Thank you for visiting Evergreen Off-Grid! We’re here to teach you to take your resource security into your own hands. Whether you live in a bustling city or a remote hamlet modern conveniences are available to us all. We flip light switches and expect light. We turn on a faucet and expect purified water, tempered to perfection. We’ve come to expect our internet and electronics to work instantaneously and flawlessly… and get angry when they don’t.
Well what if your power grid went down? What if the water in your tap was contaminated? Or simply stopped flowing? Think it couldn’t happen to you? The fact is these situations happen all over the country, all the time. And thanks to climate change we can expect to experience worse going forward.
Hurricanes, Wild Fires & Heat Waves, Oh my!
In 2018 I spent a month working near Aguadilla, Puerto Rico in the wake of Hurricane Maria. When I arrived on the island five months had passed since the second of two devastating hurricanes leveled the Caribbean Island. If there was a front line in humanity’s battle with the climate this was it. The power grid was destroyed and five months later we were there, still piecing it together.
In all my life I’ve never looked up so frequently. I’ve never paid much attention to the web of powerlines above that are so ubiquitous. It’s a canopy of human creation, ugly in it’s unnaturalness. These days I never look at power cables entering homes the same way.
Despite months of living in electrical darkness the faces of the people lit up with an unforgettable look of joy when their electrical meters started spinning again. This experience opened my eyes. While the resilience of the people I met in Puerto Rico was beyond admirable, it was hard not to wonder how I would fare in a similar situation. It made me wonder how my community would fare. I fear our dependence on delivered necessities could become our tragic undoing.
Hurricanes are becoming more frequent and more intense. Wildfires are consuming larger swaths of the Western United States every year. Unprecedented heat waves are swamping power grids everywhere. I can go on and on. Our problems do.
Evolve
Securing critical resources for your family is just the start. The strategies we will learn about simply make sense. Progress means continuously reevaluating the status quo and finding ways to evolve. It means finding ways to improve on broken systems.
For example, why do we use massive amounts of power to purify, pressurize and pump water into every home and business and then poop in it? Perhaps we should repurpose water from our sinks or bath drains to poop in? Rather than moving water around the city, why not collect water where it lands and use it at that point? There is definitely some room for improvement.
Humanity has made incredible gains, but we aren’t done. Solar power was once laughably expensive. By some estimates it’s now cheaper per watt than fossil fuel. Our tool box is becoming much more respectable and our knowledge base more expansive.
Take Control
We have a conundrum. Power is awesome! The miracles made possible through modern technology require power. But the more eggs we put in the electric basket the more dependent we become. If we depend on power for survival and we don’t know how to generate power then we do not have agency over our survival. I don’t know how that makes you feel, but it makes me feel vulnerable. So what can we do?
We can go back to the Stone Age. We can move away from civilization and return to a hunting and gathering lifestyle. While it sounds romantic I don’t recommend it. Our environment’s ability to support very many hunter gatherers these days isn’t promising. Scale seems out of the question. I’m not sure how many earths it would take to support 7+ billion hunter gatherers but I bet it’s a lot.
So the Stone Age is out… What else can we do? Let’s just start with not letting the lights go out. Generate your own power and store it. Don’t leave your water security to chance, collect and purify it yourself. At evergreenoffgrid.com we’re here to teach you how.
With the ongoing climate crisis, energy and water security problems are baked into the cake. Everyone needs to do their part if we’re going to prevent worst case scenarios. There’s synergy in what were doing. Preparing for energy and water scarcity in the ways we’ll discuss on this website is not only good for self preservation but they’re also good for the preservation of our planet.
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Reach Out!
We want to hear from you! Seriously, we do… What topics are you interested in learning about? Would you like to see any features added to this site? Do you have any suggestions on how we can make this site more useful for you?
Thanks again for visiting Evergreen Off-Grid! We look forward to hearing from you! info@evergreenoffgrid.com
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