Off-the-Grid Sustainability Lies About Green Living
When one looks at movements toward more sustainable living through the use of “green” solutions, there are two general camps. Not necessarily opposed to one another, the two groups are those who advocate “off-the-grid” solutions and those who support more collective living (let’s call them the “tighter-grid” camp). The Off-the-Grid camp favors back-to-the-earth solutions, including growing crops without fertilizer, raising animals in “free range” environments, using natural fibers, and a close integration with nature. The Tighter-Grid camp favors life in large cities, where people live in close proximity in apartments, the use of public transportation, and generally shun the “country life.” It should be obvious that there are overlaps between these two groups, but in terms of philosophy, their approaches to sustainable living could not be more different, and thus it makes sense to contrast the two.
The problem with these two camps is that one is currently winning the sustainability debate in the media, while also failing in many sustainable living tenets, and that’s the Off-the-Gridders. When news reports talk about sustainable living, the prototypical focus is on a family living on their own hobby farm, raising chickens, planting a large vegetable garden, and wearing flannel. Perhaps they have a furnace powered in part by animal waste or a wood burning stove around which they gather each cold winter evening. This is presented as an ideal for sustainable living.
But these media reports ignore the fact that this type of living is fundamentally unsustainable. First, these individuals living off-the-grid have not removed themselves from society. Instead, they must use a lot of energy to get to society: busses must pick up and drop off their kids for school, they have to drive to work each day, and shopping is miles away. Even if their workplaces, stores, and schools are in small towns not too far away, these towns also represent unsustainable living, where most goods must be trucked in regularly.
The Tighter-Gridders are living a vastly more sustainable lifestyle. Small apartments are much easier to heat and cool than houses. Work and school are easy to walk to, and public transportation is widely available. Shopping is conveniently located, and a mass concentration of people means more goods can be transported together, allowing less distance overall. In terms of efficiency, the modern metropolis is vastly superior to small town or country life.
These benefits are not regularly recognized, however. Even academic departments supposedly focused on “green living” miss this distinction. Consider, for example, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. This article of theirs discusses how faculty and students of this institution are practicing sustainable living, but it glorifies the Off-the-Gridders. Dr. Jean Bahr, a professor of geosciences and environmental studies, is celebrated because she installed solar panels on the roof of her house and replaced incandescent bulbs with fluorescents. That Dr. Bahr lives in a house, rather than in a more sustainable apartment or condo is not mentioned. Student Sunny Nguyen is celebrated because he “tries to eat as little beef as possible.” The fact that vegetarians somehow manage to eat no beef at all (imagine that!) goes unmentioned.
The worst offender celebrated in the article is Nelson Institute Interim Director Gregg Mitman and his “green cabin” located 50 miles outside of Madison. His 600 foot cabin serves as his family’s “summer getaway” and was built to be “sustainable.” How building a cabin on some land is more sustainable than simply leaving the land undeveloped is not explained. Dr. Mitman can surely recognize that owning two homes is less sustainable than owning one, and that owning a condo is more sustainable than owning any homes at all. But the article doesn’t bother to mention this.
Why not mention it? Because the Off-the-Gridders aren’t interested in making sacrifices to their preferred lifestyle. They act as the Romantics did, celebrating the pastoral life of shepherds. Living in a city is contrary to these dreams, and even though it is more sustainable, city life is shunned in favor of DIY green solutions. Off-the-grid lifestyles are thus more interested in consumerism than anything else. “Going green” opens up a whole new realm of purchases to make, money to spend, and work to do, offering tangible benefits and pleasures. Moving into a small apartment in the middle of a busy city, even though such a move would be highly sustainable, has no such intrinsic pleasure associated with it.
Even worse, the Off-the-Gridders have no interest in producing solutions for world hunger or overpopulation. Commercial agriculture has revolutionized food production and made it possible for many people to get enough food to eat. In cases of mass hunger, the main issue is moving food to the right places at the right times, not an overall world food shortage. The solution to this problem is not to encourage people to grow their own food or shop at farmer’s markets. The solution is to find ways to encourage commercial agriculture techniques around the world. High yield farming is the best way to feed people, and city living is uniquely designed to support high yield farming. It gets people to stop living on arable land and allows for easy distribution of food. This is recognized in the Tighter-Grid camp and woefully, even damnably, ignored by the Off-the-Gridders.
Though the Nelson Institute titles their article “Practicing what we teach,” the examples do everything but. No person can reasonably claim that sustainable living starts by all people building 600 square foot cabins in the wilderness. This model of life is impossible to sustain and would result in massive loss of life the world over. From a Kantian perspective, if the efforts of Dr. Mitman cannot be practiced by all, they are unethical. Ethics and morals demand that the Nelson Institute stop encouraging off-the-grid lifestyles. The sustainability of the planet depends on it.
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January 26th, 2012 16:59
Check out this blog:
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/kbenfield/
Kaid Benfield often posts about urban sustainability.
January 26th, 2012 17:14
Thanks for the link, Ken!
February 13th, 2012 06:22
This is excellent. I’ve done it both ways, several times, and I’m now inclined to look for a small domicile in a downtown area, although that’s partly because at age 62 I can no longer swing my axe to chop down 40 acres before breakfast. A further point, though: according to careful figures I kept for 7 years, it costs about $1,500 a month to go”back to the land” even with no debts for the house or car, but it’s only about half that much to live in the city. Those two costs reflect the “sustainability” figures you mention. (Also see the several hundred articles I’ve posted over the years.)