I want to live off grid because I think I can do a better job of managing the supply and quality of my utilities better than the giant corporations who currently charge me an arm and a leg for doing so.

I want to live off grid because I think I can do a better job of managing the supply and quality of my utilities better than the giant corporations who currently charge me an arm and a leg for doing so.

He has said it all, really. I would love to live like that. I think frequently about my desire to make that step. Yet in a sense, I don’t know just how to make that change. Yes, I have read huge amounts, and know just how my house would be designed and built and where my equipment would be sourced. Yet my day-to-day life consists of going to work plus family matters, which seems to occupy all the available time.

This mismatch between timescales – today versus the future – seems to be something we all suffer from. How many people think, “yes, climate change will be a major danger… I’ll just pour an imported drink, prepare some imported food and switch on the air conditioning…”

Well, we aren’t quite that bad – we buy local low-fuel-miles vegan food from a wholefood workers’ co-operative, for example… For decades I’ve done everything possible whilst living in a suburban setting. My house is so efficient I rarely use heating, I don’t have aircon or a tumble dryer, my kids switch off not only the low-energy lights but all standbys and chargers, and we drive only one-twelfth of the national family average in a highly efficient small car. And we largely subscribe to Stephen’s “just-say-no” philosophy on consumer acquisitions.

Yet that’s the day-to-day stuff – I have to live here to earn my family’s keep – but underneath, my biggest concern is with the long-term outlook. I want to move and be completely energy-independent before the energy options run out. I want to have a spring or bore-hole before water wars become the norm. Above all, I don’t know whether to stay in the UK, which has such climate uncertainty (will it continue to heat up or will the Atlantic Conveyor cease in our lifetime?) – or go elsewhere – in which case, where’s the best bet?

I am pessimistic about the future (or possibly realistic). My desire to live off-grid used to be about reducing my footprint to help save us all from runaway climate change. Now I think positive biofeedbacks are already setting in, making catastrophic climate change inevitable, so I guess my motivation is more selfish – for my family to survive as well as possible. Those of us who have thought in detail about an off-grid life, even if we haven’t yet fully achieved it, should be at least a few steps ahead in the future, when it’s each man for himself.

(PS I’m a very positive, cheerful person on a day-to-day basis!)

In truth it is born of a sort of survivalist instinct –not a reactionary red neck vision of fighting government and communism, but of a fear that the world as we know it is going to break down some time soon and I don’t want to go down with it.

Living in central London it sometimes feels that we are not so much on grid as caught in a nightmareish lattice , that at once provides the frame work of our lives and acts as an inescapable prison.

The earth beneath us is a criss cross of tube networks, pipes, tunnels, power lines and waste outlets. At ground level there are roads choked with traffic , railways rumbling and screaming for twenty hours a day, telephone wires, cable outlets and xxx

Above us the air is thick with planes preparing to land at Heathrow, City and Gatwick airports, microwaves from local telephone antennae, executive helicopters, police spotter planes and aircraft trailing commercial messages.

It’s all feels very concrete, robust and permanent. And yet like a precision watch with a million moving parts, it is in fact frighteningly precarious. It only needs one small wheel to stop running smoothly for the whole thing to come grinding to a halt.

You only have to look at the petrol driver’s strike a few years ago when the people who drive the tankers that deliver petrol and other fuels, went on strike. Within hours there were enormous queues backing up at petrol stations. Within a couple of days there was talk of supermarket shelves being empty.

The prospect of people starving in the streets was a mere seventy two hours away and that was just from three hundred drivers going on strike. Imagine the consequences of repeated flooding of low lying areas, rapidly changing weather patterns, huge displaced populations and the break down of hundreds of pieces of the precision mechanism that constitutes our global economy.

I do regularly and that’s why the autonomy of living off grid is so attractive to me

Alex Benady 141 Fentiman Rd. Leave any packages at 143 if we are not in.