“My life here is connected to something real. Before, I didn’t really get that the elements were real things…”
“We’d all rather look at the stars at night than go to Starbucks”
The above statements came from a woman I stayed with over the summer whilst I was carrying out ethnographic research, on an off-grid island in western Canada. She was one of many homesteaders on the island who were pursuing – gently and quietly – a more frugal and self-sufficient way of life. I say gently and quietly, because the community was far from a cohesive, politicised, banner-waving movement; many residents had not necessarily chosen life there in order to be more sustainable. The interesting this was, residents had chosen the lifestyle nonetheless.
My role as a researcher was not to critique exactly how sustainable their lives are – whilst the island is off-grid (hence power derived from micro-renewable sources), fossil fuels were still used for cars, boat engines and chainsaws. Similarly, community members were quick to scrutinise ‘self-sufficiency’ as neither possible nor glamorous, but instead a romantic and mis-used, rather tokenistic phrase today. The ethic of self-sufficiency however, did prevail. To be as responsible and deeply involved as possible in the production and maintenance of one’s own products and systems necessary for survival – food, water, power, medicines. As a researcher, I decided instead to travel around the island and simply converse with residents, explore their philosophies and worldviews and reasons for choosing to live such an inconvenient way of life. Why, in an age of electrical grids, clean running water, superstores and Amazon Prime, would one choose to live off the grid?
At this point in human history, we are more disconnected from the products we consume and throwaway than ever before. The Enlightenment era, the development of science, the Industrial Revolution – with their concomitant propaganda of ‘progress’ and ‘freedom’ from the caprices of nature – did many wonderful things. In the tiniest blip of history, we’ve been thrown into a vastly urbanised, complex, high-speed, electric, globally interconnected system. ‘High Mass Consumption’, the (apparent) ultimate goal of human society as projected by economist W.W Rostow, has by far been reached in most of the West.
Industrialisation required a fundamental shift in our relationship with the natural world. Whilst many people were living as tenant farmers prior to the 17th century, working the land to produce their own subsistence, the following century saw the largely forced transformation of subsistence farmers into wage-labourers, transferred to factories to earn a salary. The commons (communal land shared by communities as a space for cultivation) were enclosed, privatised and fenced off. For the majority of individuals, the products needed for survival – such as food – would then be purchased, within a capitalist, market-driven system, rather than grown by hand. In Marxist terms, this labour is ‘alienated’. We do not produce what we consume, and we do not consume what we produce.
This history is important to contextualise our current situation. One could of course go even further back in time, to hunter-gatherers. I by no means intend to romanticise past societies – we’ve moved on, and the world is an unrecognisably different place. My time on the island also taught me the immensely time-consuming, physically demanding realities of living even slightly more ‘off the land’… not always a picturesque countryside ideal. However, there are values that can be carried forward, small acts that can reconnect us to what we consume even today, in our busy city lives. Many people had chosen to live on the off-grid island to find peace, be closer to nature and escape the regimented 9-5 agenda. Once settled, the tasks of building, sourcing water, gardening and maintaining energy systems would take up much time. Yet, the most important message I took from my research – a statement which came up again and again – was the deep sense of connection people felt with themselves, their community and the earth below their feet, and the fulfilment derived from using one’s hands as much as possible. The sentiment ‘make do or do without’ was central.
We can’t all own enough land to grow vegetables and keep chickens, we don’t all have the initial capital necessary to purchase solar panels. We can, however, question what and how much we consume. Behaviour on the island was mediated by natural cycles and fluctuations. Cloudy days meant using less electricity, but to many people this did not represent compromise or frustration, but instead felt ‘real’ and made them grateful. It is hard for us, connected to various grids with light switches and running taps, to get a sense of where anything is coming from. Fossil-fuel energy is the least renewable of all, yet we are able to use it as if it were limitless. Similarly, buying stuff online with next-day delivery, or plucked from the shelves of endless choice in Sainsbury’s, we struggle to understand the life of the product – the labour, energy, water, ecology needed for it to exist.
We don’t all have the skills or time to fish and sew and build and preserve foods. But this is where community is essential. The residents on the off-grid island would never be able to manage without having fostered such a strong community. Sharing resources, knowledges and spaces make physically and mentally challenging tasks easier, and hugely enjoyable. Creating common spaces where we can learn these skills together, and bit by bit become more responsible for what we consume, is more urgent than ever.
Tesni Clare
DISCLAIMER: THE VIEWS EXPRESSED IN THIS ARTICLE ARE THOSE OF THE AUTHOR ONLY AND DO NOT REPRESENT THE VIEWS OR OPINIONS OF COMPASS MAGAZINE AS A WHOLE OR THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE DEPARTMENT OF GEOGRAPHY.