The New American Life - Tracie McMillantraciemcmillan.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/McMillan_OffGrid.pdf · The New American Life ... 1991 Time magazine declares the desire to return

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

The New American Life

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


The 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

that 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.

The 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-ping” 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 of off-grid had a recent precursor in the back-

Betsy Andrews • 5/14/15 9:42 PMAdd bio box for Tracie? (Ask Jim)


Above: Kristin Kimball, children Jane, 7 (left) and Miranda, 4, and husband Mark enjoy a quiet moment at home in Essex, New York. Facing page, clockwise from top left: Lindsey Keith (left) and Meagan Binkley hoe rhubarb rows on the Kimballs’ Essex Farm; Taylor La Fleur brings young plants outside to acclimate to the weather; an Essex Farm sow naps while her piglet finds his feet; Mark and Miranda, 4, return home from the fields. Everyone gets around this farm

Kristin KimballEssex, New YorkOff-grid for food and power

I’d say 80 to 90 percent of our calories come from our farm. For breakfast, we had pancakes, and the flour came from the mill one town south of us. The lard came from our pigs, yogurt from our cows, eggs from the farm, and a cheese made from our milk. For our little Sunday after-church meal, we’ll have our own roast beef and roast mutton heart with pickled beets, cheese, and pancakes left over from breakfast.

There aren’t very many people in the world who get to eat 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.

Betsy Andrews • 5/14/15 9:42 PMAdd 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.


I really do think about how I can do good just in my everyday life.

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.


Jimmy Lizama and son Joaquin, 5, bike home from work and

school in downtown Los Angeles. Facing page, clockwise from top

left: Elya Waters, 3, entertains her mother, Aurisha (right), at

Los Angeles Eco-Village; Lizama helps Joaquin brush his teeth,

adding the water they use to their grey-water system; Lola Reyes

hugs an Eco-Village chicken; Laura Allen consoles son Arlo, 4, in the kitchen while husband

Peter Ralph chats with a neighbor in their Eco-Village kitchen.

Jimmy LizamaLos Angeles, CaliforniaOff-grid for transportation and gray water

I’ve never owned a car in my life. The whole time I’m in a car, I’m stuck inside this box. I go from one box to another box to another box, and the interaction between me and the environment is not there. For me, that quality of life is awful. Bicycling really raises my quality of life on a daily basis, hour by hour.

We live about 4 miles away from my son Joaquin’s school. I make sure he looks decent for school, then put him in the cargo bike. We bike on Sunset all the way to Chinatown, and I drop him 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.


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.

But to understand the motives that drive others from the grid, consider what the grid truly is: a formal, collectivized network that facilitates modern life. it arises because it makes our lives


infinitely easier, at least initially. within 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. with 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


Above: Joseph Trumpey super-vises as daughters Evelyn, 12 (left), and Autumn plant greens. Facing page, clockwise from left: In Michigan, the Trumpey pantry is bursting with home-jarred goods; Shelly Trumpey and Evelyn add eggs from the family’s chickens to a Moroccan-style shakshuka dinner; Evelyn and Autumn herd sheep for shearing on the farm.

Joseph TrumpeyGrass Lake, MichiganOff-grid for food, water, power, and building materials

If you’re growing your own tomatoes, once you run out, you don’t go to the store and buy Prego. You just wait until the season comes back. It’s a logical extension to start to think about your electrical use.

We could be on the grid here pretty easily if we wanted to be. But a lot of the power infrastructure here is closely tied to coal or fracked natural gas. Somewhere there’s a plant spewing 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.


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

Norma HeathDetroit, MichiganOff-grid for street light

I’ve lived at this location 16 years. Twelve years ago, it was a big thing about the blackout. It was all over in Detroit, and all the cities and New York were out. We didn’t have lights. I think that went on for three days. I was like, “Oh, no!” Me and my husband, Kelvin, were out on the back porch, and said, “If we had solar light, we wouldn’t have to worry about this.”

I met Rev. Ross because I volunteer so much in the community. She came in with the idea for solar lights, and I told her that would be great. The light was put in in November. In December, a transformer went down. Everything went out, dark, for 10 blocks, and I was glad I got my light.

If I could put solar in my house, if I had the funds to do that, I would. Rev. Ross says all those things that God put on Earth, we should not be paying for. You don’t have to worry about an overhead bill, and you can get that from the sun? That’s a wonderful thing.

Off-Grid, Off the shelfBack to the land: the enduring dream of self-sufficiency in Modern americaHistorian Dona Brown chronicles 20th-century back-to-the-land movements, from early anti-consumerists to New Deal rejecters to hippies. home Power This magazine for hard-core do-it-yourselfers delivers news and advice on renewable energy, both on- and off-grid.Mother earth News Covering topics from green transportation to natural health, this sustainable-lifestyle magazine has been nudging readers off the grid since 1970.Off the Grid: inside the Movement for More space, less Government, and true independence in Modern americaIn this 2010 book, Brit Nick Rosen profiles American off-gridders from scrappy anarchists to wealthy families with ample means to step away from society.Off on Our Own: living Off-Grid in Comfortable independence Anyone with qualms about giving up the perks of the grid has only to read this book by Ted Carns, whose Pennsylvania homestead, the Stone Camp, is a

model for grid-free luxury. real Goods solar living sourcebookBuilding a composting toilet, racking solar panels, even home embalming—the 14th edition of John Schaeffer’s tome is an ultimate user’s guide to off-gridding.the essential Urban farmer Even city dwellers can live off the land with this in-depth guide from Novella Carpenter, who teaches how to grapple with soil remediation and other particulars of farming in the concrete jungle.the Good life The writings of homesteading icons Helen and Scott Nearing, who fled to the Vermont woods back in 1932, remain vital.the Good life lab: radical experiments in hands-On living Artist Wendy Jehanara Tremayne went off-grid in an abandoned RV park in New Mexico, and lived to tell about it wildcrafting, microbatching biofuel, and more. the self-sufficient life and how to live it: the Complete Back-to-Basics Guide In its 6th edition, this illustrated classic from the late British author John Seymour remains an essential primer on back-to-the-land skills, from skinning a rabbit to thatching a roof.


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.

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


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Retirees Kristy Klaiber and Denward Wilson built their house in Las Vegas, New Mexico, with a long south-facing side to max-imize the amount of energy they

get from the sun. Facing page: Klaiber and Wilson settle down

for lunch in their sun-soaked kitchen, where the plants are

irrigated by graywater. They get all of their drinking water from the

rainwater they collect.

Kristy Klaiber Las Vegas, New MexicoOff-grid for water, power, and most building materials

Since I was a child, I’ve always wanted to be a pioneer, to go out in the country and build my own house. My husband and I knew we wanted to be self-sustaining as much as we could. We were retiring, and wanted to be less of a burden on the earth. The architect said, “You can do this yourselves,” and we just thought, “Okay, let’s do it!”

I was a recycler, and I was like, “I can recycle tires!” We came out for eight summers while we were teaching in Arizona, and we would stay here for a month or two, pounding tires. I counted to about 600; each tire is pounded with three wheelbarrows of dirt, about 300 pounds. The bathroom is all made out of aluminum cans; they’re like bricks. You’re just recycling.

We’re doing fine. We’re dependent on the solar, and New Mexico has lots of sun. There’s just something wonderful when you think, “I built this myself, and it actually works, and I’m not being a burden on the earth.”


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plywood hold big enough for his son, Joaquin, 5,to ride in. lizama eschews los angeles’s infamous automobile and gasoline grid, solely biking for transport.

And then there are people who go off grid in ways that perch deli-cately between idealism and practicality. mark and kristin kimball, owners of essex Farm in new york’s champlain Valley, use solar

arrays for a third of their current power, and they’re aiming to push it to 100 percent by year’s end. they feed an entire community themselves by pro-ducing a complete organic diet of produce, grains, meat, and dairy for all 222 members of their csa. their farm, like any other, is a business, but it’s one that’s in every way independent of the industrial food grid. “i believe farming can be a regenerative force in this age where agriculture is and has been a destructive force,” says kristin, who wrote a 2010 book about their experience called The Dirty Life.

despite their ideals, the kimballs don’t believe that they can go it alone. today’s off-grid is not about leaving the world behind; it’s about being as socially engaged off the grid as on it. Just ask rev. ross. she’s figuring out how to install wifi on those solar street lights to help get her underserved neighborhood online, and she’s launching a community radio station that she's planning to make solar-powered, too. says rev. ross of her burgeoning off-grid strategy, “it’s meant to expand the things the community can benefit from. it’s not meant to detach us from what’s going on.”


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check out these blogs, books, and businesses beFore you take the plunge and go oFF-grid

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The New American Life - Tracie McMillantraciemcmillan.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/McMillan_OffGrid.pdf · The New American Life ... 1991 Time magazine declares the desire to return

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