The New American Life

The New American Life From the country to the inner city, americans are taking matters into their own hands and going off the grid in surprising ways story by tracie mcmillan photographs by Amy toensing

2 RODALE’S ORGANIC LIFE R JULY / AUGUST 2015 Jane Kimball, 7, holds a motherless lamb she’s just hand-fed on her parents’ solar-powered farm in Essex, New York. The Kimballs grow almost all their own food and also operate a CSA that provides a near-complete diet to its members. The New American Life

JULY / AUGUST 2015 R RODALE’S ORGANIC LIFE 3 he first time I reconsidered what off-grid meant, I was in Detroit’s North End, trailing the Reverend Joan C. Ross. Red-spectacled and in a second ca- reer after selling off her McDonald’s franchises, Rev. Ross was showing me a solar demonstration house, a once-abandoned beauty she had helped bring back to life. There was fine trim in a Victorian parlor, a porch thatT screamed for a summer afternoon, a toilet that used wastewater to flush, a yard designed to catch runoff, and solar panels on the roof. “You’re not paying into companies who are burning fossil fuels, or de- stroying the planet,” she said. “You’re relying on the sun.” I would have expected this from someone with blond dreadlocks and a beard, someone who had traded a normal house for a souped-up camp- site in the woods. Off-grid as I knew it was a mix of awesome and weird and marginal; it was bohemian. But, between working in the North End and having McDonald’s on her resume, Rev. Ross wasn’t marginal or bohemian. She wasn’t all that weird. And that, oddly enough, makes her a pretty typical off-gridder in America today.

he term off-grid began to circulate around the turn of the millennium. On the one hand, it was associated with the post-9/11 obsession with “prep- Tping” for apocalypse. But it also described survivalism’s utopian opposite: the persistent American compulsion to do for oneself, to live simply and in consort with nature. This latter definition ofoff-grid had a recent precursor in the back-

4 RODALE’S ORGANIC LIFE JULY / AUGUST 2015 Betsy Andrews • 5/14/15 R9:42 PM Add bio box for Tracie? (Ask Jim) Above: Kristin Kimball, children Kristin Kimball Jane, 7 (left) and Miranda, 4, and husband Mark enjoy a quiet Essex, New York moment at home in Essex, New Off-grid for food and power York. Facing page, clockwise from top left: Lindsey Keith (left) I’d say 80 to 90 percent of our calories come from our farm. For and Meagan Binkley hoe rhubarb breakfast, we had pancakes, and the flour came from the mill one rows on the Kimballs’ Essex town south of us. The lard came from our pigs, yogurt from our Farm; Taylor La Fleur brings cows, eggs from the farm, and a cheese made from our milk. For young plants outside to acclimate our little Sunday after-church meal, we’ll have our own roast beef to the weather; an Essex Farm and roast mutton heart with pickled beets, cheese, and pancakes sow naps while her piglet finds left over from breakfast. his feet; Mark and Miranda, 4, return home from the fields. There aren’t very many people in the world who get to eat Everyone gets around this farm as well as we and our CSA members do. That feeling of deep connection to this place deepens the enjoyment of that good food. In a very real way, we’re made of this place. Farms have to fit your personalities, or it doesn’t work. As farmers and parents and people who care about the people who come after us, it’s deeply important to us to be able to say that we tried to do something about climate change. We go out and think, How can we maximize the growth that we are getting from the sun in real time? We’re making a regenerative form of agriculture real in our lifetime.

JULY / AUGUST 2015 RODALE’S ORGANIC LIFE 5 Betsy Andrews • 5/14/15 9:42 PM R Add bio box for Tracie? (Ask Jim) I really do think about how I can do good just in my everyday life.

Resident Lola Reyes, TKage, explores the shared flower and herb garden during an open house at the off-grid community Los Angeles Eco-Village.

6 RODALE’S ORGANIC LIFE R JULY / AUGUST 2015 400 Years Off-Grid

1607 English colonists found Jamestown in Virginia. Ruling “he that will not work shall not eat,” leader John Smith teaches farming skills. 1620 Seeking religious freedom, the Pilgrims land at Plymouth Rock. They survive with help from Native Americans, who teach essentials like fertilizing crops with dead fish. 1776 Ann Lee founds the Utopian separatist Shaker community in upstate New York. 1841 Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes “Self- Reliance,” an essay exalting individualism. 1854 Henry David Thoreau publishes his nature-communing masterpiece, Walden; or, Life in the Woods. 1864 Back-to-the-land book Ten Acres Enough is published in the wake of a financial crisis. 1907 Bolton Hall’s off-grid guide Three Acres and Liberty discusses the possibility of small frog farms near San Francisco. 1915 Some 40 Jewish agricultural settlements exist in the U.S.—an effort at self-reliance in response to pogroms in Europe. 1896 Booker T. Washington publishes his essay “Self-Reliance” and establishes an agricultural program at the Tuskegee Institute. 1933 The New Deal’s Subsistence Homestead program gives urbanites tracts to grow food on. 1943 20 million backyard Victory Gardens supplement diets during wartime rationing. 1967 Inspired by B. F. Skinner’s novel Walden Two about a commune practicing Thoreau’s ideals, Twin Oaks Community launches in Louisa, Virginia. 1970 President Nixon returns 48,000 acres of New Mexico to the Taos Pueblo Indians, who forbid electricity or running water in their millennium-old adobe village. 1972 Michael Reynolds, an architect for “radically sustainable living,” builds his first Earthship, a house made from recycled materials. 1980 The oil crisis and the aftermath of the Vietnam war spur survivalist literature urging self-sufficiency. 1989 The Slow Food Manifesto is signed in Paris, birthing a new era of farm-to-table and edible gardens. 1991 Time magazine declares the desire to return to a simpler life a decade-defining trend. 1994 Researchers make a photovoltaic cell that converts more than 30 percent of sunlight into electricity. 2015 At the Future of Energy Summit, Al Gore predicts the power grid will go the way of landline phones. I really do think about how I can do good just in my everyday life.

JULY / AUGUST 2015 R RODALE’S ORGANIC LIFE 7 Jimmy Lizama and son Joaquin, 5, bike home from work and Jimmy Lizama school in downtown Los Angeles. Los Angeles, California Facing page, clockwise from top Off-grid for transportation and gray water left: Elya Waters, 3, entertains her mother, Aurisha (right), at I’ve never owned a car in my life. The whole time I’m in a car, I’m Los Angeles Eco-Village; Lizama stuck inside this box. I go from one box to another box to another helps Joaquin brush his teeth, box, and the interaction between me and the environment is not adding the water they use to their there. For me, that quality of life is awful. Bicycling really raises grey-water system; Lola Reyes hugs an Eco-Village chicken; my quality of life on a daily basis, hour by hour. Laura Allen consoles son Arlo, We live about 4 miles away from my son Joaquin’s school. I 4, in the kitchen while husband make sure he looks decent for school, then put him in the cargo Peter Ralph chats with a neighbor bike. We bike on Sunset all the way to Chinatown, and I drop him in their Eco-Village kitchen. off. I get to places just as fast as most people do. I really do think about how I can do good just in my everyday life, and how I get around, and how I consume. I have a greywater system, I compost, I grow bananas, I bicycle everywhere, and it’s really fun doing it this way. If I had it my way, everybody else would be on a cargo bicycle, and I’d be just a normal guy out there with everybody else.

8 RODALE’S ORGANIC LIFE R JULY / AUGUST 2015 to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s, when solitary sorts, families, and off-beat communes eked out a living in the wilderness and away from mainstream society. Many of those people dreamed of going ‘all the way back' to the land, of escaping modern society completely,” ,” says Dona Brown, author of Back to the Land, a history of the movement. “They were thinking about opting out.” Today’s off-grid movement is different. It’s focused less on individual house- holds than on the greater social good, and it encompasses many ways of life. While some off-gridders were who I would expect them to be, others surprised me. Denward Wilson and Kristy Klaiber are the types you might think would opt off the grid. A retired professor and schoolteacher, respectively, they hand-built a pas- sive solar house called an Earthshipoutside of Las Vegas, New Mexico, using mud, used tires, and wood. Their home, where the sun-bathed kitchen is lush with herb plants irrigated with wastewater, reflects their inspirations: “a religious regard for the wilderness and its unparalleled beauty,” they say; and the farmer-poet Wendell Berry, who exalted the agrarian life. Similarly, Joe and Shelly Trumpey, another professor-teacher couple, are passionate about self-reliance, high-quality food, and reducing their carbon footprint. The self-identified homesteaders built their solar-powered home outside Ann Arbor, Michigan, by milling their own timber, raising walls with stone from their land, and plastering it all together with adobe and straw bales as a tangible “rejection of the fossil fuel thing,” says Joe.

ut to understand the motives that drive others from the grid, consider what the grid truly is: a formal, collectivized network Bthat facilitates modern life. It arises because it makes our lives JULY / AUGUST 2015 R RODALE’S ORGANIC LIFE 9 infinitely easier, at least initially.W ithin the grid, we can be warm or cool whenever we like, we can travel where we like, we have light and water at the flip of a switch and the turn of a knob. But the grid comes with phenomenal costs, too: global warming, pollution, drained aquifers, the devastating effects of fracking. Most infuriatingly, because infrastructures are social creations, the grid reflects the inequalities of the society that created it. Simply put, people living in affluent areas are better served by it. In and around Ann Arbor, going off the grid may be a choice that reflects earth-friendly values; in a place like Detroit, a struggling city with staggering poverty and notoriously unreliable public services, an off-grid strategy is increasingly essential.W ith thousands of street lamps dark across the city, Rev. Ross raised money to put solar lights in the yards of people like Norma Heath, arguing that the illumination was planet-friendly and, better yet, free of charge. Says Heath, who is no longer left in the dark, “Everybody is saying, ‘Why didn’t I get one?’ ” I found another urban variant at the Eco-Village in Los Angeles’s Koreatown. Here, more than 40 Angelenos—Hispanic, black, and white; working class and professional alike—share a former resort outfitted with solar water heaters and a greywater recycling system, which irrigates a courtyard garden that is dotted with bananas, papa- yas, and pomegranates. Arguably the most striking off-grid practice in the Eco-Village is one that resident Jimmy Lizama introduced to me. Outside his kitchen, underneath his banana trees, he stores his most impressive off-grid project of all: a cargo bicycle, fitted with a

10 RODALE’S ORGANIC LIFE R JULY / AUGUST 2015 Joseph Trumpey Above: Joseph Trumpey super- Grass Lake, Michigan vises as daughters Evelyn, 12 Off-grid for food, water, power, and building materials (left), and Autumn plant greens. Facing page, clockwise from left: If you’re growing your own tomatoes, once you run out, you don’t In Michigan, the Trumpey pantry is bursting with home-jarred go to the store and buy Prego. You just wait until the season goods; Shelly Trumpey and comes back. It’s a logical extension to start to think about your Evelyn add eggs from the family’s electrical use. chickens to a Moroccan-style We could be on the grid here pretty easily if we wanted to shakshuka dinner; Evelyn and be. But a lot of the power infrastructure here is closely tied to Autumn herd sheep for shearing coal or fracked natural gas. Somewhere there’s a plant spewing on the farm. something unpleasant for the atmosphere and the neighborhood nearby. So we’re not taking part in that system. We wanted a house that was really energy-efficient. Eventually, we became enamored with straw-bale houses: the deep walls, the windowsills, the texture of the plaster. The straw was grown across the street, so the transportation costs were minimal. The mass of the adobe on the walls is all local. All the stone is out of our field. In the wintertime, we wait until there’s sun to do laundry. In the summertime, when we’ve got lots of electricity, we can do whatever we want. We have a TV and a refrigerator and toilets and a dishwasher and a microwave and all this other stuff. But, man, we do it with a lot less energy.

JULY / AUGUST 2015 R RODALE’S ORGANIC LIFE 11 12 RODALE’S ORGANICLI FE the sun?That’sawonderfulthing. overhead bill, and you can get that from for. Youdon’thavetoworryaboutan put onEarth,weshouldnotbepaying Ross saysallthosethingsthatGod had thefundstodothat,Iwould.Rev. glad Igotmylight. went out,dark,for10blocks,andIwas a transformerwentdown.Everything was putinNovember.InDecember, told herthatwouldbegreat.Thelight in withtheideaforsolarlights,andI so muchinthecommunity.Shecame to worryaboutthis.” “If wehadsolarlight,wouldn’thave were outonthebackporch,andsaid, “Oh, no!”Meandmyhusband,Kelvin, that wentonforthreedays.Iwaslike, were out.Wedidn’thavelights.Ithink Detroit, andallthecitiesNewYork about theblackout.Itwasalloverin Twelve yearsago,itwasabigthing I’ve livedatthislocation16years. Off-grid forstreetlight Detroit, Michigan Norma Heath Pennsylvania homestead, the Stone Camp, is a Pennsylvania homestead,theStoneCamp, isa has onlytoreadthisbookbyTedCarns, whose qualms aboutgivinguptheperksof grid IndependenceAnyonewith Comfortable Off onOurOwn:LivingOff-Gridin means tostepawayfromsociety. anarchists towealthyfamilieswithample American off-griddersfromscrappy In this2010book,BritNickRosenprofiles Independence inModernAmerica More Space,L Off theGrid:InsideMovementfor nudging readersoffthegridsince1970. sustainable-lifestyle magazinehasbeen green transportationtonaturalhealth,this NewsCoveringtopicsfrom Mother Earth on renewableenergy,bothon-andoff-grid. do-it-yourselfers deliversnewsandadvice Home PowerThismagazineforhard-core rejecters tohippies. from earlyanti-consumeriststoNewDeal century back-to-the-landmovements, Historian DonaBrownchronicles20th- of Self-ufficiencyinModernAmerica Back totheLand:TheEnduringDream Off-Grid, Off the Shelf If Icouldputsolarinmyhouse,if I metRev.Rossbecausevolunteer ess Government,andT

JULY / JULY AUGUST 2015 rue from skinningarabbittothatchingroof. an essentialprimeronback-to-the-land skills, the lateBritishauthorJohnSeymour remains In its6thedition,thisillustratedclassic from It: TheCompleteBack-to-Basics Guide The Self-ufficientLife andHowtoLive wildcrafting, microbatchingbiofuel,and more. park inNewMexico,andlivedtotellaboutit Tremayne wentoff-gridinanabandonedRV in Hands-OnLivingArtistWendyJehanara The GoodLife Lab: RadicalExperiments Vermont woodsbackin1932,remainvital. icons HelenandScottNearing,whofledtothe The GoodLife Thewritingsofhomesteading particulars offarmingintheconcretejungle. how tograpplewithsoilremediationandother guide fromNovellaCarpenter,whoteaches dwellers canliveoffthelandwiththisin-depth The EssentialUrbanFarmerEvencity ultimate user’sguidetooff-gridding. edition ofJohnSchaeffer’stomeisan panels, evenhomeembalming—the14th Building acompostingtoilet,rackingsolar Real GoodsSolarLivingourcebook model forgrid-freeluxury. We said:“Ifwehadsolarlights,wouldn’thavetoworry.”

PHOTO credit tk We said: “If we had solar lights, we wouldn’t have to worry.”

Norma and Kelvin Heath stand in front of their home in Detroit, Michigan. With the help of local minister Joan Ross, the Heaths installed this solar streetlight after the city’s lights stopped working reliably.

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JULY / JULY AUGUST all of their drinking water from the all oftheirdrinkingwaterfromthe Denward Wilson built their house Denward Wilsonbuilttheirhouse imize the amount of energy they imize theamountofenergythey a longsouth-facingsidetomax- in Las Vegas, New Mexico, with in LasVegas,NewMexico,with irrigated by graywater. They get irrigated bygraywater.Theyget Klaiber and Wilson settle down Klaiber andWilsonsettledown get from the sun. Facing page: get fromthesun.Facingpage: 2015 kitchen, where the plants are kitchen, wheretheplantsare for lunch in their sun-soaked for lunchintheirsun-soaked Retirees Kristy Klaiber and Retirees KristyKlaiberand rainwater they collect. rainwater theycollect. being aburdenontheearth.” you think,“Ibuiltthismyself,and itactuallyworks,andI’mnot Mexico haslotsofsun.There’sjust somethingwonderfulwhen cans; they’relikebricks.You’rejustrecycling. about 300pounds.Thebathroomisallmadeoutofaluminum about 600;eachtireispoundedwiththreewheelbarrowsofdirt, would stayhereforamonthortwo,poundingtires.Icountedto out foreightsummerswhilewewereteachinginArizona,and “Okay, let’sdoit!” architect said,“Youcandothisyourselves,”andwejustthought, retiring, andwantedtobelessofaburdenontheearth.The we wantedtobeself-sustainingasmuchcould.Wewere in thecountryandbuildmyownhouse.MyhusbandIknew Since Iwasachild,I’vealwayswantedtobepioneer,goout Off-grid forwater,power,andmostbuildingmaterials Las Vegas,NewMexico Kristy Klaiber We’re doingfine.dependentonthesolar,andNew I wasarecycler,andlike,“Icanrecycletires!”Wecame

PHOTO credit tk PHOTO credit tk A biking fortransport. eschews LosAngeles’sinfamousautomobileandgasolinegrid, solely plywood holdbigenoughforhisson, Joaquin, 5,toridein. Lizama detach usfrom what’sgoingon.” from.expand thethings thecommunitycan benefit It’s notmeant to too. SaysR community radio stationthatshe'splanningtomakesolar-powered, help getherunderserved neighborhoodonline, and she’slaunchinga onthosesolar streetlightsto out how toinstallwifi She’s figuring about beingassociallyengaged offthegridasonit. Justask R alone. Life . Dirty experience calledThe been adestructive force,”saysKristin, whowrotea2010bookabouttheir farming canbearegenerative forceinthisagewhereagricultureisandhas one that’sinevery way independentoftheindustrialfoodgrid. “Ibelieve 222 membersoftheirCSA. ducing acompleteorganicdietofproduce, grains, meat, anddairyforall percent byyear’send. arrays forathirdoftheircurrentpower, aimingtopushit100 andthey’re Despite theirideals, cangoit theKimballsdon’tbelieve thatthey T oday’s off-gridisnotabout leavingtheworldbehind;it’s owners ofEssexFarm inNewY cately between idealismandpracticality. MarkandKristinimball, nd thentherearepeoplewhogooffgridin ways thatperchdeli- ev. R oss ofherburgeoningoff-grid strategy, “It’smeantto hey feedanentirecommunitythemselves bypro- They Their farm, likeanyother, isabusiness, but it’s ork’s Champlain Valley, usesolar ev. R oss. JULY / JULY AUGUST 2015 R

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PHOTO credit tk check out these blogs, books, and businesses before you take the plunge and go off-grid

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