For the time being, there are only a few quotes from the book here.
The back-to-the-land
movement is having its time again. A few hundred thousand elderly
ex-hippies —or maybe
enduring hippies— who went rural in the 1970s have now been joined by a younger generation, many of
whom have abandoned the rat race in the past few years as economic conditions
have worsened. Some were forced out. Others in secure jobs used the downturn
to reappraise their values. They are sick of traffic, pollution, and the
consumer-driven society. They have lost all trust in bankers and
politicians. They are looking for a better way. Mike's youngest daughter
is an urban environmentalist —the latest face of the back-to-the-land movement. She would
take up her father's off-grid legacy, if at all, for the health of the planet.
But going off the grid is only partly about living a greener life. It is
also about freedom from the daily commute, mortgage-induced wage slavery, and
corporate mass-markting. True, people who survive without municipally
supplied power and water are likely to reduce their carbon footprint —that esoteric
calculation of the damage our every move is doing to the planet— but
this makes them merely accidental environmentalists, assuming they use wind
or solar power for electrical energy, capture rainwater for washing and
drinking, and dispose of their own organic waste, perhaps with a composting
toilet that replaces water with wood chips and allows the mix to mature for
six months before returning it to the soil. With a certain design approach
known as eco-architecture, warmth comes directly from the sun through big windows in the walls of
the home. Solar thermal water heaters, wood-burning stoves, and ground-source
heat pumps —which extract the heat from the ground— can also
provide minimally harmful warmth.
(Nick Rosen: Off the grid, p. 5)
The main requirement is a change of mind-set. Americans are happy and
proud to buy and use recycled toilet paper, but a composting toilet is another matter, a level
most people won't even think about. Most Americans are taught, or at the
very least encouraged to believe, that homes must be a certain way. Well before
the invention of TV, marketers pushed "ideal lifestyle" scenarios that included
fridges and washing machines and electric gadgets of all kinds. The power
companies, of course, subsidized the development and marketing of these
products, and intentionally or not, dependence on the grid became a fact of
life in America. Living in homes that are the exceptions to this rule are
hippies and traditional back woodsmen (and women).
(Nick Rosen: Off the grid, p. 6)
The most familiar —to me, because this is the reason I was looking
myself— are those whose off-grid properties are second or vacation
homes, places to duck out from the stresses and ills of modern society:
unhealthy lifestyles, fast food, commuter hell, urban violence, high rents,
work deadlines, and uptight clients. The off-grid second home is a true
escape from all that. The conventional second home is too often nothing more
than a replica of the primary residence, an additional home simply situated
in a difference place that fosters the same habits from which one is trying
to escape.
Then there are what might be called transitionalists or "off-grid-ready"
residents. Their homes are their primary residences and are still connected
to the grid, but they have solar or wind power and have reduced their
energy and water consumption to the extent that they could if necessary live
happily with just a few solar panels (or the equivalent) and a single
rainwater tank. Traditionalists tend to believe that we are in the age of
peak oil —meaning
that the supply of affordable energy is dwindling. They are also motivated
by ecological concerns.
Most of us feel the need to have flushing toilets and municipal power. Some
people, for whatever reason, do not have that need. They are just the same
as the rest of us, yet, unlikely as it may sound, they feel perfectly
relaxed looking after their own power, water, and waste disposal. They spend
their money on the things that are most important to them: With a limited
budget, they are prepared to sacrifice the grid in return for a more desirable
location or a larger house or a bigger yard. They have chosen to live off the
grid in order to enjoy what they aspire to have on the grid.
(Nick Rosen: Off the grid, p. 14)
Yes, it's convenient. We come in, flip a switch, and there is light; we
turn a handle and water comes out of the tap. And I understand that for
most of us, most of the time, the grid is welcoming. It bestows a sense of
security; we know that someone is looking out for our power and water.
But today, all those things are available without the grid. The latest
inverters, renewable energy sources, and rainwater-capture systems can
provide for our needs. As the country prepares to spend hundreds of billions
to upgrade the grid and transform it into the "smart grid," it is worth reminding ourselves how we came
to build the grid in the first place.
(Nick Rosen: Off the grid, p. 22)
Historian David Nye,
in his book Electrifying America, says that managerial capitalism was
possible only "in a large integrated market which allowed one company to
produce in quantity at a few efficient sites and to sell the product to a
large market." There in a nutshell is the rationale and the justification for
the grid. It was not to help the consumer, nor to give communities more
control over their own lives, nor necessarily to guarantee a more reliable
flow of energy —that was a by-product. The grid came into existence
to optimize the efficiency (and hence profitability) for the producer.
Society has organized itself around this approach to business, and in doing
so, I beieve, has tied itself in knots.
(Nick Rosen: Off the grid, p. 24)
Since the early stages of the grid, GE had been working hard to increase their sales of
products other than lightbulbs. Merely running a few lights per household did not require the huge
central generators that GE was building, nor did it require the elaborate
power grid that was being planned. Things could have proceeded
differently. Just as today the smart grid is hardly inevitable and not
necessarily in the consumers' interests, back then the grid was not the only
logical conclusion and not the best solution for the market. "It could have
been a much less centralized system, even balkanized," David Nye told me.
If the opposition had been better organized, or the pro-electricity lobby
had not been so well funded, or if a man named Bruce Fairchild Barton had not come along
when he did, the grid might never have formed.
(Nick Rosen: Off the grid, pp. 29-30)
Thanks to GE, the American housewife, as portrayed in advertisements of this
period, was a pitiable creature —isolated in her home, demanding
evermore electrical goods while her husband went off to work. No wonder that
by the early 1970s, as the back-to-the-land movement gatherd pace, many
educated American women no longer wished to be one.
(Nick Rosen: Off the grid, p. 33)
Imagine for a moment that the smart grid does work, that in the future
the entire US grid will consist of power switching this way and that as sensors
convey usage information to central computers, the price varying depending
on demanda. Who is going to decide who will get that last extra unit of
energy on a sweltering day when everyone is using the air-conditioning? Will
it be the steel mill in Pittsburgh? Or the little old lady short of breath in
the heart of Georgia? It will be decided by a pricing mechanism of some sort,
and rather like airline tickets, electricity will be relatively cheap when
nobody wants it, and jaw-droppingly expensive when demand is at its peak. For
the big corporations with their managerial approach, this is perfect. What
about everyone else?
(Nick Rosen: Off the grid, p. 39)
Many of the same conflicts and principles that drove the expansion of the
electricity business also drove the water-supply industry in the early
twentieth century. The push for size obscured arguments about the public
interest; scale was everything. Businessmen and politicians agreed on this
assessment. Population growth, especially in the Western states, was only
part of the reason. Industrial processes needed more water, and the water
industry itself preferred big projects.
But there is only one crucial difference between water and electricity:
Water is essential for life; power, while highly desirable and life-enhancing,
is non-essential.
The initial demand for pure water delivered under pressure came from
firefighters and from the health industry, especially as the germ theory of disease spread from the
UK to America. As cities grew they needed more water, so battles began
between those who wanted to bring it to the cities and those (mainly farmers
and other property owners with water rights) who wanted to leave it where it
was.
The pattern was established. Tension between municipal authorities and
private water companies led, in many cases, to the municipalization of the
water companies. Once they were brought under government control, they became
tools of the politicians, and were used to line individual pockets, to
promote population policy, and, in particular, to promote the growth of
metropolitan areas. The political parties preferred to focus on urban
initiatives because it was easier to bring out the vote in densely populated
cities.
(Nick Rosen: Off the grid, pp. 40-41)
For a long time the health-related arguments for centralized, carefully
monitored water have prevailed. But the belief that water is healthier when
it is centralized has now reversed, and in many cases the water is now
healthier when it is not centralized. It still needs to be treated and
filtered, and that can now be done locally. The point of collection can
be the same as the point of consumption, and that means greater predictability
and contol for the end user. In the same way that energy from a solar panel
on the roof will not diminish traveling down the wire, water sourced on site
does not go through a transmission system and cannot be contaminated.
(Nick Rosen: Off the grid, pp. 40-41)
Entertainment Factor ?/10
Intellectual Factor: ?/10