Bead 8: Off-Grid Dreaming

It started when I was about seven.  I was a voracious reader of Little House on the Prairie, and fancied myself an incarnation of Laura cruelly planted in the 1980s.  We lived in a nice suburban home in Georgia.  I wanted to live on a farm.  We drove a Ford Clubwagon van.  I wanted to get around by horse.  For pets, we had my brother's rat snake and the mice he fed it.  I wanted chickens and a milk cow, and a couple of devoted dogs.

I wasn't much of a nature lover at the time.  I found the Georgia woods sticky and dirty and overly stocked with poisonous life forms.  Hence, my Little House on the Prairie fantasies had little to do with the outdoors.  More, I craved a cozy cabin lit by kerosene, animals, a nice view, and delicious food raised just beyond the front door.  I had the feeling of having been born too late, of having been cheated out of a simpler, more meaningful life.

Over time, the dream wavered.  I entered sixth grade in 1986, and promptly succumbed to the most awkward of life stages in the most awkward of decades.  I got a perm.  I wore eyeshadow from lash to brow.  I spent all my babysitting money at The Limited, and brooded to Bon Jovi on my Sony Walkman.  But on the other end of 1986 was 1993, when I moved to Utah and discovered the mountains.  Then 1996, when I worked for an artist in backwoods Montana, just across the river from Glacier National Park.  Then 2000, when I took up gardening.  And essentially every year since then, as I've learned more about myself and the life that feels right to me.

In short, I want to be a homesteader.  Not exactly like Pa Ingalls, not exactly like claiming my 160 acres and sweating blood to prove up.  I would love to own 160 acres, but I suspect the only way to do that these days is through a buy-sell agreement.  I also aspire to "prove up" in a manner of speaking--to turn raw land into a home, to surround my house with things to eat, to tend my property for the benefit of natural ecosystems as well as my family.  I want to be a homesteader in the modern sense of the word, meaning I want to live as self-sufficiently as possible on my own patch of ground.  And because I've actually become quite outdoorsy since those early years in Georgia, I want to homestead in the most rugged of ways--in a remote setting, off the grid, surrounded by sticky, dirty nature.

My first practice homestead, at my artist friend's cabin across the river from Glacier National Park

My second practice homestead, a converted barn I lived in for four years, and where I started learning how to garden

In the next few days, Donald Trump is expected to take a series of executive actions designed to unravel the climate legacy of President Obama.  These include: 1) lifting the moratorium on new coal mining leases on public lands, 2) revisiting or eliminating a budgeting metric that had been adopted by the Obama administration, in which the "social cost of carbon" was weighed as an economic trade-off to regulations that would reduce industry profits, 3) rescinding an Obama-era order that required federal agencies to consider the impacts of climate change when deciding whether to permit or undertake a particular activity, and 4) and dismantling President Obama's Clean Power Plan, which imposed tough standards for power plant emissions, and effectively spelled a shift from coal to renewable energy.  These actions will be on top of villainous moves that Trump has already made, such as stopping an Obama initiative for improved fuel economy in new vehicles, and proposing a 31 percent budget cut for the Environmental Protection Agency.   

Trump and the EPA's very own pre-metanoia Onceler, Scott Pruitt, claim not to believe that human activities are warming the planet.  Both have denied the scientific consensus on the matter, and Trump has even gone so far as to call the notion of climate change a "hoax."  During a campaign speech in 2016, Trump lambasted President Obama's stance that climate change represented a serious threat to humankind.  He said that sounded like a joke, the likes of which Jimmy Fallon or Jimmy Kimmel might tell (presumably all comedic Jimmies are created equal).   

But, as most people know and aren't politically disqualified from admitting, human activities are changing our climate.  The spike in average global temperatures since the Industrial Revolution tracks neatly with the spike in atmospheric carbon dioxide--too neatly to be coincidental.  No set of factors--solar cycles, El Nino, other climate oscillations--is sufficient to explain our planet's warming trends over the past century, until greenhouse gases are added into the mix.   And according to the NASA website, which the Trump Administration evidently has yet to lobotomize, our levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide are continuously record-setting.  Based on reconstruction from ice cores and deep sea sediments, scientists believe that the last time the Earth's atmosphere had carbon levels this high was more than 2 million years ago, before the dawn of human civilization.

My current practice homestead in the Sierra foothills

For the past seven years, I have been pretending to homestead while actually living in a rural rental home in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, and commuting to work every day.  My "pretend homesteading" activities include growing a vegetable garden and berry patch, brewing my own beer and natural soda, making yogurt, drinking well water, heating our house with wood collected from the property, and sharing with neighbors.  My non-homesteading activities include logging a minimum of 25 vehicle miles per day, buying most of our food at the grocery store, and obtaining our electricity from Pacific Gas & Electric Company.     

The latter, I've learned, is not as unsustainable as you might think.  PG&E claims to deliver some of the cleanest power in the nation, with about half derived from a combination of renewable and greenhouse gas-free sources.  Still, that puts the remaining half in the domain of natural gas and "other" or "unspecified" sources.  

In my future life, I hope to be powered entirely by solar and other renewables.  Of course, I also hope to be off-grid, meaning I want to produce my own energy on my own land.  Although "pretend homesteading" in a rental home does not allow me to disconnect from the grid, I recently learned that I can go solar right now.  PG&E offers a program called Solar Choice, in which subscribers pay about 2.6 cents extra per kWh, and purchase electricity from solar projects in the state of California.  You can choose to buy solar power matching either 50% or 100% of your electrical usage.  I went with 100%, and will pay about $16 more per month.

After decades of pining for my unrealized, real-deal homestead, I can finally see it taking shape.  I am in the process of trying to sell my old house in Montana.  After that, my family and I will shop for land in Vermont.  Vermont is a lush, green state with a proud tradition of modern homesteading, relatively cheap real estate, low population density--and yes, Bernie Sanders.  Vermont also offers, we hope, some latitudinal insulation to the effects of climate change.  Although we're sure to experience our share of bizarre weather there, our homestead should be more resilient in Vermont than, say, arid California.

So, my Little House on the Prairie will actually be more like Little House in the Big Woods, the first book in the series.  Beyond that, I expect my off-grid life will resemble that of the Ingalls' not at all, for our world is more different than Laura ever could have imagined.  No matter; I am not obsessed with Little House anymore.  Still, I am thankful for that early glimpse of the good life, and happy to be on my way toward living it.

Helpful Links

PG&E Solar Choice Program:  https://www.pge.com/solarchoice/

Tom Lambert's blog post about Solar Choice and other programs enabling Californians to go solar sans rooftop panels, including FAQs and a powerful why-we-should-care message:
raisedbyturtles.org/solar-choice