The Independent Home: Living Well With Power from the Sun, Wind, and Water (A Real Goods Independent Living Book)

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Summary: A bedtime book not a build it yourself guide.
Review: I found this book very disappointing. I was looking for more of a "How-To" book which would provide answers and ideas for a mountain cabin. Instead I found it to contain warm hearted informtion in the form of short stories. At a minimum this books title should be modified to "The Independant Home - Good Hearted American Stories of Living Well with Power from the Sun, Wind, and Water.

Rating:
Summary: Return of the Pioneers
Review: Michael Potts traveled the country to interview the new pioneers who are generating their own power. He wound up with a book that is not so much a technical manual as an introduction to the many subjects that pertain to making an independent home: choosing a site and materials, power generation (photovoltaics, wind turbines, hybrid systems), storage batteries, inverters and control panels; appliances, maintenance and repair, gardening and waste disposal.

Independent living is, in short, a great opportunity for anyone compulsive about details, control, and doing it yourself. It is an opportunity to be a settler, and regain some independence, but with the benefit of today's technology.

It would be easy to dismiss the new pioneers as hippies. But at this point in our history, with mounting evidence about the dangers of relying on oil, the subject of renewable energy has become much more conventional. Far from Luddites, these people retain their high-tech habits and possessions, such as computers, TVs, stereos, cars, and air conditioners. But because they produce their own power, they are much more careful with it. Many of them are engineers. Nearly all of them have engineer's habits in their endless tinkering and tweaking, their love of gadgetry, and their search for the next technological improvement. I particularly enjoyed the brief interviews with some of the movement's leading lights: Amory Lovins at the Rocky Mountain Institute; Karen and Richard Perez, the publishers of Home Power Magazine; and Paul Gipe, an owner of wind farms.

As Russell Kirk wrote, nothing is more conservative than conservation, so there is much here that ought to warm the conservative heart: family, localism, community, smallness, decentralization, independence, self-reliance, responsibility, resourcefulness, craftsmanship, and stewardship. The sort of lives that these people live are much more in tune with the local, decentralized United States outlined in the Constitution and The Federalist, the sort of country which existed before the Wilsonian fascism of 1914. By contrast, it was Marx who used the phrase "the idiocy of rural life" and who praised the breakup of traditional communities. The bureaucratic, multinational corporations of our time are much more socialistic in outlook and behavior, contemptuous of roots and continuity, dependent on government money, federal favors, and centralization of power.

This was my first venture into the field of independent home-building, and I had only a few reservations: some predictable left-wing cliches and cheerleading, lapses in organization, blurring of Potts' interviews with his own comments, and a loss of focus perhaps due to the ambitious attempt to write a "whole guide" to home-building rather than a modest introduction to a vast subject. When the book remains modest, it succeeds. It should fire up the pioneers among us.

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Summary: Preaching To The Choir
Review: When I ordered this book I thought it was a collection of stories gathered from people who have moved off the grid with some techniques and practices thrown in. Instead what I've found is that it preaches to the choir.

The emphasis is on explaining how we waste energy through our daily on-the-grid lives and what doing so costs in "real" terms of "dead dinosaurs" turned crude oil deposits. If I'm buying this book then it's assumed I already have some concern for the environment and my energy usage, that I already want to "get off the oil" addiction my nation has. Why propound it over and over and over in this book. Why preach environmentalism in a book bought by environmentalists? Why not give them the info they need and the courage to do it through depicting others who've done it already?

There are some stories of how others have gotten off the grid but they are short and don't really go into any of the problems one may encounter or how they can be overcome.

A disappointing book that so easily could have been much much better.