Category — PEOPLE

Discovery Channel bares all in Naked Castaway

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…)

His eco-city is his monument

Born in Turin in 1919, Soleri was best known for Arcosanti, an experimental village he established in the Arizona desert devoted to his theory of ‘arcology’, or architecture in harmony with ecology.

After studying with Frank Lloyd Wright in Arizona in 1946, he returned and settled there 10 years later where he developed influential theories on buildings that respect nature and spoke out against urban sprawl.

In 1970 he founded Arcosanti, a futuristic community planned for 5,000 people that over the next 40 years received international acclaim as an urban laboratory. (more…)

It would seem that I’m not the only blogger/prepper who is also worried about getting family on board for prepping. I can’t impress upon you just how important this is, the more people around you who are also ready for whatever may be coming down the pike, the better off YOU will be, the fewer people you will either have to share with (meaning less food and supplies for YOU and YOUR household) or the fewer you will have to turn away in an emergency situation, neither scenario is a good one. Daisy Luther recently wrote about how to get your loved ones to get ready, to be prepared, to be more responsible for taking care of themselves and their households… (more…)

Look around you, how many grey and white heads are nearby? If you are lucky, you will have at least one, if you are very lucky you will have multiple to choose from. Why is it so fortunate to have older folk around? Simple, beneath all that gray and white hair is a plethora of knowledge and experience. This is a valuable resource, and one that is dwindling each and every day. Often the biggest feat is to find those who lived through the great depression and still have their mental faculties and are willing to sit down and talk about their lives, that’s the trifecta!

These folk grew up during a time when most things were done by hand, black and white TV was something for the wealthy, that’s if they had electricity. Lighting was often candles and kerosene lanterns. Some lived on farms and had to get up before dawn to take care of farm animals before eating breakfast and heading off to school. These folks grew up in circumstances that most of us can’t even imagine. (more…)

The rugged outdoorsman dubbed the ‘Last American Man’ is facing a government shutdown of his camp in the Appalachian Mountains for not adhering to building code.

Eustace Conway dedicated his entire fortune and nearly 30 years of his  to building and living off of his 500-acre farm. Now he is facing having his entire way of life shut down by the North Carolina state government. In the YouTube film (click the pic above) he says what motivated him.

You can read much more here about Conway, 51, in an excerpt from my book OFF THE GRID – Inside the Movement for More Space, Less Government and True Independence in Modern America

According to the Wall Street Journal, several officials showed up to his Turtle Island Preserve home and found that his outhouses, (more…)

Letter published in The Burlington Free Press earlier today:

We attended a lecture by Bill McKibben at the Rutland Free Library hoping to hear real solutions in the green energy sector and ways to reduce our carbon footprint. Not only did we come away disappointed but infuriated!

We sat instead in an overheated room viewing his slide show of places all over the world that he had jetted off to. The carbon emissions from his trips alone far exceeded many Vermonters’ carbon footprint. He expressed sympathy for caribou affected by the Hydro Quebec dam and people on the other side of the world but had a cold, callous response to a family here in Vermont, living off the grid, but suffering from Wind Turbine Syndrome. (more…)

A service the Eco-movement provides to Brands

Its written by Suzanna Jones, described as “an off-the-grid farmer living in Walden.” She does not object to local power – but disagrees with McKibben about the trend towards industrial scale renewables. It is, she says, part of the mainstreaming of the environmental movement.

“In his 2008 book “Deep Economy,” Bill McKibben concludes that economic growth is the source of the ecological crises we face today. He explains that when the economy grows larger than necessary to meet our basic needs – when it grows for the sake of growth, automatically striving for “more” – its social and environmental costs greatly outweigh any benefits it may provide.

Unfortunately, McKibben seems to have forgotten what he so passionately argued just five years ago. Today he is an advocate of industrial wind turbines on our ridgelines: He wants to industrialize our last wild spaces to feed the very economy he fingered as the source of our environmental problems. (more…)