Nick Rosen’s back cover Off the grid says the book is “essential reading for anyone who has ever thought about going offline.” It is not.
Instead, it’s a hodgepodge of loose anecdotes around the theme of life without utilities. I doubt anyone in Off the grid would have read, or benefited from, this book before going offline. What you don’t see in this featherweight book is the seriousness of the times and of the people whose response to America today is, in part, to go offline.
This is supposed to be a layman’s guide based on the author’s conversations with various off-grids he met while touring the US Rosen seems like a nice enough guy, and the book reads like the leftovers from a paid vacation, which they surely were. It jumps out a lot, as the subjects, I’d hesitate to call them interviewees, are all over the place geographically and appear seemingly random. In the end, I wondered more how Rosen organized and paid for all those trips than how or why people live the way they do.
The problem is that people living off the grid, or contemplating it, already have the resources and support networks they need; they are just a Google away. In these golden days of the information age, survivors have survival sites; homeschoolers and religious have places to congregate; marijuana growers don’t bogart your information; the environment has Real Estate; and even nomadic car dwellers have groups, like the hugely busy Van Dwellers Yahoo group, for advice and support. I’ll give a shout out here to “Hobo Stripper,” who successfully turned a website written from her truck while making a living as an itinerant sex worker, at an Alaskan off-grid retreat she now owns and calls home. .
The off-grids owe more to Stewart Brand, who still lives on his tugboat, and to The Whole Earth Catalog, than to any other source. However, they do not miss a mention in Off the grid. Now there was a book that deserved the role that it was [ecologically] printed on. The Catalog, “Access to Tools”, sparked the off-grid movement, back into the field 40 years ago. Those myriad sparks of knowledge, including the Internet, still shine all around us, informing us and lighting our way.
Rosen does nothing to add to the conversation(s) that the Catalog started, whether it’s compiling source information or digging up obscure but useful sites. There are no notes, no bibliography, no index.
Clearly, he hasn’t done his homework when it comes to the political side of life off the grid, either. Perhaps it is the British perspective of him, but on this side of the Atlantic, it is easy to understand how intelligent, cultured and conscientious they are, at best, deeply mistrustful of his rule. I am certainly not an expert on any of the many government lies, conspiracies, and cover-ups of the last 60 years, my life, nor do I want or need to be. But I have seen enough to understand that our government is essentially evil in many important respects.
For example, it is strange that Rosen only “vaguely recalls” a conversation with Larry Silverstein, owner of the World Trade Center and recipient of something like $750 million in insurance money, about the rationale behind the controlled and prearranged demolition of Building 7. on 9/11 (p.268). And because this isn’t just historical footnote to many people, including his subject of the moment, Allan Weisbecker, Rosen dismisses him, and them, as paranoid crackpots in his chapter titled “Fear.”
As for Peak Oil, Rosen reveals a lack of understanding that harms both his subjects and the reading public. He makes a mistake of fact by misdefining Peak Oil as “the point in history when the amount of oil consumed each year exceeds the amount of new oil found each year” (p.273). Consumption has outpaced discovery for many years. Peak Oil is when world oil production reaches its highest possible point, always and forever. It’s a basic, but critical distinction. According to the International Energy Agency, that point occurred in 2006, in line with what many others have predicted.
It’s important to this book because Peak Oil means that the entire 150-year era of petroindustrial growth, of which the network is a big part, is over. The network is almost certainly on the verge of demise, whether due to irreparable infrastructure deterioration, terrorism, copper and aluminum “mining” vandalism, fuel shortages, financial shenanigans, or some combination of the above. previous.
Rosen broaches none of this, patronizing those of his subjects who are serious about politics and energy. It’s not just that there’s bad scholarship here, though there is that, it’s that there’s no hint of any critical thinking or reading.
There is no help here for people who are already off the grid and want to improve. There’s also not enough intellectual meat to help concerned readers make informed decisions about their place on or off the net.
if you have to read Off the grid, at least get it out of the library, like I did. And spend your hard-earned money elsewhere, like on your utility bill.