Non-Essential Reading for Living Off the Grid

The rear cover of Nick Rosen's From the Power grid states it is "essential reading through for anybody who's thought to ask sounding the power grid." It isn't.

Rather, it is a hodgepodge of anecdotes loosely hung together round the theme of utility-less living. I doubt that anybody in From the Power grid might have read, or achieved positive results from, this book before they unplugged. What fails to encounter within this featherweight book may be the importance from the occasions and of those whose reaction to present day USA is, simply, to maneuver off-power grid.

This should be a layman's guide in line with the author's conversations with assorted off-gridders met as they together with the united states. Rosen appears a enjoyable enough fellow, and also the book reads such as the collected scraps of the compensated vacation, so it surely was. It skips around a great deal, because the subjects - I'd hesitate to them interviewees - are everywhere geographically, plus they appear apparently randomly. Ultimately, I wondered more how Rosen arranged, and given, everything travel, than Used to do about how exactly or why folks live because they do.

The issue here is, people living from the power grid, or considering it, curently have the assets, and also the support systems they require they are merely a Google away. During these golden times of the data era, the survivalists have survivalist sites the home schoolers and also the religious have places to congregate pot-farmers don't Bogart their apple enviros have Real Goods as well as the nomadic vehicle residents have groups, like the enormously busy Van Residents Yahoo Group, for advice and support. I'll hand out a shout here to "Hobo Stripper," who effectively parlayed an internet site written from her van while making her living being an itinerant sex worker, into an off-power grid Alaskan retreat she now is the owner of and calls home.

Off-gridders owe more to Stewart Brand, living on his tugboat, and also the Whole Earth Catalog, compared to what they do holiday to a single source. Yet they do not rate a mention in From the Power grid. Now there is a magazine that deserved the paper it had been [ecologically] printed on. The Catalog, "Use of Tools," sparked the off-power grid, to the land movement 4 decades ago. Individuals myriad sparks of understanding - such as the Internet - still glow everywhere, telling us and lighting our way.

Rosen does nothing to increase the conversation(s) the Catalog began, either by producing source information or digging out obscure but helpful sites. You will find no notes, no bibliography, no index.