Eden Richards

People

New TV formats to exploit off-grid interest

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.

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People

New Lives in the Wild – TV series

glasheenAt 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?

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People

Daryl Hannah tells Abu Dhabi about going off the grid

daryl hannahThe 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?)

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Community

“Happy People: A Year in the Taiga” by Werner Herzog

Riveting watch as the film’s main subject uses a hatchet to carve himself a pair of skis from a log

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Community

Mountain Men – TV’s usual trashy take on off-grid living

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.

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Mobile

Dr No-ah and his $1m ark

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.

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Green homes can help solve the housing crisis

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

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People

Lucas Foglia pics

“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.

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People

Jewel spurns Discovery

Platinum chanteuse Jewel Kilcher will have “nothing to do” with new Discovery series about life off the grid

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Send us your videos of off-grid life

Its real easy using our built-in uploader to send video of any length – lets see what you did for off-grid Xmas

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Land

Sold my Life, Bought an Island

off the coast of Bocas del Toro, in north-west Panama, he is now master of his own Universe

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People

Top Gear presenter says living off-grid can make you happy

Multi-millionaire TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson has said that anyone living off the grid is likely to have a better life than his own.

In a recent newspaper column he describes his move to an unfurnished flat in Central London and says that someone living in a barn and feeding off “what you could find in a hedge” would be better off than him.

In his column, Top Gear presenter Clarkson, 50, reveals  he has been thinking of doing without the modern conveniences of living.  “In recent times, I have become so fed up with everything I own that I started to think seriously about what life would be like without any of it,” he said.

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