Abstract
Elaine Forde presents us with an ethnographic account of living off-grid. The book examines the policy context which emerged in Wales both to legitimise and in some regards to facilitate the formation of off-grid eco-villages and households. This research on the phenomenon of eco-villages has an innovative perspective that departs from the classical anthropological studies in at least two ways. The author does not carry out an ethnography on an eco-village or an isolated community in, for example, Papua New Guinea, but instead presents an ethnography of the back-to-the-land movement and the creation of eco-villages in Wales, the first industrialised nation in history according to the author, and therefore the nation that sooner embraced capitalist modernity. The other innovative idea is to study the eco-village as an off-grid community, something that goes far beyond technical grids. For the author, ‘off-grid’ describes a structural and infrastructural disconnection from the material, political and symbolic grids of social life.
This ethnographic account is based on a comparison between two off-grid eco-villages, Mynydd and Tir y Gafel, located in West Wales, a region ‘considered to be culturally and linguistically distinct with a high proportion of first-language Welsh-speakers compared to other regions of Wales’ (p. 35). Through this comparison, the author shows how the practice of living off-grid both answers the challenges associated with energy transition and confronts the political economy of the state. One of the key arguments that this book makes is that living off-grid in rural Wales is a socio-technical assemblage. Thus, the two eco-villages are both examples of ‘off-grid’ communities from different points of view. Mynydd and Tir y Gafel share a consensual approach to living off-grid respectively, but in Y Mynydd the motto was ‘as part of nature’, while at Tir y Gafel the requirement was ‘low-impact’ and heavily influenced by permaculture.
However, this book does not focus only on analyzing the history and peculiarities of two ‘off-grid’ communities. Rather it delves into the discussion of some problematic and contradictory aspects when building and living in these communities, starting with their own notion of community or the role played by external volunteers. Another interesting focus is on their material needs: water supply, wastewater management, building materials and of course energy supply. It is not about offering an idyllic portrait of life in an eco-village or the advantages of living an off-grid life, but an analysis about the challenges that this implies in the daily routine of its inhabitants, and the contradictions that this way of life generates in the Welsh government, despite its zero-carbon One Planet Development policy framework.
To summarise, Living off-grid in Wales analyses the creation of ‘a new off-grid rurality which is produced largely in part by technical know-how, whether it be how to harness renewable energy, how to build without embodied carbon or how to argue for a planning appeal’ (p. 107). Off-grid living means for Forde not a policy solution or a spatio-temporal fix, but rather a radical and hybrid social assemblage in which, for instance, a dwelling in an eco-village can be ‘on’ the power grid and at the same time ‘off’ the bureaucratic grid or vice versa. This book can therefore be inspiring both for scholars studying back-to-the-land movements or a broad audience interested in eco-villages and alternative lifestyles in the context of emerging urban crises due to the COVID-19 pandemic.