Journalist and filmmaker Nick Rosen has traveled around the US documenting off-grid pioneers. He believes they are the "foot soldiers of the environmental revolution" that is slowly creeping into the mainstream as even Morgan Stanley has realized that Tesla's off-grid batteries could seriously alter the electricity industry by enabling an even larger number of people to unplug. Below is a just-released trailer for his upcoming documentary:
After the success of his 2008 book about the UK off-grid scene, which gives a rounded view of the motivations and methods of people already off-grid, Rosen created a web site for aspiring off-griders to connect with one another; a sort of FB for survivalists. One of the tools contained on the website is the LandBuddy map which shows you where other people are planning to build so you can join in.
During research for his 2010 book, Off The Grid, Rosen visited "outcasts, billionaires; the foreclosed and the forgotten" in the US to find out why so many people are going off-grid at the same time. His trip took him from Colorado to New Mexico to Maine to North Carolina to Texas and beyond. Rosen claims to be on the heels of the "next big thing" and he may be right; off-grid living brings autonomy, control and a sense of freedom that you can never have with those monthly utility, rent and mortgage payments weighing you down. Whereas with off-grid living, all those fees can be reuduced to a fraction of the cost if not zero.
His video notes from that trip are the cornerstones of his documentary, but he's looking for folks who are in the process of moving off-grid to document their transition. Contact nick@off-grid.net if you're making the move. With growing media interest in the Internet-of-Things, it would seem that the grid is slowly encrouching on our personal lives so perhaps going off it can also free us from the data warehouse we are all becoming merchandise in. Hopefully Rosen is right and this is just the beginning of major turning point in post-consumerist society, all we need now is an off-grid Internet to truly free us from the "mental" grid of Google, FB, and Amazon!
