redblueamerica.com

One of the quirks of living in a college town is that you have a higher-than-average number of old hippies who kept clinging to their ideals long after their buddies cut their hair, put on ties and went out to make their fortunes. We had a neighbor across the alleyway, for example, who lived entirely off-grid until his death a few months ago: No electricity. You never saw lights after dark in his house. He spent his days in his back yard, growing spinach -- good spinach -- for a local restaurant and his weekends at the Saturday anti-war protest.

Now, imagine if an entire town did lived that way.

The Center for American Progress reports today on Lake Billy Chinook in Oregon, where  "more than 250 homes have committed to living completely disconnected from the commercial water and power utilities on which most Americans rely."

Three Rivers residents generate most of their power from solar panels on their rooftops or on nearby freestanding structures positioned to more efficiently capture the sun. Some supplement the energy with wind power. The solar energy is enough to power their computers, lights, big-screen TVs, microwaves, and refrigerators.

“Ninety percent of the people here, if (outside) power were offered to them, they’d turn it down,” says Gary Sweet, who moved to the community a few years ago.

Residents have invested in their off-grid community for a variety of reasons. They joke about the peace from sirens and car alarms, the closeness with nature, and the return to American values. By living off the grid, their use of resources is limited to renewable energy, water, and food. They cannot use more than they can produce, and so their carbon footprint is virtually zero. By relying on solar power, they emit no pollution and are immune to energy price hikes. Solar is the most dependable power source available for off-grid living.

Off-grid living gets tagged with the reputation of a Waldenesque anti-social approach to life, but I haven't found that to be the case. My neighbor obviously was a bit on the extreme side -- he had no solar panels, as far as I could tell -- but was a good man who disconnected from the grid not because he was anti-social, but because he thought it benefitted the community by resisting the consumption of resources and attendant climate change. In my experience, that's often the case. And that attitude it might just help all of us.