People Archives - Page 12 of 34 - Living Off the Grid: Free Yourself

People

Solar-powered US Congressman

Despite only being in office for a year, Rep Thomas Massie (R -Ky) is one of the most activist members of Congress. He lives off the grid back in his home State, and defies categorization on the left-right political spectrum.

“My house is solar powered,” he explains. “I tell Republicans, you can hate the subsidies – I hate the subsidies too – but you can’t hate solar panels. These are rocks that make electricity, so they are incapable of receiving your hate.” Representing Kentucky’s 4th district, which runs from the northern tip of the state from Ashland west past Covington, Massie holds a B.A. and an M.A. in engineering rom MIT, founded SensAble Technologies, a computer-modeling company based in Massachusetts, and served as county executive for Lewis County, Kentucky. A member of House committees on Oversight and Government Reform, Transportation and Infrastructure, and Science, Space, and Technology, he personally built his old, off-the-grid Kentucky home (even planing the trees that become its timber) and has decked it out with solar panels and off-the-grid energy sources.…

June 9, 2013 1 Comment

People

Off-Grid Street-lamp featured in NY Daily News

NY Daily News features BALDEV DUGGAL who came to New York in 1957 from India with $200 and no ticket home and has built up a multi-million dollar eco-light business.

Now he’s poised to change the world. Duggal, who first made a name for himself when he founded a photo studio in the early 1960s that later became one of the largest production houses in the country, now controls 100,000 square feet in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, including a huge, eco-friendly building that was once an asbestos-filled abandoned monstrosity.…

May 28, 2013 2 Comments

People

New TV formats to exploit off-grid interest

Discovery Channel, Travel Channel and TNT all look to offer new wrinkles to the venerable survival-based competition reality series genre with new shows set to debut later this year.

Travel Channel and Discovery are set to stretch the genre, in which strangers compete in desolate and extreme locales — born a decade ago, with the premiere of CBS’s Survivor — to include a married couple (Travel Channel’s Get Lost) and totally nude contestants (Discovery Channel’s Naked Castaway and Naked and Afraid) in an effort to find new ratings success.…

May 8, 2013 No Comments

People

New Lives in the Wild – TV series

At last – a TV series about living off the grid that does not patronise or belittle the lifestyle. Instead New Lives in the Wild but allows the stories to come out of the real lives of real people with something to say.

Presenter Ben Fogle meets people who left the modern world behind; He wrote about it in the British Daily Telegraph.”My long-suffering wife Marina has become accustomed to my returning from wild expeditions with suggestions for a new life. I’ve never acted on such impulses. But what sort of people do follow their wildest dreams?…

April 14, 2013 6 Comments

People

Daryl Hannah tells Abu Dhabi about going off the grid

The Kill Bill star has two off-grid homes, one in Colorado and one in California. She was recently in Abu Dhabi as a guest of the world’s leading hoteliers, where she shared her philosophies on living a sustainable lifestyle.
Being green does not mean you have to cut down on opulence, Hannah said at the eco-travel event they all jetted in for: “It depends what your concept of luxury and lavish is. I consider my home incredibly comfortable and incredibly luxurious in terms of its appointments. (Being sustainable) it doesn’t mean it’s hideous.” Its not clear whether means her Colorado home, near Telluride, or her Santa Cruz home which she refers to elsewhere as a “misfit circus.”
Hannah says she does not have “19 bathrooms with gold faucets” . .(does anyone outside of the Saudi royal family?)…

April 11, 2013 5 Comments

People

Paolo Soleri

(ANSA) – Rome, April 10 – Renowned Italian architect and visionary Paolo Soleri has died at 93 at his home in Arizona.

Born in Turin in 1919, Soleri was best known for Arcosanti, an experimental village he established in the Arizona desert devoted to his theory of ‘arcology’, or architecture in harmony with ecology.

After studying with Frank Lloyd Wright in Arizona in 1946, he returned and settled there 10 years later where he developed influential theories on buildings that respect nature and spoke out against urban sprawl.

In 1970 he founded Arcosanti, a futuristic community planned for 5,000 people that over the next 40 years received international acclaim as an urban laboratory.…

April 11, 2013 No Comments

Community

The persuasive prepper: convincing loved ones to prepare

It would seem that I’m not the only blogger/prepper who is also worried about getting family on board for prepping. I can’t impress upon you just how important this is, the more people around you who are also ready for whatever may be coming down the pike, the better off YOU will be, the fewer people you will either have to share with (meaning less food and supplies for YOU and YOUR household) or the fewer you will have to turn away in an emergency situation, neither scenario is a good one. Daisy Luther recently wrote about how to get your loved ones to get ready, to be prepared, to be more responsible for taking care of themselves and their households……

April 6, 2013 No Comments

Gleaning information from the older generation

Look around you, how many grey and white heads are nearby? If you are lucky, you will have at least one, if you are very lucky you will have multiple to choose from. Why is it so fortunate to have older folk around? Simple, beneath all that gray and white hair is a plethora of knowledge and experience. This is a valuable resource, and one that is dwindling each and every day. Often the biggest feat is to find those who lived through the great depression and still have their mental faculties and are willing to sit down and talk about their lives, that’s the trifecta!

These folk grew up during a time when most things were done by hand, black and white TV was something for the wealthy, that’s if they had electricity. Lighting was often candles and kerosene lanterns. Some lived on farms and had to get up before dawn to take care of farm animals before eating breakfast and heading off to school. These folks grew up in circumstances that most of us can’t even imagine.…

March 27, 2013 1 Comment

People

Last American Man gets eviction order threat

The rugged outdoorsman dubbed the ‘Last American Man’ is facing a government shutdown of his camp in the Appalachian Mountains for not adhering to building code.

Eustace Conway dedicated his entire fortune and nearly 30 years of his to building and living off of his 500-acre farm. Now he is facing having his entire way of life shut down by the North Carolina state government. In the YouTube film (click the pic above) he says what motivated him.

You can read much more here about Conway, 51, in an excerpt from my book OFF THE GRID – Inside the Movement for More Space, Less Government and True Independence in Modern America

According to the Wall Street Journal, several officials showed up to his Turtle Island Preserve home and found that his outhouses,…

March 18, 2013 26 Comments

“Callous” Bill McKibben, eco-fraudster

Letter published in The Burlington Free Press earlier today:

We attended a lecture by Bill McKibben at the Rutland Free Library hoping to hear real solutions in the green energy sector and ways to reduce our carbon footprint. Not only did we come away disappointed but infuriated!

We sat instead in an overheated room viewing his slide show of places all over the world that he had jetted off to. The carbon emissions from his trips alone far exceeded many Vermonters’ carbon footprint. He expressed sympathy for caribou affected by the Hydro Quebec dam and people on the other side of the world but had a cold, callous response to a family here in Vermont, living off the grid, but suffering from Wind Turbine Syndrome.…

March 8, 2013 3 Comments

Energy

So when did Environmentalism lose its soul?

The Vermont Times Argus published a spot-on review of a new book by Bill McKibben -one of many who made a career out of jetting between conferences about the environment.

Its written by Suzanna Jones, described as “an off-the-grid farmer living in Walden.” She does not object to local power – but disagrees with McKibben about the trend towards industrial scale renewables. It is, she says, part of the mainstreaming of the environmental movement.

“In his 2008 book “Deep Economy,” Bill McKibben concludes that economic growth is the source of the ecological crises we face today. He explains that when the economy grows larger than necessary to meet our basic needs – when it grows for the sake of growth, automatically striving for “more” – its social and environmental costs greatly outweigh any benefits it may provide.

Unfortunately, McKibben seems to have forgotten what he so passionately argued just five years ago. Today he is an advocate of industrial wind turbines on our ridgelines: He wants to industrialize our last wild spaces to feed the very economy he fingered as the source of our environmental problems.…

February 10, 2013 3 Comments

People

Hemingway’s grand-daughter living off the grid

PARK CITY, Utah – She’s the granddaughter of the legendary author, Ernest Hemingway, but Mariel Hemingway gained fame in her own right as actress and activist. In a new film at the Sundance Film Festival, she explores her family’s history of depression, mental illness and suicide. “I’ve always felt that I might be crazy, and I’ve been really scared of that,” Marie told the Post. “There’s been a lot of dysfunction in our home.”

Hemingway, 51, is understating the case. Her grandfather Ernest and sister Margaux are among the seven family members who have committed suicide. To stay grounded, she feels it’s important to spend a lot of time outdoors. She and her partner Bobby Williams live in the Santa Monica Mountains. “We have a little farm with almost two acres,” she says. “We have 18 chickens and goats. We live a lifestyle that’s off the grid.”…

January 23, 2013 3 Comments

All you need to go off-grid

People

Solar-powered US Congressman

Off-Grid Street-lamp featured in NY Daily News

New TV formats to exploit off-grid interest

New Lives in the Wild – TV series

Daryl Hannah tells Abu Dhabi about going off the grid

Paolo Soleri

The persuasive prepper: convincing loved ones to prepare

Gleaning information from the older generation

Last American Man gets eviction order threat

“Callous” Bill McKibben, eco-fraudster

So when did Environmentalism lose its soul?

Hemingway’s grand-daughter living off the grid

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