Consider this

Q: What links Spain with New York�s Mohawk River Valley, 240km-long, beginning just west of the state capital, Albany? A: They have both seen a sudden rush in eco-developments.

Safflyn Corporation is planning a $53m housing project with 100 solar and wind-powered homes surrounded by athletics fields, walking trails, a golf course and driving range.

Manhattan-based Caledonia Advisors picked urban Utica on the Upper Mohawk, 370km north-west of New York City. (more…)

Thiel - building his own country

A $500,000 donation from PayPal founder Peter Thiel, has kickstarted the Sea-steading Institute, to create experimental ocean communities “with diverse social, political, and legal systems.”

There’s a long history of people founding independent nation-states out in the ocean, most recently on an abandoned gun emplacement off the coat of Britain. They offered mail order kidney transplants and tax breaks to drug dealers, and eventually fled their “nation” to escape from some other bad guys.

But the Sea-Steaders have an unusually coherent philosophy, and an impressive track record in getting things done. (more…)

Step into another world

You don”t need to be Johan Eliasch, the Swedish multimillionaire who bought 400,000 acres of Amazonian rainforest to “save” it, to own your own wood.

Fifty paces into this piece of British woodland and the roar of the road gives way to birdsong. A pheasant flutters from the scrub and a fat hare thumps off in the direction of a stream. You are in the world of gleaming Arthurian knights stepping from between the sun-striped, mossy tree trunks. (more…)

Off-grid planning advisor

Introducing top planning and environmental lawyer Tim Driver of UK law firm Berryman……

Tim will be advising off-grid readers IN THE UK ONLY, on how to gain planning permission for their off-grid homes (any lawyers in the United States interested in helping off-gridders fight their way through the system, please feel free to contact us).

Planning permission, the right to live on or use a particular piece of land, is the main obstacle to off-gridders in the UK.

Trouble with the local council planning officers? Or the neighbours? Or building control? If you need help carving out your little piece of off-grid heaven, write to MANWITHPLAN@OFF-GRID.NET with questions or requests for advice . (more…)

Where’s the car park?

The rulers of UAE know better than most that the world’s oil supplies are running out. That’s why they committed $37 billion to build a city that is totally self sufficient for energy and water, plus a range of other alternative energy projects in the desert outside their capital of Abu Dhabi.

Residents are due to start moving in next year, but is it greenwash? (more…)

Nigel Hargreaves lives on the eastern seaboard of Australia. He sent us his hopes for an off-grid future:

Its warm in here!

My first residence in Australia was a wooden shed which some friends and I converted using re-cycled Australian hardwood timber.
I had two 75W PV panels to supply electricity to a bank of six 2V ex-telephone exchange, alkaline batteries. Most of the lights were single, hi intensity laser diodes. There was a 600W inverter for conventional stuff like a stereo and laptop computer.

Bottled gas was my cooking fuel and occasionally, when my roof-fed water tank was up, I would light a fire under a cast-iron bath outdoors for a hot bath, using off-cuts and litter from the surrounding woodland. I also had a pot-belly stove which heated the place in the winter, but my roof insulation was lacking and a great home for rats coming in from the cold! (more…)

Big fat hypocrite

Felix Dennis is best known as a publisher accused of corrupting the nation’s children in the Oz obscenity trials in the 1970s. Today, he seems keener to maintain the status quo and hopes to scupper plans for a new eco-town in the picturesque British countryside where he lives. He has written a book called How to Get Rich and spends his time trying to stop others from achieving the success he has been allowed.

A hero to the 1970s youth movement, Mr Dennis, 61, claims to be an environmentalist, but he has shown himself to be just another selfish rich old geezer. The opening salvo in his fight against the eco-town was a letter of protest to Hazel Blears, the UK�s Communities and Local Government minister. (more…)

Back to the future

The off-grid population is growing in the Scottish Highlands at an unprecedented rate. �For the first time in a thousand years that there are more people moving into the Highlands than are moving out,� Professor James Hunter told the Financial Times. If the trend continues, the Highland population will be back at 1851 levels within 20 years, says the professor of History. By 2001 the population of the Highlands and Islands had risen to 434,000, compared with 378,000 40 years before. And, according to the Highland and Islands Enterprise Network, more than half of the newcomers are English. In a region that had been a byword for depopulation the turnaround is extraordinary.

A thousand people are on the waiting list of the Crofters Commission, a government agency that establishes whether refugees from the rat-race are in a position to herd cattle. The number of applicants has swollen by a fifth in the past two years, and some people have been waiting 11 years for a croft. Almost half registered are under the age of 40. (more…)

Horsedrawn heaven

On the lookout for an affordable holiday home in the mountains? Try Austria for a modern fairytale unfolding in a charming eco-aware village. The Lungau ski region in Austria is a rustic wonderland, a Snow White country of rushing rivers, fir-tree clad hills and mountains, sleepy villages and undiscovered hamlets.

Years ago, Jodi Venner traveled to the pretty Alpine village of St Martin. There she fell in love with the local ski instructor and carpenter Herbi Bliem. They married, had two children and are now building what will be Austria’s first energy self-sufficient eco-holiday resort, (more…)