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 grey- water 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.

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