by Jonathan Taggart, CHANs Lab PhD student
Could you imagine a life where water didn't flow automatically from the taps? Where electricity wasn't simply accessed by flicking a switch? A life in which networks of power, water – as well as food, heat, and waste disposal – were only available if you built them yourself? It sounds like a stretch... but the lessons might be worth the leap.
Could you imagine a life where water didn't flow automatically from the taps? Where electricity wasn't simply accessed by flicking a switch? A life in which networks of power, water – as well as food, heat, and waste disposal – were only available if you built them yourself? It sounds like a stretch... but the lessons might be worth the leap.
Between 2011 and 2013 I travelled across Canada with Dr.
Phillip Vannini (Canada Research Chair II in Innovative Learning and Public
Ethnography and my Masters supervisor at Royal Roads University) working on an
ethnographic project that aimed to characterize and describe the lives of
people living “off the grid” in every province and territory. The project
revealed much about the challenges, motivations and practices of people who
have chosen to disconnect from Canada’s electrical and gas infrastructures: many
off-gridders, we discovered, are inspired by a profound attachment to, and
concern for, place. Many believe that
a good life is one characterized by deep and bodily involvement in the architecture
and infrastructure of living – buildings, energy, food, water – and have taken up the challenge of producing these niceties and necessities for themselves.
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| In coastal British Columbia off-gridders can use surface water to generate power year-round because it rarely freezes. The prairies are typically sunnier, even in winter, and those on the east coast get plenty of wind for their turbines. Off-gridders use a variety of technologies (some home-made, like this stream engine on Lasqueti Island) to make electricity, each choice, or combination of choices, guided by the unique affordances of their surroundings. |
In two years we interviewed nearly 200 participants in over 100 households, roughly 10 from each province and territory. With a mandate to make our research as accessible as possible, we designed the project to have multiple outputs, including magazine articles and a feature-length documentary film in addition to numerous academic articles and a monograph. The reception so far has been remarkable, and has shown how successful research can be in connecting with non-academic audiences: at last count, the film’s trailer has had nearly 21,000 views online, driven in large part by articles in Canadian Geographic and the Huffington Post, as well as by ongoing guest blogs we have written for the Huffington Post, The Tyee, and Mother Earth News. The story, in short, seems to be one that people want to hear.
But to what end are we pushing this research so far and
wide? It’s easy to package and pedal the romance of wanting to “live
deliberately”, as Thoreau put it, but surely there must be more to living off
the grid than the self-satisfaction and solitude of living a cottage life
year-round. Living off the grid is by no means the solution to the challenges facing our planet – “it’s
colossally selfish”, observed one interviewee, pointing out the inequalities
evident in his privileged access to the land, technology and education that
have made his life possible – but the values espoused by many off-gridders are things we can
all learn from.
If we agree that the path to living within planetary
boundaries is marked as much by social as it is by technological change and
innovation, perhaps off-gridders can show us what life might look like if we
not only use less energy and fewer
resources, but also what a world might look like if we shift to a paradigm in
which we want and need less[i].
It’s a paradigm shift fueled in part by increased involvement in the production
of what we consume, and by awareness, in the words of another interviewee, of
“what things actually cost”. In consideration of these externalities and
“actual costs”, living off grid is also an act of deconcession or divestment: while
their individual impact may be small, off-gridders are ‘voting with their
feet’, moving their financial resources away from large utility providers and,
by taking control of their own energy and food production in ways that respect
their particular bioregion, incrementally shifting demand away from the
corporate entities they view as responsible for threats to biodiversity and the
environment[ii].
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| Imagine cooking your meals using the power of the sun: tracking its path with your solar oven, waiting longer for dinner when it’s overcast, and maybe firing up the wood stove instead when the winter rays are low. This solar oven on an off-grid Manitoba farm is essentially a giant reflector that uses reclaimed printer’s tin to redirect the sun into a glass-fronted insulated box – just one example of how some off-gridders work with the weather rather than around it. On a sunny day it is relatively easy to bring an oven like this up to 400°. |
While the life being lived by a handful of people in the
deep woods and far reaches of Canada may not be broadly scalable (the necessary
land base alone is prohibitive: off-gridders generally agree that 10 acres is
the minimum parcel needed per family for food, water and firewood), the
associated attitudes are admirable and adoptable. By advocating for a life dictated
by the whims of wind and weather (a reality in many homes powered by renewable
energy), they are exchanging an anthropocentric worldview for one that is more
relational and arguably more sustainable.
Life Off Grid is currently
touring film festivals: it will be appearing at Ethnografilm2015 in Paris, April 8-12, 2015. ‘Off the grid: Reassembling domestic life’, co-authored by Phillip Vannini and
Jonathan Taggart, is available from Routledge here. A collection of Jonathan’s off-grid photographs from across Canada
will be on display at Liu Institute for Global Issues as part of the Capture
Photography Festival throughout April 2015.
[i]
Vannini, P., & Taggart, J. (2014).
Making sense of domestic warmth: Affect, involvement, and thermoception in
off-grid homes. Body & Society, 20(1), 61-84.
[ii]
Vannini, P., & Taggart, J. (2014).
Growing, cooking, eating, shitting off-grid organic food: deconcession,
convenience and the taste of place. Food, Culture and Society, 17(12), 319-336.
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