Posts by — spy_vondega

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. (more…)

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? (more…)

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?) (more…)

A new documentary directed by Werner Herzog takes a look at a Siberian subculture that is off the grid because there is no grid.

As a film-maker, Herzog’s constant theme is Nature – the “vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger,” he once called the Ocean, but the description could apply equally well to the Siberian tundra. His new movie, “Happy People: A Year in the Taiga,” documents the lives of Siberian fur trappers who live and work in extreme conditions. (Buy it in the UK). Deep in the wilderness, far away from civilization, 300 people inhabit the small village of Bakhtia at the river Yenisei. There are only two ways to reach this outpost: by helicopter or boat. There’s no telephone, running water or medical aid. (more…)

The love affair between reality TV and the off-grid lifestyle continues with the new series Mountain Men (finale this thursday 8/9pm)on History Channel.

Eustace Conway, one of the stars of Off the Grid: Inside the Movement for More Space, Less Government, and True Independence in Modern America
is a lead character. The sales pitch for the series links it unashamedly to off-grid living – “Have you ever wondered what it would be like to live your life off the grid?” runs the Web site. “Have you wished you could shed the complications of modern society and live in the wilderness, using only the things nature has provided? ”

And like all reality TV, the cracks are showing as viewers realise that the series is extremely unreal. (more…)

Johan Huibers, a carpenter, has built a full-size replica of Noah’s Ark in Dordrecht, in the west of the Netherlands.

The vessel will be opened to the public on Monday. Then Huibers plans to sail it across the sea and along the UK canal network to the London Olympics. Like Dr No in the James Bond film, he plans to live aboard his creation. (more…)

Nick Rosen talks at Port Eliot Festival, Sunday 22nd July

*Author of HOW TO LIVE OFF-GRID launches plan to build homes for less than £50,000 ($80,000).

*They consume 25% of average energy and water

*Using the new Localism Act to create a proof of concept

Off-grid settlements – historically a fringe interest in the UK, although they have a long history in other countries, including the US – offer an important new alternative — important because they help solve three problems:

– Cheap housing – how to enable it
– Energy security – how to improve it
– Rural regeneration – how to kickstart it (more…)

“By the time I was 18 we owned three tractors, four cars and five computers,”says photographer Lucas Foglia. Growing up on a small farm in New York State, Foglia lived a very modern self-sufficient lifestyle. His family grew and preserved all their food. They bartered their crops for everything else they needed, including clothes, shoes and even visits to the dentist. But they also had all the attributes of modernity.

From 2006 he travelled through the southeastern US, befriending and photographing people who have abandoned the city to live off the grid and in many cases give up the accoutrements of modern technology. (more…)

Raised off the grid in Alaska, singer Jewel Kilcher,  known professionally as Jewel, has sold tens of millions of records.  The multi-platinum-selling singer and songwriter also co-hosts a successful TV series.  But she is having nothing to do with her family’s latest venture – a low-budget reality show following their off-grid lives.

Her father and siblings are cashing in on her fame by allowing cameras from Discovery TV to follow them as they endure winter off the grid in Alaska. Jewel has not confirmed she is feeling betrayed by their decision to go for the series without her.  She says the roots of the family are more adventuring than ecological:  “”As a kid, we traveled by bush planes to Alaskan native villages. It would drop us off in the night, and dog sleds would pick us up in the village. I was probably about 6 or 7 years old.”

The simply titled, “Alaska: The Last Frontier,” is just the latest in the ever-expanding list of reality TV shows set in Alaska. (more…)