diminishing necessities

Do you remember when “No Impact Man” Colin Beavan turned off the electricity to his Manhattan apartment? That was a very big deal. Electricity is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. He'd taken his zero-impact project as far as it could go, it seemed, by using candles at night instead of incandescent bulbs. It's sort of my schtick, doing weird shit in the name of principle, and even I was awed.

I'd like to point out, though, that not many other people seem to have taken up the project of living off the electrical grid, despite Beavan's well-publicized example. This aspect of “lifestyle activism” doesn't appear to be as appealing as bringing cloth bags to the grocery store or buying attractively decorated stainless steel water bottles. I remember looking around my own apartment, heavily dependent on almost every outlet available, and wondering what I would do without electricity. At any one time I might have the following plugged in:

*personal computer (and all associated gadgetry)

*rice cooker,

*slow cooker,

*fancy-pants blender,

*microwave,

*refrigerator,

*coffee-maker

*dishwasher,

*vacuum cleaner,

*stove and oven (occasionally gas-powered, but usually electric),

*cell phone charger,

*hair dryer,

*television,

*multiple lamps,

*alarm clock,

*washer and dryer,

*various power tools,

and probably a bunch of other stuff that I can't remember.

In this cabin we are learning to live without electricity. We have to learn, because the solar array doesn't work hardly at all and the generator on loan from a neighbor is horribly loud and makes the whole area smell like gasoline – which we might ignore if we weren't obviously polluting a pristine environment. Our landlord is happy to let us expand or replace the solar array, or buy our own generator, subtracting the cost from our rent, and at first we were sure we would do this – if only because it was inconceivable that we could live without a refrigerator.

The funny thing is, I like to flatter myself that I know something about how to live with less, and how to be more self-sufficient, but then I get slapped in the face with what a princess I still am. That's what happened after we moved in, hauling a bunch of frozen meat with us, and had no refrigeration. We were paralyzed by indecision, not sure when or if the solar panels would start working, and whether they could support the refrigerator when or if they did, so we didn't bother trying to acquire a generator, or asking friends to store the meat for us. Finally we packed the meat into a cooler, but all of it had defrosted. Then we had power, briefly, and though defrosted meat isn't supposed to be frozen again, we didn't know what else to do but let it freeze. But we couldn't let the generator run constantly, so it half-defrosted again.

Eventually, because I was too afraid of contamination and disease, most of the meat was consumed by Tuna. Now that's one pampered pup – local, organic, grass-fed beef, and the nicest cuts, too!

Maybe we should have named him “Chateaubriand.”

So you see, in the end, I don't know anything about taking care of my own needs, or living grid-free. If I'd been prepared, and not exhausted from the move and embittered by the loss of hundreds of dollars' worth of food at a time when we really can't afford to replace it, I might have had the forethought to preserve the meat. Instead, I was fixated on this very simple ubiquitous luxury-turned-necessity – the full-size refrigerator, and the invisible sources of energy to run it.

To a certain extent, I find it comforting to be completely average in some ways. Maybe I feel like it gives me legitimacy, or provides a sense of safety, to retain some basic connection to this culture even in the process of decolonizing. (Maybe that's why I blog!) Whatever it is, I'm reluctant to release some pleasures or conveniences regardless of how they tether me to a certain way of life I'd otherwise reject. One way in which I'm completely average is that I like to shop for food only once a week and keep a full-size refrigerator packed with it. I might compost my bodily waste and slaughter my own chickens and think it's completely reasonable to blow up a dam to free the salmon, but give up my energy-sucking full-size refrigerator...?!

Still, we've grudgingly adapted. We gave up the ghost of solar power and cleaned out the refrigerator, packing everything into a super-efficient cooler. This has necessitated a different approach to storing food. Friends overseas assure me that super-size American refrigerators are unknown there, because people market every day, and don't need as much chilled space. When I've tried this daily-marketing thing, I usually end up spending so much more money. Instead of spending $100 a week I might spend $20 a day, or more. I'm still working on this, but I'm finding that making a menu, counting up the cost of everything before I buy it, and then dividing our meals into two-day storage is working fairly well.

If you've read my blog for any length of time, you can probably skip the paragraph in which I explain that I don't believe that moving off-grid as an individual, or even as a community, will halt or reverse or even slightly nudge our destructive trajectory. Of course it will not. I'd go as far as to say that if you moved “off-grid” by appointing a box of concrete and steel with solar panels or wind turbines or generators in a clear attempt to maintain an energy-intensive lifestyle with ostensibly more virtuous consumables, you're just as deeply embedded in this culture as any asshole abusing coal-powered electricity. I say this harshly because it's a harsh reality that we must accept. Alternative energy (solar, wind, hydro, biofuel) is wholly dependent on conventional energy (fossil fuels). They cannot be divorced from one another. Personal change does not equal political change, and it never will.

This is not to say that I don't think alternative energy is a hopeful thing for individuals (not for the culture as a whole). A one-time purchase of a destructive product that can forever remove a person from the government grid is a positive thing, especially as globalization and dependence on fossil fuels come to an end. But if that destructive product is used as evidence that we can halt or reverse climate change or habitat collapse or the loss of every large fish in the ocean without changing our way of life on a deeply fundamental level... well, you've lost me there.

I guess you could say I'm in favor of austerity as a lifestyle. Nobody likes to hear this, and if I were smart and really wanting to get people on-board with my plans, I'd never use that word. But I believe it, for myself and for my community. I believe in the coming crash of this empire, and I believe that we need to prepare for it by being a little less infantile in our consumption patterns, and that means learning how to provide for ourselves. And since alternative energy products are not available for the mass majority of industrialized humans, better that we simply learn to live without manufactured energy – or at least with much, much less of it.

In this vein, I like these paraphrased comments from Martin Khor, director of the Third World Network. When asked whether the "developing" world would be deprived of industrial standards of living without global trade agreements, he said,

“I think you have it backward. Those who most depend on an expanding economy are not Malaysians or other Third Worlders, but you in the First World. In your world, you no longer have contact with the land, and you don't know how to get along without luxuries. For us, if the whole global trade system collapsed, we might be better off. We have never lost touch with the land; we know how to grow food for our communities, how to make our own clothes, how to develop the fairly simple technologies we need. This is how most of us lived until recently. We wouldn't mind having some of the new technologies you offer, and some kinds of trade are very useful, but if the Western colonial powers and transnational corporations would simply leave us alone, stop exploiting our resources and land so we could again retain their use, we could probably survive quite well. But what would you do?”

To me, this is the fundamental issue at stake when considering the impending collapse of this global empire. None of us in the homo consumptus species have even the absolute most basic skills of survival. We don't know how to grow food – and I don't mean non-native tomatoes in pots, that we use to decorate the arugula we buy from Whole Foods, I mean real food, calorically- and nutrient-dense, enough to keep us from starving. We don't know how to walk into the hills and find medicine we need to stop infection or dry up diarrhea or prevent a postpartum bleed. We don't know how to shoot a rabbit, or skin it, how to make something warm from that skin. We don't know shit.

And it's fine for us to not know shit, and to do nothing about it, as long as cheap energy is providing for these needs. But only the most ardent head-up-his-ass cornucopian can refuse to see that we are headed for a future of very expensive energy. Very expensive energy will probably make it cost-prohibitive to stock a grocery store twice a week with food from a globalized economy. Probably, we won't be importing beef from the former Amazon. Definitely, we will not be feeding corn to cattle – or to people, for that matter, in the thousands of different configurations in which we currently consume it. Agriculture as we know it could not be even remotely possible without cheap petroleum. So if you only consider one aspect of what I'm saying, consider agriculture. Consider pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and fertilizers, all of which are based on petroleum. Consider the relative high cost of organic food, much of which is imported or delivered across state lines, and then consider that cost being applied to everything we eat, and then inflated. Consider the impending food shortages eagerly awaited by speculators. This is serious.

This endeavor, this little experiment of mine, living off the grid and slowly learning traditional skills, slowly ridding my heart, mind, and body of the effects of colonialism, won't save the planet – not by a long shot. But it might save us, as we transition to a forcibly saner way of life. And if others would adopt this experiment, it might save a bit more than just us. Things will get much, much worse before we collectively pull our heads out (assuming we ever do), and that will probably include a serious return to coal-powered energy. I, for one, do not want to be so dependent on refrigeration, or a hair dryer, or a cell phone, when that time comes, and I will guess that the land feels the same.