Preppers - a new kind of tourism for Taupo

The government has already earmarked the spot for a “Biosphere of the 21st century” and it is home to the New Zealand Clean Energy Centre.
The proposed family-style homes would be heated via geothermal or biomass sources, and electricity supplied via solar or wind energy.
Wastewater would be drip irrigated to energy crops that would provide future fuel for the community. Water would be supplied via rainwater collection.
There will be wi-fi internet along with communal vegetable gardens and septic tanks.
“This is about attracting people who have disconnected from the world, so to speak, who need only their laptop and smartphone and can travel anywhere and still work,” said the centre’s CEO, Rob McEwan.
“Young, affluent Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are scouting around New Zealand at present looking for land,” Mr McEwan said.
“They are looking to get out of the US, live in a community with good water resources and establish a sustainable and ‘local’ lifestyle.” New Zealand could “easily” rise to be the No 1 choice for them, he said.
“We are politically neutral, almost 80 per cent of our electricity is generated from renewables, we have ample water and we are friendly to Americans.
“So then the question for Taupo becomes how can we lure them to our community?”.
The development would comprise half- acre sections and the actual houses would be simple designs that resemble any ordinary Waikato development.
“The large section would allow for things like large garden spaces, which could be private or shared, and septic tanks,” he said.
And how much would a slice of green living go for? “It is an unknown cost at this stage, but part of the vision is providing affordable housing.
“We would be looking at a range of homes, all under $500,000.” Owners would also have to pay about $60,000 for renewable energy technology add-on costs, he said.
Taupo mayor Rick Cooper was wary of the “grandiose plan”. “But the council does like to support drive and enthusiasm and dreams.”

David and Sally Cox - Escaping the rat race

They have dry wall, refrigeration, DVD player and two computers plus some mod cons. They live on a very small pension, but that does not mean compromise. “Living off grid does not have to mean hippy, rustic, back-to-the-land or anything truly revolutionary” says David. “We just have much too much reliance on motors to claim otherwise. But we grow our food, limit our carbon output and generally live on a smaller planet, so to speak. We are locavores.”

The reasons Canadians go off the grid are many and varied, and we will be exploring some of them in future articles (please mail news@off-grid.net with any story suggestions).

For David Cox it was simple: “the rat race. It is a Machiavellian trap. When I took my family traveling for four months (year 2000) …I had to leave $1700 a month not to live in my house!

“ In Canada that means making $2500 before taxes NOT to live in my house If actually live in the place, the costs just climb.

That is why we are off grid. Being on-grid is like being one of the human batteries in the Matrix. The system lives off me as much, if not more than I ever lived off it. The system is a giant leach on life. Just a more subtle form of being a serf.“

Over the next few months we will be running regular stories and photos of Canadian off-grid men and women. Please send us your photos and videos.

Test case for an urban off-grid community

As the Occupy LSX movement prepares for a legal battle over its encampment outside St Paul’s Cathedral, its presence down the road in Finsbury Square looks slightly more secure.
Public spending cuts have left the square’s owners, the Borough of Islington, with an overstretched legal team, and although it do not support the Occupy presence,  the Council is “reluctant” to devote potentially millions of pounds to evict the protesters. This news may arouse intense disappointment amongst Occupy’s many neighbours in the banking and financial sector. UBS bank, for example, has ordered its employees to keep the blinds closed in case residents in the nearby Bank of Ideas spy on their documents using long lenses.
Now the Occupy organisers are seeking help from the off-grid movement to turn the square into a model (albeit temporary) off-grid community. They need energy experts, water engineers, builders, mechanics, lawyers, fund-raisers, architects and planning consultants as they prepare for a residency of up to three years until the next local elections.

Finsbury Square and the Bank of Ideas are organising a one day seminar on the skills need to set up an off-grid community.  Anyone who wants to give a workshop on any of the relevant skills ( you know what they are) please email nick@off-grid.net.
Step one is to install composting toilets in the square, but the technical problem is that the soil is only 2 metres deep as the square sits atop an underground car park. Please send solutions or offers of help  as comments on this article.The next priority is to put up yurts, benders, dome homes and other eco-buildings in place of the nylon tents which currently crowd the half of the square given over to the Occupy residents. Simultaneously the group are installing renewable energy sources. But the large office buildings on all four sides mean that wind and sun are both in short supply. Bicycle powered generators are currently the preferred solution. These are likely to be supplied by Magnificent Revolution.

The new residents of Finsbury Square are preparing to register for a vote at elections and have called on their local MP, Labour’s Emily Thornberry for her support.

An Islington Council spokesman said: “We support the right to peaceful protest, but this has to be balanced with the needs of our community, which is among the most deprived in England.

“The protesters have no permission to be in the square.  At a time of huge Government cuts to our budget we are very reluctant to waste vital money on expensive legal action, but have not ruled it out.”

Snowbirds welcome - bring your own 12-gauge

CBS Evening News has reignited interest in Slab City – the off-grid community near Los Angeles. It is celebrating its 20^th anniversary and is growing steadily as a result of foreclosure victims looking for a place with few rules, where they can get on with life undisturbed.

The 2000 residents are gathered in the desert around concrete slabs placed there during WW2, living in tents, trailers, elderly mobile homes and other dwellings made from found materials.

There are no municipal services, no streetlights and no water or sewage service, reports the LA Times in a follow-up piece to CBS. “But nobody charges rent or collects fees or tries to impose homeowner covenants.”

“It has a post-apocalyptic look and we like it that way,” said Don Case, 41, who worked as a chef in Colorado and is planning to move to Alaska — someday. “It’s peaceful here, people have it together.”

CBS’s Ben Tracy reports that it is “home base for more and more people who can`t afford to live anywhere else.”

Vince Neill parked his RV here two months ago, along with his wife and six kids. He recently lost his audio-visual business and their home in Modesto, California.

Neill tells CBS: “I would apply to 30 to 40 jobs a day online, and there was just nothing.” He could no longer afford to stay at an RV park and his family lives on food stamps and money from odd jobs.

“I`ve always wore a shirt and tie, worked in an office, had a nice car and house. But we lost pretty much everything.”

There is a church, a music venue called the Range, and even an Internet cafe. But electricity comes from the sun. There is no sewer, no running water. A hole in the ground is the only shower for miles.

Another family told CBS they came here because they cannot afford to heat their house in Washington state this winter

The community is spread over about 600 acres of rutted roads and bushes. To the west is Niland (population 1,100) and the Salton Sea. To the east is the Coachella Canal (ripe with catfish) and the Chocolate Mountain Aerial Gunnery Range used by the Navy.

“This is the last truly free place in America,” said Jim Merton, 54, who spends the winter at Slab City and the summer in Washington. “I can smoke some weed, drink some beer, be loud and rowdy, skinny-dip in the canal, and there’s nobody to tell me I can’t have fun.”

One way is to write for this blog. But a more direct approach is to offer lessons in off-grid living to others in your area.

This week Bruce Johnson and Barbara Hagen will teach Oklahoma City area residents to live more cheaply and sustainably, with a few tricks they’ve learned in over 30 years of off-grid living. They are giving the course for free.

Johnson and Hagen, both 64, live in an Oklahoma City home powered by solar and wind power generated on their property, and use water from their own well. They haven’t paid an electricity bill since they were married in 1986.
The couple are running a sustainability workshop at Oklahoma State University.
“We’ve (been) living out here for the past 30 years, using solar and wind energy….we’ve learned to conserve and still have a good life,” Johnson said.
The couple have a refrigerator, cars, power tools, television and other modern conveniences. And though Johnson said most people won’t want to live completely like they do, if everyone adapted a few of their techniques into their own lives and homes it could all add up.
Just by knowing more about where power and water come from and the work it takes to generate them, people learn to conserve and be more conscious of how they live, the couple said.
“I think as we’re more conscious, then we’re going to want to do the things that help create those connections that allow life to continue,” Hagen said.
The couple have photovoltaic solar panels scattered throughout their property, which provide most of their energy. It’s supplemented by wind power generated from a towering turbine near their garden. They use water from a well drilled more than 100 feet below the ground. Water is heated by solar panels and a stove.
Johnson said a lot of what they’ve learned over the years can be used in anyone’s house or apartment. Much of it would save consumers money in the long haul.
The workshop is the latest in a series hosted at OSU-OKC with the partnership of Oklahoma City’s Sustainability Office aimed at showing local residents ways to save money by making environmentally friendly choices. The workshops are paid for by federal grants.
Sustainability course: 7:30 to 8 p.m. in Room 240 of the Agricultural Resource Center at OSU-OKC, 400 N Portland Ave.

Ready for anything

The London Occupation has just decided to invest in solar panels, to guarantee themselves at least a few kilowatt hours of electricity a day.  Two large panels and a battery are all they need to keep a laptop powered indefinitely.

Across the world, tent cities have sprung up in downtown centers.  They do not just happen, but require hours of daily planning.  Skilled chefs, IT consultants, lawyers, Bushcraft experts and others have kept the show on the road.

At St Paul’s in London, just a couple of miles from the Off-Grid.net office, the occupierts avoided opening a bank account for the first few weeks, for obvious reasons.  Eventually the pragmatists won, and the campers now share an account with the London Camp for Climate Action and had £7,300 of funds the last time they checked.

The rest of their money – “a few hundred quid”, according to one volunteer – is held in cash on site and is used to fund small purchases of spices for meals or gaffer tape.

Spending more than £150 has to win unanimous support at the general assembly; yesterday they signed off on £560 for solar panels.

The camp relies on donations for the majority of its essentials. An online wishlist specifies the things they need – gloves, woolly hats, scarves, Butane gas cans and a “Power Gorilla portable laptop charger” are all currently required. Last week a piano tuner was summoned and multiple candidates rose nobly to the challenge.

Thirty-six voluntary “working groups”, ranging from catering to meditation, run the camp and cater to its increasingly diverse needs, with daily meetings and an impressive array of rotas propped against the central information tent.

Mismanagement? Chaos? They’re leaving that to the bankers, they say.

50
People volunteered to work in the welfare tent to help the vulnerable

224
Tents have been counted on the site, including work tents like the kitchen, university, welfare and first aid centres

15
Litres of handwash donated by a company in the North

36
Working groups are listed in the information tent, including Occupy FC, direction action, artistic collective, healing, queer group, Egypt solidarity, meditation

1, 500
Hot vegan meals are prepared and served each day,
with an estimated 2,500 visits for snacks. Carnivores are appeased by tinned sardines and tuna

8
Protesters staff the kitchen, led by award-winning Italian chef Alessandro Petruzzi

100
Litres of milk donated each day, most of which is soya

50
Kilos of green beans donated on Monday for the evening meal

200
Containers of mixed veg donated by a member of the public

£5,000
Value of kitchen equipment donated to the food tent

10
Kilos of quick noodles donated in one delivery

£90
Daily cost of gas for the kitchen

2
Bin-liners of French bread donated daily by Paul’s bakery

8
Hours of daily lectures in the camp’s Tent City University, which has a capacity of 40

30
Children who organised an “occupy half-term” of music, dancing and a school assembly

£750
Cash donated into the camp’s main kitty each day

£7,300
Balance in the bank account the protesters are sharing

£20,000
The weekly fall in sales experienced by Pret A Manger on Paternoster Square since the protest began

5
Portaloos have been lent. The camp pays £180 a day for cleaning

0
Number of alcoholic drinks allowed on the site. The kitchen declines donations of wine and other tipples in accordance with the camp’s “No drink, no drugs” policy, although a few cans of Boddingtons have been sighted by visitors

The protest’s newspaper is the Occupied Times and 4,000 copies have been printed. Forty people write for it, and it has two designers and three commissioning editors

400
protesters during the day, with about 200 sleeping in the camp at night

1
“Banksy” Monopoly board

200
Books donated by one member of the public to the Tent City library, which now has more than 500. Other book donors include Freedom Press, the 125-year-old anarchist publisher in Whitechapel. The online wish list requests “political theory, other political, good fiction”

25
Number of volunteer press officers

5
Types of recycling bin, for plastic, paper and card, cans, glass bottles and food waste

This event is a real bonus

Outline of Today’s Public Hearing:

• 09:45 Guests and Panel are seated
• 10:00 Introduction to A People’s Hearing, Tony and Sandra Nurse, Occupy Wall Street
• 10:10 Opening Statement, Dr. Cornel West
• 10:20 Background of Goldman Sachs, Mr. Chris Hedges
• 10:20 Witness Testimonials
• 11:00 Proposal of Verdict
• 12:00 A Call to Action – March to Goldman Sachs

Liberty Square, NY — Today (Thursday, November 3rd) the People, the 99 percent, will hold A People’s Hearing of Goldman Sachs in Liberty Square Park and march on Goldman Sachs.

The people will bring to justice perhaps the single most egregious perpetrator of economic fraud and corruption in the United States. The Hearing will include testimonials from individuals directly affected by Goldman’s fraudulent manipulation of financial markets, including victims of housing foreclosures, pension losses, public lay-offs and untenable student debt.

The proceedings will also include expert analysis from Ralph Nader, Cornel West and Chris Hedges. Following the 99-minute hearing the people will decide on a fair and deliverable verdict via our own process of consensus-based direct democracy – and we intend to deliver it ourselves – to the headquarters of Goldman Sachs at 200 West Street, eight blocks from Liberty Square. We will ask for something our judicial and legislative systems have so far failed to deliver – the return of billions of taxpayer dollars to the 99 percent and criminal sentences for those Goldman Sachs executives who carried out the fraud. The event will be broadcast live via the Occupy Wall Street Livestream, among other public media outlets.

The People’s Hearing will examine the collapse of regulations and political and economic controls that permitted Goldman Sachs to loot the U.S. Treasury. It will look at how we came to live in a country where it became impossible to vote against the interests of Goldman Sachs. It will ask why Goldman Sachs was allowed to enrich itself not only at the expense of millions of small investors but through its control of the bailouts and the regulatory process. It will demand to know why Goldman Sachs, one of the prime culprits in the destruction of the global economy, is permitted to continue to bankrupt countries such as Greece, creating massive human suffering, without oversight or control. The People’s Hearing will finally give Goldman Sach’s victims a voice.

Rolling Stone columnist Matt Taibbi described Goldman Sachs as “a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” The broad outlines of Goldman Sachs’ massive fraud are well documented. It put together a collaterized debt obligation (CDO) from mortgage-backed securities that the company assumed would fail. It sold these CDOs as assets and secure investments to pension and mutual funds as well as institutions and banks while betting against them through credit default swaps (CDS). A credit default swap, or CDS, is an insurance policy where the issuer makes up a loss if an asset goes bad. Goldman Sachs, in essence, sold toxic garbage to investors and when this garbage was exposed as garbage, wiping out tens of millions of individual investors who had put away money for retirement or college, Goldman Sachs raked in money from insurers. AIG, which insured these worthless CDOs, lacked sufficient funds to pay Goldman Sachs during the financial meltdown of 2008, a meltdown that evaporated some $ 40 trillion in worldwide wealth. Goldman Sachs, with numerous former officials ensconced in the Treasury department and government, simply looted the U.S. Treasury to pay itself. And they are sitting on our money to this day.

The firm has committed numerous acts of fraud that extend beyond our shores. Goldman Sachs was instrumental in helping Greek authorities hide its mounting government budget deficit by selling swaps to the Greek government in return for future revenue streams. The Greek government was able through this arrangement to mask the loan which would have raised its budget deficit above euro zone limits. The sleights of hand now threaten to see Greece go into default and could trigger a massive banking crisis through Europe. The crisis has seen the Greek government unleash draconian austerity measures that are taken out on the backs of students, the poor and the working class. Goldman Sachs is a global criminal syndicate.

Goldman Sachs, while its victims suffer from foreclosures and bankruptcy, has set aside $ 10 billion in compensation and bonuses for its chief executives this year. These bonuses are being paid out even as Goldman Sachs dismissed 1,300 employees with another 1,000 employees expected to lose their jobs by the end of the year. No one is safe from our oligarchic elite, not even the underlings at Goldman Sachs. We invite the newly unemployed from Goldman Sachs to join us.

The median paycheck in the United States, even while these corporate heads pulled in salaries that often equate to $ 900,000 an hour, fell by 1.2 percent to $ 26,364. The number of poor and unemployed is swelling while the number of Americans making $ 1 million or more climbed to 94,000, a 20 percent increase from 2009. Corporate profits now account for 88 percent of all income growth while wages account for 1 percent. The top one percent has, through fraud and the corporate control of the judiciary and regulatory agencies, accounted for about half of all income growth since the 1970s.

How is it possible that in a democracy the bottom 99 percent sees only half of economic growth? How is it possible that the economy does not work on behalf of the 99 percent? How is it possible that financial swindlers and liars continue to run our economy and our government?

Its time to bring justice to Goldman Sachs!

...heading to the mainstream (Mila Kunis)

Based on a story by Gordon Fiedler

The Off-Grid movement has parallels with the Preppers. While the latter is more apocalyptic, many preppers want to live off grid and many off-gridders are preppers – meaning they are preparing for a general social or economic collapse.

A recent gathering of preppers at Ottawa County State Fishing Lake, north of Bennington, drew folks from all over the state. They were alerted to the “meet-up” because they are members of the Kansas Preppers Network, which is part of the American Preppers Network.

They go by such online names as Lionheart, Trekker, Kanman, MoEngineer, Guntech and High Hopes. They didn’t want their real identities known for fear of home invasions by the unprepared and also, in some cases, to hide their efforts from suspicious employers.

As forum members, they can post questions and comment on queries from others, rant about current events and share an occasional joke among their prepper peers in every state and in all of Canada’s provinces and territories. There are even groups in Britain, Italy and New Zealand.

APN’s co-founder and current director is Tom Martin, who maintains the site from his Idaho home.He launched the site in January 2009 and patterned it after online forums in Texas and Utah. Others began popping up and he and associates decided the time was ripe for a larger, more cohesive organization.

“We saw the writing on the wall some time ago,” he told The Salinas Journal.

He could see ominous signs in the housing bubble, the federal debt and other events.

The movement’s infancy

But when he started the site, the prepper movement was in its infancy.

Back then, there were fewer than a 1,000 Internet sites that answered to a search on the word, and many of them dealt with such subjects as auto body restoration.

“There were only four or five at the time that dealt with preparedness,” Martin said.

A search of the word now delivers more than a half million sites.

There are even preparedness videos posted on YouTube.

Martin’s forum also has swelled, with more than 9,000 registered members, and it is growing daily. But the movement is much larger than that.

“We’re by no means the leader in the movement. I don’t think there is a leader.”

He said people are being drawn to the site for varied reasons and bringing with them a broad spectrum of philosophies.

“We’ve got people on the left, on the right and everything in the middle,” he said. “We’ve got people preparing for things as simple as a job loss to people preparing for natural disasters, economic disasters. A few people believe in the 2012 (Mayan prophesy) theory. Anything and everything.”

Self-reliance the key

Despite the differing political persuasions of his forum members, Martin said they seem to rally around a common cause: self-reliance.

“Almost nobody that I know (who) is a prepper thinks they can rely on the government to help them in a disaster,” he said. “Even FEMA comes out and says we have to have three days of food and water. They know they can’t get to you immediately.”

Martin said he’s traced the origin of the word “prepper” to the Y2K scare, when people taking precautions against the anticipated computer collapse were known as Y2K preppers.

While Y2K was an end-of-times bust, it was instructive, Martin said. Perhaps, he said, the precautions by businesses and individuals on the eve of the new millennium prevented a larger catastrophe.

The prepper term simmered on the back burner for nearly a decade before being picked up within the past few years by people worried about the souring economy, the housing and banking crises, oil and food prices and political gridlock in Washington.

Business is good

As the movement has grown, so have businesses that cater to the prepper crowd.

Forum chatter from preppers on such topics as sources for food-grade containers, home canning and processing, gardening, water filtration, alternative energy, backyard livestock, defensive weapons and ammunition, rural property, hunting, post-collapse coinage and wilderness survival has spawned a growth industry.

Pam Molloy is general partner of Mayflower Trading Co. in North Fork, Idaho, a 14-year-old business that supplies not just preppers, but others seeking a self-sufficient lifestyle.

It offers emergency food, housewares, first-aid and alternative energy products.

“I have seen a huge increase in storage food and the first-aid stuff, disaster kits, trauma kits,” Molloy said.

“When we first went online, people were interested in food, survival stuff, tents, knives, outdoor cooking,” she said. “It was real popular as people prepared for Y2K. Then when that was over, we started seeing a lot more business in alternative energy. Even though Y2K didn’t go down the way it was going to happen, they were awakened. This whole place is fragile.”

She said her clientele now includes homesteaders; latter-day back-to-the-land types; the “greens” who want to lessen their carbon footprint, and the survivalists.

” I use that term for people who believe that if things go bad, they can run off into the woods and survive,” Molloy said.

Multiyear food supplies

The storable food business was first generated by rural dwellers who simply wanted a garden backup to get them through the winter and early spring.

“Now, people are buying multiyear supplies,” said Molloy, who wonders where people are putting all of it.

“I don’t know if they’re remodeling houses, storing it in crawl spaces, clearing out the lawnmower shed.”

She knows of one customer who has chosen food as his investment of choice.

“One guy told me he’s spending his retirement savings on food. He thought he would need it because his (money) will buy twice as much.”

He said he’d rather buy a bucket of wheat now for $20 rather than $40 later on as food prices rise.

Creating thriving lives

Another business preppers have tapped is Shelf Reliance, a Utah company that first catered to the members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who are commanded to maintain a year’s supply of food.

Marketing director Sebastian Nilsson said the company got its start in 2005 manufacturing and selling shelving that automatically rotates the stock.

Now it’s tapping into the prepper movement by offering, besides the shelf systems, dehydrated and freeze-dried foods and emergency kits and supplies.

“We have the tools to help people build up a home store,” Nilsson said.

“We’re trying to find a vision to help create thriving lives. We feel to be prepared gives you peace of mind for whatever hits.”

Ready for the really big one

And if the big one — the really big one — hits, then Brian Camden should have been at the top of the preparedness list.

He’s principal of Hardened Structures, a manufacturer of bomb shelters, including high-end models that go for up to $600 a square foot. His company is building them all over the world for private, commercial and military clients.

“A lot of people are scared about the economic collapse,” Camden said. “That’s 50 percent of our business. In the last four to five years, it’s picked up, definitely.”

These are not the septic-tank-like backyard structures of the Cold War. Not for $600 a square foot.

For that kind of money, you’re getting “a reinforced concrete underground bunker with blast overpressure protection with full NBC (nuclear, biological, chemical) filtering,” Camden said.

“We build them with hydroponic food growing systems, barns underground for livestock, water generation, sewage disposal,” he said.

Shelter dwellers could survive for five years in one of them, he said.

Selling freeze-dried food

After 9-11, Victor Rantala was another who saw an opportunity.

“The buzz was that the world had changed,” he wrote in an email. “Danger was around every corner. I wasn’t necessarily buying into that thought process, but I had always been into preparedness to some degree and have always believed it just to be common sense to be ready for the unexpected on any number of levels. What I saw was that folks were not being well-served in the preparedness marketplace, in spite of the sudden surge in interest.”

So in 2002, he founded Safecastle Royal in Prior Lake, Minn., and started selling freeze-dried food online, then expanded into storm shelters.

Other entrepreneurs, seeing an opportunity in the prepper market, also jumped on board.

“Market niches … have steadily, and sometimes suddenly, grown through the 10 years I’ve been materially involved,” he said.

He declined to reveal sales figures but said business is growing.

“What I will say is that our annual revenue growth each of the last 10 years has easily exceeded expectations most investors or business owners would have for an average business in today’s environment. We are growing, expanding, and hiring (part-time people) from time to time,” although he’s not adding staff at this time.

“In a sense, I welcome the fact that preparedness is so much more mainstream today than it was several years ago,” he said.

Take care of yourself

One who would agree is Tom Martin. If his American Preppers Network does just one thing, it is this: “I’d like to see every able-bodied American become self-reliant, to be motivated and capable to take care of themselves.”

Our pre-off-grid life was pretty much like most anyone else, we lived in a regular house, a mobile home actually, in a regular neighborhood in north central Texas. PB owned his own business, taking care of restaurant equipment for several big name companies and a smattering of smaller ones, he was a one-man-band, no employees. I worked 2 jobs, the first as a merchandiser and pricing coordinator for a big box electronics company and the other job was as a trainer in a semi-well known gym for women. We weren’t what you would call well off financially, but we were happy.

We were both empty nesters from previous marriages, in the beginning neither one of us knew the other had a secret desire to live off grid, when we began to explore the idea of actually doing this, it didn’t take us long to find our perfect plot of land in far west Texas, it was just under 6 acres of unimproved, rough, almost inaccessible land on the side of a mountain in the high desert.

I cashed in my stock from my job and had enough to buy the land and had a little left over to buy some building material for the start of the cabin (soon to be renamed the sky castle). In less than 2 weeks, PB had a minimal structure built, it was enough for us to move in. We were able to get some solar panels, a charge controller, a few deep cycle batteries and a few other things we needed to get started. We began to disassemble our current city lives, PB shut down his business, I quit both of my jobs, and on December 22, 2007 we moved all of our remaining belongings to our new life in west Texas.

The first few months were pretty rough, we lived in a most primitive manner, some might even say our first few years were pretty primitive, I suspect some might even say we still live very primitively, that’s OK, it’s quite wonderful to me. We met a great neighbor who gave us some help, it made life a bit easier, things like access to his water well instead of having to go to the community well, access to his washer and dryer instead of washing by hand and hanging to dry, access to his shower instead of taking spit baths… all things we were prepared to do on our own, but having such a great neighbor we were able to do many things a little easier, in return we do most of the maintenance on his house, we do other things for him too, so it’s a fair trade.

We quickly learned about the barter system and before long we had enough connections with the community that when anyone had some used, scrap or excess building materials, they would contact us first to see if we could use it. Most of the rest of the sky castle was built using this scrap material that would have otherwise gone to the landfill. PB would go and tear down a building at a friend’s property and we would get to take the material home. Please understand, we aren’t tree huggers, we aren’t doing any of this because it’s “green”, for us it was cheap and expedient, the fact that we were in fact being green was merely a bonus.

Little by little we built up our little place into a home, with running water, eventually installing on demand propane powered water heaters, water tanks for more water storage, we built another room, the first one was 16×16, the addition was 12×12, we built on decks and eventually, my favorite addition, the shower. We also began to work on other things, like the garden, putting up out buildings, sheds and such.

All of this has taken time and lots of sweat, we have spent very little money, mainly because we do everything ourselves, and a lot of experimentation, some of which worked great, some which failed miserably. We have been blessed by good health and only minor accidents, mostly scrapes and splinters. We have grown to really love our little community, I’d say that has been as important as anything we have done. No matter how perfect your place might be, if you aren’t happy with or welcome into your community, that will not end up in a good way.

Now we are living like kings, at least that is my opinion, of course by most people’s standards including the government, we live well under the poverty level, but I wouldn’t have it any other way, I love my life, I love living with the freedom I have, I love working hard for what we have, it really does make me appreciate each and every little thing we have. When we first started out, I was hauling 3 one gallon containers of water up the hill from my neighbor’s house every day, sometimes twice a day, I guarantee you that makes me appreciate my 1550 gallon poly plastic water container with all the plumbing involved, doing dishes and laundry by hand inside my sky castle, getting to shower with hot running water…

I look forward to many more years with PB, improving our lives and the sky castle. The last couple of days has been quite fun for PB, one of our friends and neighbors came by, he had been eyeballing the gravel in our creek bed, he offered a trade for a few trailer loads of gravel, he let us use his Bobcat tractor to do some dirt work, PB achieved in a few hours of work what would have taken him weeks if not months of hard manual work, it cost zero dollars, but was priceless for us. I have to say that life is good.

A big part of my happiness is because of my faith, I found a little church in the neighborhood (we are blessed with 2 of them close by), I joined and quickly became active in the church, now I’m on the board of trustees, working to make things better and better. I have been a Christian for many years, most of my life, but living out here and being part of this church and community has helped me grow in my faith and get closer to God. I’m not saying that is necessary for you, (though for me it is), it’s a choice you have to make, I am saying that going to church is a good way to get closer to your community, and hopefully to God too, I am blessed everyday and in every way, even in the bad times, there is always a lesson to learn, a period of growth, a strengthening. Getting to live in and near nature allows me to personally witness Divinity on a daily basis.

I have many people contact me to ask for my advice on how they should go about moving off grid, how to do it cheaply, how they should do it… it’s difficult to answer because everyone is different, everyone has different standards of how they want to live, everyone has different ideas and circumstances. My biggest advice is to have a dream and set goals, let nothing come between you and your goals, I have found that people will do what they really want to do, and unfortunately there are many who wish but don’t take the action necessary to make their wish a reality. I’m not judging, just stating the facts about what I see.

If you truly want to live off grid, then do it, you don’t have to do it all at once, but start taking the steps necessary to get you to the place where you want to be. Each step you take is a step closer to your dream, don’t let life get in the way, don’t let family, friends, a job, or anything else get in the way, do what is necessary to make yourself happy and the rest of everything will fall into place. I’m not advocating doing anything illegal, I’m assuming that most of my readers are reasonable, law abiding people. I am advocating living your life to the fullest extent, and if that includes living off grid, then do it.

If you want to learn more about our lives living off grid, you can read more of my stories here

http://www.off-grid.net/section/wretha/

you can also read about us in the book Off the Grid: Inside the Movement for More Space, Less Government, and True Independence in Modern America by Nick Rosen, we are chapter 9 in the book.

Slogan of the month

The Occupy Wall Street movement is beginning to win hearts and minds in the midst of the very area it is occupying.

Amongst the zombie facepaint and the neo-hippies massing at the off-grid settlement in Zuccotti Park near Wall Street are an increasing number of financial workers themselves. One elegantly dressed woman this week was carrying a sign that said “Wall Street workers for realistic fiscal reform – there are more of us than you think.”

And at sites all over America, OWS is attracting support from all walks of life — recently laid-off blue collar workers to students to highly-paid execs in non-financial industries who are just as angry as the rest of us about the way the banking industry has laid waste to the real economy.

The point that the mainstream US media has missed in its obsequious haste to criticize the occupation for not having any clear “demands” or a sophisticated analysis of the financiers, is that the space itself is very much its own demand, a demand for a new kind of society set up provocatively in the uncaring shadow of Wall Street, the symbolic heart of free-market capitalism.

“I’m here to learn about how to build a new community,” says Max, a carpenter from upstate New York. “We’ve essentially built a little town right in the middle of Wall Street where people are fed, clothed, housed, taken care of.”

Now the message has spread across the land and the next few weeks will be mesmerizing. A “Declaration of the Occupation of New York City” summons all those who feel “wronged by the corporate forces of the world”. Corporations “place profit over people”, “run our governments”, take bail-outs “with impunity”, poison the food supply, block green energy, “perpetuate colonialism at home and abroad”, muzzle the media and use student loans to “hold students hostage”. The protests have already spread

Wall Street's own workers join the movement

to Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago, and were this week heading towards the nation’s capital.

Hundreds of protesters on Thursday afternoon converged in front of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the most influential lobbying group in Washington D.C., Under the huge banner hanging overhead that says “JOBS.” But their question, ironically, is “where are the jobs?”

With shouts of “Where are the jobs,” protesters displayed ten foot long signs that says “Corporate Greed,” and some of them pointed at curious Chamber employees who peek out of first floor windows, hollering “Shame on you!”

Back in New York, the atmosphere at Zuccotti Park is uniquely welcoming. As a typical October night draws in and the rain begins to beat down, the medical centre, offers warm coats and hot coffee, medicine and a hug: a far cry from the pitilessness of Main Street America.

“My whole generation has kind of been conditioned to believe that we don’t have a voice, we don’t have the ability to change anything,” says Max. “It’s cool to believe again.”

But believe in what?  Now the fire has been lit, the real work starts.  What are the demands of the movement exactly? How will the Occupiers ensure their voice is heard all the way up to the 2012 election day?

A centrepiece of the Dodd-Frank financial reforms signed into law last year was a Consumer Financial Protection Agency to guard against unfair fees and predatory lending. It was set up by Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard professor, who was also expected to be its first director.

At the urging of Wall Street lobbyists, Congress has blocked her appointment.

Clear policies and clear slogans are needed.  The first priority is to work out exactly who the enemy is and what we want from them. A total of 79 per cent of Americans agree with the Occupy Wall Street slogan: “The big banks got bailed out, while we got left behind,” according to a new poll.

This writer is certain that the large majority of senior executives in the financial sector should be arrested, questioned under caution, and in many cases imprisoned for fraud and other acts of malfeasance.

The huge bonuses they paid themselves over the past decade,  based on falsely declared profits, should be repaid to the institutions they looted.

That would solve the problem of recapitalizing the banks and insurers.

Not since crowds laid waste to central Seattle when the World Trade Organisation met there 12 years ago has capitalism faced such a direct rebuke on the streets of North America.

The slogan is:  PAY IT BACK. The moment is now.

We are looking for a committed all-rounder who shares our values, and can take us to the next level and stay with us, developing the site for years to come (paid of course).

Skill Set:

Graphic Design

Usability optimisation

WordPress

PHP

Analytics

DFP

RSS

Social Media

eCommerce

Virtual Server Admin

Please write to nick(at) off-grid.net

Possible future sea-community

Paypal billionaire Peter Thiel has made his second donation to the Seasteading Institute which is setting up libertarian countries on artificial islands. How Hurriacane Irene would affect such country if it were to be established is hard to predict.

Off-Grid first reported on this story in 2008 – http://www.off-grid.net/2008/05/21/reinventing-the-nation-state/ -

Thiel, who gets seasick and does not like boats. plans to develop the solar and wind-powered micro-economy suitable for up to 300 people off the coast of California.

He told Details magazine he had contributed another $750,000 to the project, small change for a man who made a reputed $1.5billion selling his stake in Paypal

Thiel believes building artificial countries on the ocean might be the only way to launch full-fledged societies that have enough resilience to survive the coming downturn. The German-born financier wants to test the libertarian ideals of Ayn Rand, in whose novels heroic capitalists abandon society, which then falls apart.

Interest in Rand has been revived by the Tea Party movement. Last week, it looked as if the Seasteaders’ dream was collapsing as their founder, Patri Friedman, a former Google engineer, abruptly quit. The Seasteaders are updating plans for an “oceanic homestead” they hope will be operating by 2014.

Thiel made news earlier this year for putting a portion of his $1.5 billion fortune into an initiative to encourage entrepreneurs to skip college.

Homesteading, it’s a buzzword that means different things to different people, back in the day, it meant getting land for free as long as you lived on it and improved it for x number of years. It was a way to get people to move west (in the USA), back when travel was slow and painful, even dangerous.

Today it usually refers to someone who is living more like our ancestors did, in a more self sufficient manner, on a plot of land, often raising livestock, growing their own food, living more independently. Most of us are more than one generation removed from those who lived on a farm or homestead, so we don’t benefit from the knowledge of our family members who lived in a more self sufficient manner. I know in my family, it was my great grand parents who had lived on a farm, my grandparents and parents lived in suburban neighborhoods with small yards and animals no bigger than a dog.

Because of this, those of us who want to live closer to the land have to resort to alternative methods of obtaining  knowledge. I continually scour the internet for books about living off grid, gardening and such, I found this book The Ultimate Guide to Homesteading: An Encyclopedia of Independent Living (The Ultimate Guides), actually I didn’t find it, I was offered an opportunity to review it and I jumped at the chance, it was a book I had been looking at previously and was more than happy to review it.

I keep getting distracted from writing because I keep finding more and more interesting things in this book to read, I just read about growing cotton, then picking it, cleaning it, and spinning it. Since I crochet, this is especially appealing to me, and something I think I can do with little trouble. For now, I’m not set up to raise wool bearing animals, but I can grow cotton and process it.

This book has a lot to offer, it doesn’t go into extreme detail on any one subject, but gives you enough information so that you can decide if that particular thing is something you really want to try.  Nicole Faires (don’t you just love her name?) the author, has certainly lived the life, she is not just spouting theory, she grew up on a hobby farm raising chickens and growing her own food among other things.

While not an exhaustive list of homesteading subjects, I believe it covers the majority of them quite nicely, such as:

• land-buying, communities…
• water-getting it, purifying it and such
• food-finding it, growing it, preserving it…
• animals-livestock, domestic…
• shelter-various home styles, barns, fences…
• financial-making money from your skills…
• health-medicines, herbal medicines,
• and lots more

There is a great  dictionary in the back so you will at least sound like you know what you are talking about when chatting with the old timers at the feed store, LOL, seriously, I have had a good time reading the terminology and their meanings. Such as “butt-up”, before reading this book, I would have said that is how one lands when tripping over a rock and doing a face plant, now I know that is a type of roof ridge made in thatching which forces the straw together from both sides of the roof to form a peak. “Flying change”, I would think it’s what happens when you lose control of your change purse, but it really has to do with horses.

Near the back of the book, just before the index, the author’s bio and several blank pages (perfect for adding your own notes), there is a great bibliography with tons of resources, mostly in the form of internet links. These will send you to more detailed resources for the subjects found in this book. This alone is worth the price of the book.

The book is easy to read, well made, with lots of color photographs and diagrams, nice thick glossy pages ensure this book will last for a long time, that’s a good thing because once you have this book, you will be referring to it over and over again throughout the years.

PB (my hubby) has been trying to steal this book from me ever since I received it, his comment on it was that it is a good all over resource, not detailed on each thing, but a good book and he’s glad we have it, he has also been going on and on about how well this book is physically put together, the binding, the paper quality and the pictures. Now that I’m finished with this review, I can safely give the book to him, I’ll not see it again for a while. :)

See my other book reviews here:
http://www.off-grid.net/tag/book-review/

Honesty disclaimer:
I did receive this book free from the publisher for the expressed intent of giving a review, that in no way influenced my review, all of my reviews are honest and from the heart.

Why stop people from trying to help themselves?

As Tent Cities spring up across America, this kind of picture is becoming commonplace. And its just the beginning.

Residents of the 150-person Tent City near Lake Wood, Ocean County New Jersey are mainly former householders with decent employment records. They are not derelicts, substance abusers or criminals.

Tens of thousands of law-abiding foreclosure victims would like to live this way. But States will not let them – citing petty health and safety objections – as if being homeless is not the ultimate health and safety issue.

Nina Rogala, left, has been living in Lakewood’s tent city for about three years. Mark Mroczek, right, has been there about eight months.‘We’ve been in and out of the camp for a year,’ said ex-hotel worker Burt Haut, 43, who lives with his wife, ex-teacher Barbara, 48 in a tent styled like a teepee from the Old West.

‘Our financial difficulties since the credit crisis three years ago have caused us to camp on public ground, at the back of churches and down the backs of closed down stores. We’ve had help from our friends and family, but we have run that well dry.”

For nearly a year attorney Jeffrey J. Wild has spent his free time working on behalf of dozens of homeless men and women who are being threatened with eviction from a tent city they have established on publicly owned land in Ocean County.

Wild, 51, sees the case as more than just a local or regional issue, arguing that thousands of homeless people across New Jersey could benefit from his push to expand their rights to shelter on public land.

For Wild, the issue isn’t simply a question of right versus wrong. He also sees it from the standpoint of someone who has been personally touched by homelessness.

“My father was homeless at times during the Great Depression, so I have always known that, with just a little bad luck, any of us could be unable to make our monthly rent or mortgage,” he said

“‘We have a petrol-powered generator that heats up the water for the shower and lets us wash up dishes after donated meals,” said one resident.

Local officials try to close down the functioning community

‘We have pet chickens which are not for eggs, they are to eat the ticks that could make us feel very ill with Lyme disease or a blood infection.

‘It is a racially diverse community with Mexicans, Polish, Irish, African American and white people.

‘There are eight women living here too, which was a problem in the past, but has now made the camp more calm by their presence,” said the resident.

Working pro bono, Wild has filed a suit on behalf of dozens of homeless men and women in Ocean County who are being evicted from their home on public land. “I have learned that New Jersey’s ‘safety net’ is full of holes – and that men, women and children are falling through them, and hitting the ground every day.”

“When it’s a subfreezing night when we wouldn’t send our pets outside, these people are being told they have to leave,” Wild said at a May 5 hearing on the matter in Toms River. “The safety net cannot have holes.

he pro-bono legal work he has done on their behalf takes up much of his time when he isn’t helping to run the capital markets litigation team at Lowenstein Sandler, a Roseland-based law firm.

The case originated last summer, when the township of Lakewood sued for the right to remove most of the tent city residents from a patch of woods on township-owned land near a highway.

A judge initially ruled in the township’s favor, saying that the residents had to vacate once the government found another place for them to stay. But Wild filed a counterclaim late last year, arguing that the government’s temporary accommodations were a waste of money – some of the homeless had been put up in hotel rooms for $100 per night – and that the tent city residents had an implicit “right-to-shelter” under the state constitution that should allow them to stay on public land indefinitely.

Township officials responded by saying that the tent city, which includes an outhouse, tepees and livestock, was an environmental and safety hazard.

Township and county officials also said that the county’s network of seven homeless shelters was sufficient, and that they had gone out of their way to offer temporary accommodations to the tent city residents.

“There is a difference between the government’s authority to provide services and their obligation to do so,” said Jean Cipriani, a lawyer for the Ocean County Board of Social Services. “There are many things that the government must do, but this is not one of them.”

The most recent official estimates suggest that around 1,400 homeless men and women live in Bergen County<http://www.northjersey.com/news/bergen>, and a comparable number live in Passaic County<http://www.northjersey.com/news/passaic_morris>.

“If there was any group like that in the city of Hackensack<http://www.northjersey.com/hackensack>, the police would’ve disbanded them long ago,” said Robin Reilly, who founded the FAITH Foundation, a homeless services non-profit, in 2002. “But there are people out there. I know they’re there. They call me in the morning because they want someone to know where to look.”

Reilly said that the Lakewood tent city had a better shot at remaining because of its size.

“There’s strength in numbers,” she said.

Wild’s connection to the homeless in Lakewood started through an outreach program at Barnert Temple, which has been donating food, clothing, kerosene stoves and other equipment to the tent city residents since 2007.

“It’s really rooted in the idea that every human being has worth,” said Rabbi Elyse Frishman of Barnert Temple.

“When it became clear over time that the Lakewood community was interested in ejecting them and they had no place to go, Jeff became very concerned.”

The suit faces uncertain prospects in the courts. Wild said that he was pleased that Superior Court Judge Vincent Grasso in Ocean County allowed parts of his counterclaim to go forward at the May 5 hearing. But Grasso dismissed Wild’s broadest argument against the encampment crackdown – that it violated the state constitution.

“The issue in this case is not the plight of the homeless, but the procedural process,” Grasso said. He also questioned both sides about specific state laws that the county was violating.

In response, Wild pointed to a long history of laws that he said applied to the Lakewood case, including the so-called Elizabethan Poor Laws, which he said firmly establish the state’s obligation to provide food and shelter for its citizens.

But Cipriani, the Ocean County lawyer, called the Poor Laws “antiquated,” and noted that some date to pre-colonial America.

Grasso seemed to agree, but instead of dismissing the case outright he gave Wild 45 days to “amend and amplify” his claim. Wild said Friday that he would file an expanded claim on July 1.

After that, a new hearing date may be set.

For the tent city residents, that means their encampment is safe – at least for now.

Several residents who attended the hearing seemed to take the judge’s decision in stride even as they decried the process.

Michael Berenzweig, 61, said that he took up residence in the tent city more than a year ago as he and his wife suffered through a long stretch of unemployment. The two have since raised chickens there and maintain a makeshift home.

Berenzweig said he reacted to the judge’s ruling with indifference.

“To me it’s just a lot of dragging things on,” he said. “People aren’t looking at the gigantic issue in this thing, that homelessness and starvation could be solved. Everyone’s ignoring it.”

One member of the motley crew who lives in Tent City claims to be the nephew of country great Johnny Cash.

‘I used to be a guitarist and played at BB Kings’ club in New York City,’ said Mark.

‘But my girlfriend left me, I lost my home and I travelled round Toms River near here sleeping rough.

‘I was told about Tent City and minister Steve by a fellow homeless person and I walked down here and approached him for a space in his camp.

‘It is like a family here and he helped me get set up with a camping tent and now I have friends and people to talk to, which I have not had since my life collapsed.

‘My family can’t seem to help me no more and I have accepted that every time that they have tried to I have let them down and failed to sort my life out.

‘I don’t know what I would do if I didn’t have this place to live in.’

We are fund-raising to make a documentary about the ways you can go off the grid and the people who are doing it. The aim is a how-to, told through the eyes of people who are doing it.

You can see a video about our plans here, at Vimeo.  Or read all about our film at Indiegogo, where you can also donate in return for perks such as a copy of the eventual movie, and my book Off the Grid: Inside the Movement for More Space, Less Government, and True Independence in Modern America

Please give generously and see our documentary series become a reality.

The biggest donations get a days consultation with me about their own off-grid plans, and a guided tour of off-grid homes near them.

http://www.indiegogo.com/off-grid