I am the child of hippies. I have spent a fair bit of time in country places with solar panels and generators, composting toilets (or outhouses), water tanks and hoses and gardens, self-built homes and hacked pick-up trucks and home-made furniture. I was even born into a group of people who have owned and cared for and tried to restore a big piece of land in rural Northern California since the early 1970s; it’s a place I love deeply. I harbor the occasional fantasy about running off to that land to live. In some ways, I expect that I’m a perfect target reader for Nick Rosen’s new book, Off the Grid.

The story Rosen tells in Off the Grid is an old one, and a quintessentially North American one, that of the noble soul stepping away from the entanglements of modern life, going back to the land and getting off-the-grid. By ‘the grid’ here — and it almost begs ominous capitalization, The Grid — we are of course meant to understand not just wires and pipes, but also the corporations and wealthy men who control them, and the demands they place on us of conformity and servile obedience. In other words, one of the main problems with The Grid is that it’s owned by the The Man. Therefore, getting away from connection to The Grid is a primary step towards freedom (indeed, the tagline for Rosen’s site about off-grid living is “free yourself”). If you already got that idea, say, because your parents belonged to co-ops and left copies of the old Whole Earth Catalogs lying around the house, there’s not much to learn at that level from Rosen’s book.

That said, if you are planning to one day go back to the land yourself, you’ll probably love his book. It’s full of great anecdotes and characters, and the author clearly admires and gets the back-to-the-landers he writes about. Rosen also does a good job of explaining the political fights still facing those who want to make their own homes, produce their own energy and live their own way; and he does a fairly good job of sampling the current thinking about how best to live the off-the-grid life.

What I was hoping for, though, was something he definitely doesn’t offer, which is a glimpse of what a truly sustainable rural North American life might be like. If going back to the land is anything other than escapism, it has to be part of a larger movement to heal the country and the backcountry. For, right now, the state of rural North America is not sound. As I wrote earlier:

Rural North America is in sad shape. Rural poverty is perhaps even more startling than urban poverty these days, and the lack of jobs, education, health and financial resources is much more pronounced in rural areas. Virtually every measurement of human well-being is worse in rural counties (at least working rural counties, rather than rural suburbs) than in urban counties. Already, huge swathes of rural America are green and leafy ghettos, complete with welfare dependencies and drug addictions.

If managing in a catastrophe were just about growing your own food, many (but not all) rural people would probably be just fine. If it were about repairing your machines, maintaining your roof, keeping the well running, a good many rural people would be okay. But there’s a lot more than that involved in running the kind of society we all demand, things like public health systems, communications systems, transportation infrastructure, energy supplies, banking and finance, good governance innovations, an effective legal system, etc. Places with these systems do a heck of a lot better than places without them, and these are systems many communities are in a poor position to provide for themselves. In much of rural America, those systems aren’t even working very well today.

Going off-the-grid in rural areas needs to be, if it has any worldchanging aspirations, a part of improving that situation. That means, it needs to be based in thoughts about how it can help address systemic problems, especially in the United States where rural areas seem to suffer from a few major structural problems that make them less resilient than they deserve to be, and far less sustainable than some of us would like to think. Here are five examples of some of those major challenges in need of systemic solutions:

The first is that most rural areas have been run as resource colonies for most of their histories. An outside source of capital — the railroad, the coal company, the timber company, the Feds — came in and established the core infrastructure for the provision of a needed resource (corn, coal, boards, hydropower, whatever) to a distant urban market. The people who live in these resource colonies generally have little ownership and less control over either the resources or the infrastructure for delivering them to market. Generally, the result has been the economic necessity of exploiting those resources in unsustainable ways, weather it’s blowing up mountains to get at the coal beneath or strip-mining topsoil to maximize crop yields. The way most of rural North America runs right now is flatly unsustainable.

The second is that rural people and places are poor. That, in turn, means they lack capital. With the destruction of America’s small town banks and thrifts (you may remember the savings and loan crisis, the last big financial looting spree?), even the capital that had been accumulated was stolen away. It’s very hard to make significant changes without capital, and most of the countryside has no access to it: indeed, much of small town and farm America is leveraged up to its neck, contributing to the on-going farm crisis.

The third is that country life is massively subsidized. The roads, levies, water supplies and railroads that make rural life possible in North America are almost all tax-payer supported (indeed, there is a net outflow of tax dollars from urban areas to rural areas in both the U.S. and Canada). Of course, most of those subsidies have been set up to benefit the kinds of resource extraction efforts mentioned above — but rural life would become very much more difficult in many places if those subsidies were removed. Long expensive supply lines make places vulnerable in chaotic economic times.

The fourth is that much of the heartland of the United States and Canada seems particularly vulnerable to climate change and other environmental disruptions. Weather extremes, including prolonged heat waves and droughts, are predicted by some scientists to be at their worst in the Southwest and Great Plains. Climate shifts are already causing havoc with pollinators, leading to outbreaks of invasive species, devastating forests with pests, worsening floods and storms, and generally messing with the fundaments upon whose stability many communities are built. Already, the Southwest is essentially out of water, for instance.

The fifth is that rural life is extremely energy intense, especially in terms of oil, and we know that oil in particular, and energy in general, are about to get a lot more expensive. Here we need to acknowledge a side trend, which is exurban living in rural places. A significant number of people living in rural areas are living essentially suburban lives in a rural setting. They are not providing for most of their own needs; rather they’re just depending on very long supply lines to live consumer lives with prettier views (hence the joke “When you move out to the country you move into a car”). These lives in particular are the most vulnerable and least sustainable, yet also, paradoxically the most needed in many communities, since it’s these exurban residents who often bring needed professional and technical skills and capital back to rural areas (I read not too long ago about the trend of semi-retired doctors opening clinics in small towns, often providing people’s only access to primary care).

So, set up as resource colonies, poor, tax-subsidized, vulnerable to climate change and peak oil: what’s a rural community to do?

That’s a question I’d really like to hear smart, non-nostalgic answers to. It’s a question I hoped to find some answers to in Rosen’s book.

Unfortunately, it becomes clear by the end of Off the Grid that Rosen doesn’t actually really understand the problems facing rural North America, and has a fuzzy, romantic notion of what problems going off-the-grid actually solves. For instance, he is clearly not aware of the last decade or so of sustainability research:

“I’m not convinced that big, dense cities are greener than… lower-density towns and suburbs, where the bulk of Americans live. …Vast amounts of gas are used to bring in food from around the country, and the same buses and trains that liberate commuters from their cars are still energy intensive and polluting.”

There’s more, but really, this is enough to show that Rosen simply hasn’t done his homework well enough to understand the systems he’s chosen to comment on. Because we know that big, dense cities are greener; that the energy used in shipping food is a small portion of its overall impact, that transit is more energy efficient than driving (and indeed, that cars are the largest contributor to climate change), and that the benefits of urban living in compact, walkable, wired communities can extend far beyond living in smaller homes, served by more efficient infrastructure and not owning a car, to include a dramatic overall drop in one’s environmental impact. What’s more, we know why these things are so (if you need a refresher, there are literally hundreds of other articles on the subject on this site).

Understanding why bright green urban living currently offers the best pathway to sustainable prosperity is a necessary precursor to beginning to imagine what its rural counterpart might look like. We simply know more about how to live a prosperous-yet-low-impact urban life than we do about how to live a rural life of equal prosperity with a small ecological footprint. It’s counter-intuitive, but true. If we assume that a family wants a North American middle-class level of comfort, consumer affluence, access to services and interaction with others, it’s currently much easier to provide them sustainably in an urban setting than any other. We have so far failed to imagine sustainable prosperity in a rural setting.

I can imagine cities that are intimately and equitably connected to not just their municipal watersheds, but their foodsheds and fibersheds as well. Cities which regarded themselves as part of an urban-rural fabric, and regarded the country people with whom they were enmeshed as partners in a way of life, instead of just mostly invisible poor people who grew their food and cut their trees. Some people bringing cultural interpenetration to that system — essentially urban people living off-the-grid in the country; essentially rural people bringing some agriculture and forestry into the cities — might really help strengthen those connections (indeed, at the moment, they’re basically the only people keeping those connections alive).

I’d really like to read a smart book about how those connections might be grown and strengthened and made more resilient in the face of the kind of dramatic changes unfolding around us. I’d really like to read a book about the systems-level innovations we’d need to do that: policies, financial models, new designs, etc. I’d really like to read a book about how it might feel to live in a world where city and countryside felt themselves to be part of the same fabric, with mutual respect and affection.

Unfortunately, I haven’t seen that book yet. We need it.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Food and Farming at 12:30 PM)