far, beyond which lie the nuts.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0And there are some of them in his book. My favorite is the dogged fellow who, after consuming a plate of food, picked up the plate and\u00a0licked it clean<\/i>.\u00a0<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u201cNo doubt it saved both energy and water,\u201d Rosen writes, \u201cbut I\u2019d never seen anyone do that before.\u201d<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0If Rosen were a fanatic, he wouldn\u2019t have reported that. But he does. He tells you what he sees. When he visits a \u201ctent city\u201d encampment in Sacramento, he does not push the lefty line about victims cast off by global capitalism. They are not. Some are in an illegal drug business. Some are \u201cprofessional homeless\u201d living in tents \u201cfor political reasons.\u201d Some are men sporadically working and saving their money by not paying rent.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u201cThe residents I spoke to were not people who had recently lost their stable homes and stable jobs,\u201d he writes.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I like Rosen. I like his honesty. I like the clarity of his writing. He brings an attitude, and I don\u2019t always agree with it, but I smiled when he called Boulder, Colorado, \u201cthe smuggest town in America,\u201d because it\u2019s full of government workers piously \u201cbuying organic veggies and recycling their wine bottles.\u201d Rosen has written a fun book, and one that libertarians will want to read.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0As for his theory about being subordinated to the economic machine \u2014 he has a point. We work, we are paid, and we lock ourselves in with what we buy. Detaching oneself does create a kind of freedom. But detach from what? I can understand detaching from an employer and working for yourself. I haven\u2019t done it, but I respect it. It is a capitalist right. I can understand turning off network TV; I have done that for most of my life. Finally, I can understand a revulsion to the culture of compulsive shopping. My parents, who married during the Depression, taught me to moderate my wants, and I thank them for it. But detach myself from municipal water and electricity? No.<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I have detached myself from something much more important. Though my house is connected to water, sewer, electricity, gas, TV, telephone, Internet, mail delivery, garbage pickup and, through the property tax, to the state, it is not connected to the bank. The heaviest load of all was the mortgage, and it is gone. The others I can live with.<\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

\u00a9 2010 Bruce Ramsey<\/em><\/p>

\u00a0<\/em><\/p>

\u00a0<\/p>

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Mike Parks, my boss at Marple\u2019s Newsletter back in 1980, read this piece wondering if I was the Bruce Ramsey who wrote it. \u201cWhen I saw the last paragraph, I knew it was you,\u201d he said.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/section>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0A common libertarian fantasy is to move away from civilization and live \u201coff the grid.\u201d In 2010 came a journalist\u2019s book about it, Nick Rosen\u2019s Off the Grid: Inside the Movement for More Space, Less Government, and True Independence in Modern America. My review of it appeared in Liberty, October 2010. As […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-621","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=621"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/621\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1546,"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/621\/revisions\/1546"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bruceramsey.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}