I had the pleasure of reading My Side of the Mountain this past fall for an introductory science education class, and I fell in love with the world that Sam creates in the Catskill Mountains.

Sam Gribley, the thirteen year old hero, decides to run away from his cramped home in New York where he lives with eight siblings. He runs away to live a different life on land that his Great Grandfather Gribley owned in the Catskill Mountains 100 years prior.  Sam’s tenacity to make a life in the wilderness despite snickers and jests from adults is what is so attractive. Sam doesn’t let any bit of doubt or cynicism from others stop him. He figures out how to live off the land from prior knowledge, library research, from carefully observing animals and plants, and from friends along the way. 

Read more...

Fifteen years ago, Nick Rosen wanted to buy a little holiday home, and the most affordable option was a little shepherd’s hut up in the mountains.

“I found it was a really good way of life,” he told me in an interview last month, “that allowed me to unplug from the system and develop myself rather than worrying about work. I found something which had all sorts of benefits and seemingly no negatives. It’s cheap or free, it’s good for the environment, and it’s good for my soul. And for all those reasons, I want to recommend it to other people.”

I found Nick’s story fascinating. A journalist, former professor, and long-time environmental campaigner, he now fills his days talking to people about living off-grid and providing them with the real support and information they need to make it work, via his website, Off-grid.net and a guidebook he has written, How to Live Off-Grid.

“This idea that you could wake up in a little cabin, light a few candles, light the woodburning stove, go out and chop some wood, seems like some sort of romantic dream that if you actually had to do it, up close, would be cold and full of spiders. But in fact when you get there, it really is just as romantic as the dream.”

My only experience with off-grid living was a week spent with a friend at a cabin in the West Virginia mountains. Each morning I’d wake up and get the woodburning stove going, trek up the hill to the pump to get water, and come back down to make coffee and fry eggs for our breakfast. Afternoons were filled with writing and reading, evenings with guitar playing and conversation and oil lamps. I found it incredibly satisfying.

Of course, chopping wood and carrying water are slower than stopping at Starbucks, and when you have to be on the subway at 8:30 am, not very practical. But what if your expenses were low enough that you could support yourself without going to work?

Going off-grid doesn’t appeal to everyone, but it certainly does to me. And there are benefits beyond simple enjoyment of being intimately involved in the details of taking care of one’s own needs.

“I’m not trying to argue that this is for everybody, and I’m not trying to tell everyone in America that they should go off-grid. But I am trying to say that it would be very good for the country if a few million households were off the grid. It would be good in terms of helping the environment, reducing energy consumption, reducing water consumption,” Nick says.

“And there’s also another important reason which is resilience. Everyone’s talking about energy security at the moment, the price of gas is going up, there’s food rationing just beginning with rice at least in America, and the idea that there could be a few million people who were self-sufficient for energy and possibly for food as well actually would make the country as a whole stronger. So there are actually good national reasons why it’s a good idea to go off-grid.”

Nick’s thoughts on going off-grid struck me as pragmatic as well as profound. As the world gets more top-heavy with bureaucracy, his tactic of working to change laws so that people can more easily take their destinies and livelihoods into their own hands makes a great deal of sense.

I also appreciated his language, filled with words like “possibility” and “decentralization” and “community.” You’ll notice he doesn’t talk about hunkering down in a bunker and waiting for the apocalypse. The model he presents—households working together in community to share resources, challenges, and information—is nothing less than the 21st century update of the pioneer concept.

Have a listen to my interview with him and check out his amazingly informative website and let us know what you think. Could you go off the grid? Why or why not? I think I could, but not in Brooklyn. :)

This is an interview conducted over the phone with Jane Riddford, who is the founder of Global Generation, a London-based charity. I have known and been friends with Jane since 2004 when we were both students of Andrew Cohen, a modern day spiritual teacher. At the time I knew what she was doing was cool, but I didn’t realize that it is really the future of humanity—a global world, with global citizens, each with something worth living for, working together. So a few years on, I thought it would make perfect sense to do a interview with her for the Sunny Way as we share this same desire.

The focus of Global Generation is helping kids, teenagers, and young people to understand that nature is a part of who they already are. For many of these kids growing up in London, nature is almost completely alien to them, and just reconnecting helped them have a deeper connection to themselves and what it really means to be human today.

From there the program links ecology in to society using practical experiences. The kids plant, grow, spend time in the countryside, green up city buildings, and work to bring nature back into the city. All of this brings them a hands-on knowledge of the interconnection of our urban and rural landscapes, as well as a grounded understanding of their place as part of the whole.

Global Generation itself represents the next generation of organization, always changing, reconfiguring and working out what works now, not what worked last month. Jane told me its ultimate objective is to not exist anymore because then everyone will be living and expressing it! To some that may sound idealistic but to me it sounds like an objective worthy of truly inspiring the next generation of emerging adults.

The Sunny Way would like to say Go Jane!

Following are some quotes to whet your appetite. You can download the entire interview here, and click on through to the Global Generation website for more information.

“The biggest thing was these different groups of kids all being together, there were all these activities we do but for me when they suddenly they stop and go ‘oh wow its really quiet here’, or seeing the sun go down, which is like watching the earth turn. The most important thing is getting a bigger view, and that it is cool to care, care for oneself, care for each other and care for the planet.”

“By degrees we evolved the concept of living roofs into a living building, the idea of bringing life into a office building, and having kids to do that. Then we started to notice bringing kids into a business environment. What they started to realize was this wasn’t school this was real life. Also having kids in the environment, we got people working in the building it brought out a sense of responsibility in them and animated some kind of consciousness in the whole situation.”

“We’ve seen rapid change in 6 months, very cynical, very ‘Whatever’ teenage girls ... it was a big shock to them. With no electricity no curling tongs, we had to work really hard, but then somehow by the end of the 4 days we knew a bubble had burst, but we didn’t know where it was gonna lead, and thought we were being very idealistic ... then a week later the most challenging of the group, suddenly the penny dropped and she saw we weren’t asking her to be a tree hugger! It was important to have that experience, she got it and understood her experience, why we had taken them out, and how it translates into a office building in the middle of London, and what businesses are doing, and I remember her suddenly turning to me and saying ‘Jane you’ve got to shout about this! You’ve gotta get the message out!’”