Remember from your youth the potheads, the guys who slept in their rust-bucket cars, the women who baked their own bread from scratch and bartered it for used shoes?
They're back.
You can reunite in this quirky, unsettling and fascinating look at 21st-century men and women who have cut the cord to power and water and choose to live, for a variety of reasons, "Off the Grid."
The author, Nick Rosen, is British, a journalist and documentary filmmaker who edits Off-grid.net and lives part-time off the grid on the island of Majorca.
He purports there are half a million Americans living off the grid, at least part-time -- from environmentalists to survivalists, plus the rich, the poor and the angry.
He purports millions more would do so if it weren't so hard to find cheap land, to get building permits and mortgages from leery officialdom, or to plant an old motor home on a lovely bit of land without issues.
Why aren't more of us moving back to the land? "The main requirement is a change of mind-set," Rosen writes. He details how power companies have for a century promoted power-guzzling home appliances to addict us to ease. "Americans are happy and proud to buy and use recycled toilet paper," he writes, "but a composting toilet is another matter, a level most people won't even think about."
This book is your opportunity to not only think about that, but to introduce yourself to the Clivus Multrum, which Rosen calls, "the Hummer of composting toilets, a vast and intricate object."