Living Off-Grid in Wales: Eco-Villages in Policy and Practice

By Elaine Forde

Living Off-Grid in Wales addresses broad debates about the possibility of planning for a sustainable future, by an examination of rural development off the grid. Contrasting Wales’s policy on One Planet Development – a planning policy that encourages living off-grid – with a more DIY approach to living off-grid, the book presents case studies from eco-villages that imagine off-grid very differently. The text pivots on the problematic question that if planning is about the spatial reproduction of society, then why should it encourage autonomy from societal systems. The ethnographic case studies in the book comprise an ethnography of rural Wales, and the focus on eco-villages brings a fresh perspective to the anthropological literature on community by considering off-grid as a radical form of social assemblage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9781786836601

Book preview

For my family, with thanks

Introduction

0.1 Beginnings

The notion of ‘the grid’ is becoming more and more ubiquitous. In everyday interactions and mainstream media portrayals, the idea of the grid is invoked with increasing normativity, although usually with recourse to its counterpart, ‘off the grid’. But when people speak of grid – and off-grid – what exactly do they mean? Central to this book’s argument is the notion of multiple and overlapping grids. The examples that will illustrate this thinking show different approaches to going off-grid, very few of which entail either the complete or simultaneous rejection of all kinds of grid-logic. In spite of this diversity and partiality of approach, the premise of this book is to illustrate and examine, and, it is hoped, go some way towards answering why, how, and why now, we should be seeing an increasing acceptance that there is both a grid and the opportunity to leave it. Since the ethnographic research that is presented later in this book comes from research in rural Wales (UK), it must be stated clearly that the following theorising is only representative of the societies that produced it and to some extent will read it. This book is a product of Welsh society as an ethnography of west Wales eco-villages. But as an ethnography, this is also a discursive product of academia. The political, social and economic conditions for going off-grid in contemporary Wales can hardly be said to be universal, yet it is intended that a more generalising theory of off-grid might emerge from this specific account. This book begins then, by staking its claim to defining what is meant when people speak of the grid.

Grids and the interplay of power, with power

This book puts forward a conceptualisation of multiple grids, which hinge on the notion of ‘power’. This conception contains the literal sense of the power grid, the physical infrastructure that connects people to electricity – the embodiment of grids par excellence. Of course other material infrastructures connect people to utilities such as water and gas, as well as connecting people to other people and places via roads and mass transit systems, and through communication grids. The siting, location and availability of such grids closely overlaps with that other grid (power again), something which is reflected and acknowledged by concepts such as Dominic Boyer’s ‘energopower’ (Boyer, 2014). This other power grid, the socio-economic and institutional network of coercion and possibility that shapes and drives connection to all other grids, is both conceptual and very real. It exerts what are perhaps the most tangible effects of all other grids here outlined, it mediates and coordinates access to grids, and it produces and reproduces infrastructural inequalities.

Going off the grid (or sometimes, simply being off the grid, an idea that contains more complexities) is the rejection of the efficacy, authority and morality of one or other of these grids in favour of autonomy. Off-grid therefore means the autonomous provisioning of everything that grids have promised, and perhaps more. The ethnographic examples given here explore alternatives to exchange: self-reliance from the physical infrastructures that connect us to others, and conceptual and actual autonomy from a pervasive state of governance.

Precursors

This conceptualisation of the grid is not uniquely mine, and as alluded to, there is certainly more than one angle of approach. Anthropologists have long looked for grids; how else to explain a preoccupation with kinship, kinship diagrams and the acquisition of languages, taxonomies and terminologies? Electricity grids have been interpreted by anthropologists as much more than a purely technical arrangement. Howe uses sociobiotic terms to describe grids as conduits for ‘electric social life’ (Howe, 2014). If the grid, as conduit, represents the flow and movement of power, does that imply that off the grid is somehow a point of stasis? The conceptualisation of off-grid that this book takes forward is neither rooted entirely in natural, social or discursive categorisation. I suggest a broader interpretation of ‘off-grid’ which describes a structural and infrastructural disconnection from the material, political and symbolic grids of social life, an analytic tool which acknowledges that in practice many people occupy a liminal space between these polarities of relationship with grids (Forde, 2017). A key way to demonstrate this thinking is with the notion of prosumption, where an energy user is also a producer, and which has seen technological developments such as the pro-energy Solcer House, which can generate more power than its operational needs.¹ Such an infrastructure allows, even demands, the feeding back of energy – in the broadest sense – unlike a grid in which traffic has traditionally only been one-way.

Off-grid as energy metaphor suggests two things. First, that a preoccupation with power (production and consumption) is a material provisioning reality; and also that such a metaphor might conceal important cultural assumptions that this book seeks to address. Autonomy is not productivist, yet such feedback systems do not allow productivism to be overturned. In other words, producing energy to feed back into a grid does not disrupt the material reality of the grid. Under such a system the viability of the grid is not challenged. Yet many acts of off-grid thinking and doing require just that, an upturning of grid-logic. Originating in the technical language and predominance of the grid as power-infrastructure, the grid/off-grid analogy offers far more than a simple reversing of production – and this observation can be extended across all aspects of the grid that have been outlined. Self-provisioning under existing market conditions is not a going off-grid; rather, it reproduces neoliberal values. Self-produced homo economicus will never upturn the financial exchange grid that shapes social and material possibilities for most. Working within the grid in order to go off-grid therefore reproduces a certain compliance. This approach distorts as it reflects the alternative to the logic of the grid that, as will be seen, made the idea of going off-grid so very attractive in the first place. This is precisely the problem which this book hopes to tackle.

What is explored in this book is the idea of going off the grid as it is done from within the system and without, off-grid in policy and in practice. Besides making the perhaps startling assertion that it is possible to go off-grid without effectively leaving the grid – a statement that of course warrants scrutiny – this book also explores the possibility of going off-grid outside these grids, where off-grid is not a policy solution or a spatio-temporal fix, but rather a radical social assemblage.

0.2 The Grid as Possibility in Cultural and Historical Perspective

This section seeks, by situating off-grid both culturally and to some extent historically, to contextualise the ethnographic context examined in this book. The relationship between societies and grids may be viewed as a shifting relationship. By considering when and how this relationship changes, the political and socio-cultural motivations for living off-grid can be made visible.

Going ‘on-grid’

One of the key questions addressed by this book is, what makes ‘off-grid’ a possibility? Why is the practice of going or being off-grid a novelty or somehow interesting? Why isn’t being ‘on-grid’ considered remarkable? Perhaps it is simply the ubiquity of the infrastructures of modernity in centres such as towns and cities throughout the northern hemisphere, and very much of the global south, that has made an alternative state of affairs seem strange by definition. There are social, cultural and historical reasons for that ubiquity which must be explored, and to do so it is useful to turn to the work of James C. Scott.

As Professor of Agrarian Studies, Scott’s task is both enormous and daunting. Most practising agriculturalists throughout history and across the world have not found the time or perhaps inclination to record or represent their histories. We must therefore rely on others’ work, diligent or expedient, to piece together a certain account of facts. In Seeing like a State (1998), Scott unravels this problem with a focus on different – failed – techniques of government, or we might say governance, over mobile or itinerant populations. Scott’s approach can be understood with recourse to three headings: legibility, spatialisation and simplification.

Legibility refers to tools such as census and taxation, systems that help to quantify populations. Spatialisation refers to planning and aligned policies which, by deploying notions such as morality or development, shape societal norms about how people should occupy space. Simplification refers to the overall imperative, which is to make the operation of state functions easier and smoother. In Scott’s examination of sedentarisation, with these factors in place, a population is suddenly made visible by and to the state – such as that might be. The trident that Scott describes contains a number of techniques that will ‘map’ any given population: land tenure, fixed surnames, censuses, standardised weights and measures, and even planned settlements. This sort of mapping system might very well be described as a grid.

As a geographer, Harvey is concerned with how grids (though not in so many words) produce space. Harvey’s (2004) notion of spatio-temporal fixes is interesting here, and provides a framework for understanding more about the benefits of a grid-model of population management. By examining housing market bubbles and their relationship to other markets, and specifically market crashes, Harvey outlines how landscapes are produced by the absorption of excess capital into infrastructure projects. This is achieved largely by the delivery of large grid infrastructures: roads, mass transit, power lines, services, housing, even civic buildings. The socio-technical institutions, such as finance, development and planning which mediate this process are meshed into these grids, which themselves have the capacity to expand or contract in tandem with capital flows. From this perspective, going on-grid has been a neoliberal no-brainer.

Going off-grid

It is possible to trace the off-grid trope historically to a point long before the specific kind of neoliberal economic models that form the object of Harvey’s critique. In understanding the socio-cultural factors that have fuelled this trope, it’s useful to turn back to the notion of poetics. In his 2013 review article, Larkin examines successive waves of research into infrastructures and, alongside systems thinking and technopolitics, considers the poetics of infrastructure. The poetic, in speech, is distinguishable because a poetic speech act releases meanings which transcend the purely referential meaning. Poetics therefore proposes an alternative hierarchy of meanings (Larkin, 2013: 335). In infrastructural thinking, poetics interplays with technological function. Larkin offers pertinent examples, from developing Africa to Soviet Europe, where technical and technological function exist not to deliver the socio-technical in any tangible sense, but rather to affect aesthetic function: a politics of ‘as if’ (Larkin, 2013). Returning to the notion of off-grid, a kind of fascination with living off the grid emerges, almost as a symbolic inversion of the infrastructural poetics that Larkin outlines. The power of poetics off the grid is derived from the complete absence of infrastructure, whether political, poetic or both.

Given the poetic potency of the off-grid trope, it should be no surprise therefore to note that the eighteenth-century Romantic poets Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge planned to found a prototypical off-grid utopian commune, which they dubbed Pantisocracy. Although originally destined for America, Pantisocracy was later planned for Wales before being abandoned altogether. The focus on Wales in this case must have been linked to the emerging travel guides to Wales, such as William Gilpin’s (1782) Observations on the River Wye.

Wales’s industrial history plays a part here too. As the first industrialised nation, large swathes of rural Wales were rapidly abandoned as people settled in the industrialising south and north-east. Indeed, in the coal-mining Valleys, because pastoral farming carried on alongside the collieries, such ‘industrialised’ areas remained largely ‘rural’ in appearance (Brennan, Cooney and Pollins, 1954: 16–17). It therefore makes sense that Wales should be a destination for successive waves of counter-urbanisation. Halfacree picks up this trend from the 1970s, and characterises west Wales in particular as a destination for ‘radical refugees’ to escape the confines of urban life (Halfacree, 2006: 320), by embarking on ‘back-to-the-land’ projects. In the context that this book explores, those people living off-grid were almost always migrants to the region. It is true that some research participants were second- or even third-generation migrants, and were connected to the back-to-the-land movement in its broadest sense, but it is remarkable that this type of green lifestyle migration (Forde, 2019) figures so prominently in research participants’ trajectories. Going off-grid, seen in historical-to-contemporary perspective, therefore becomes in large part a story of migration. Taking a historical view of this practice helps to illustrate that going off-grid is not, and cannot be, simply about whether or not to use energy utilities (c.f. Vannini and Taggart, 2015), something which makes the poetics trope highly relevant.

A comparison with important historical migrations can help to shore up these points. Examples include the history of the Voortrekkers in South Africa. The Voortrekkers are a salient symbol of Afrikaner identity and politics in South Africa and symbolic of Afrikaner nationalism, though Verwey and Quayle (2012) suggest that more recently this symbol is being jettisoned by post-apartheid Afrikaners as a caricature of Afrikaner identity. The Voortrekken migration – the ‘Great Trek’ – was intertwined with the Afrikaner search for autonomy in the face of British encroachment into South Africa in the nineteenth century. Etherington cites the disorganisation in British administration both in South Africa and in London, and dissent through South Africa’s British zone at the time after the Anglo-Xhosa war around 1835, as partly why the trekking movement was able to gather momentum unchecked (Etherington, 2014: 245–6). Further, he characterises the trekking movement as heavily armed both with weaponry and with an innovative system of land tenure which enabled the spatial reproduction of Afrikaner dominance. The later endorsement by the British of this tenure system acted as a precursor to Afrikaner rule and the apartheid system (Etherington, 2014: 243).

A brief examination of the Welsh migration to Patagonia in the mid- to late nineteenth century yields some themes which are comparable to some extent with the Voortrekken. Harris (2015) notes that the industrialisation, urbanisation and Anglicisation of ‘Celtic Britain’ prompted much of the nineteenth-century emigration to the American continent, but that motives for the Welsh migration to Patagonia, Y Wladfa, were complicated by the added factors of Welsh Nonconformism, language politics and the notion that Welsh identity within the United Kingdom was being compromised by an aggressive policy of Anglicisation. Migrants identified the region of Patagonia in Argentina as a preferred destination; not only was it a remote location, but also – and in contrast to North America – it lay outside the formal ‘British’ world.

To call the Y Wladfa region ‘off-grid’ is perhaps to invoke a certain territorialism or neo-colonial discourse; however, that is not intended, not least because the region was of course already home to groups of Tleuche. A lack of infrastructure in Chubut may have signified to the early settlers the complete absence of the state, however. In turn, and akin to the discussion of poetics above, this brings to mind an inverse to Marx’s technological sublime. That is not to say that an absolute off-grid is somehow the un-sublime, but rather, and offered here as a thought-device, a non-technological sublime.

There is an indication that contemporary accounts appreciated a degree of the sublime in the Y Wladfa project and Chubut itself. Harris analyses the Rev. Lewis Humphreys’s contemporary report on the establishment of the colony, and describes it as having a ‘strong utopian strain’, in which Humphreys transforms the arid Chubut valley into an ‘Arcadian, bucolic idyll of natural abundance’ (Harris, 2015: 203). Ultimately Argentina assimilated Y Wladfa into the Argentine state, fearing the colonists’ lack of enthusiasm for Argentine culture as a sign of pro-Britishness, and the notion of Y Wladfa as a Celtic nation was somehow lost, and ironically so. More telling perhaps for this discussion is that the process of assimilation began by the provision of infrastructure.

The Y Wladfa project, the failures that beset it and the ultimate compromise that the settlers accepted, place this story into a trajectory of migration for the pursuit of utopia, the exoticism and romanticisation of a journey which are still woven through the way that migration narratives are constructed. Migration for a better life, a higher purpose, retains a set of characteristics, and it is no small part that the absence of infrastructure, poetically symbolic of the absence of the state, plays in contextualising this journey.

In both the historic cases explored here, the groups strove for socio-political and religious autonomy from the societies they were leaving. One of the problems with viewing these migrations as a process of going off-grid is that, given the colonial legacies and precursors, it is difficult to valorise the processes. The benefit of having this discussion, however, is that it brings remarkable analytical insight to present-day green lifestyle migration, which represents much of the going off-grid that one might encounter in Euro-America. Though fewer off-grid groups (with the possible exception of survivalists or ‘preppers’) could be described as heavily armed, new approaches to land tenure as well as loopholes or lobbying to change planning and other development strategies in green lifestyle migrants’ favour do mean that migration and settlement are enabled by startlingly similar factors. In addition, a rhetoric of neo-colonialism pervades the discursive construction of the morality of going off-grid, and this is particularly acute in group examples that promote a shared ideology. As will be seen, in this research field the term ‘pioneer’ is a commonplace way that green lifestyle migrants described themselves and what they were doing, particularly those that used the One Planet Development policy. The notion that going back to the land is ecologically – and therefore also morally – correct is very powerful. This is weighted by added legitimacy when policies have introduced models, such as Carbon or Ecological Footprinting, by which this kind of correctness may be proven. This leads to a polarisation in ways of occupying rural space and a disjuncture between existing populations, and green lifestyle migrants who have the benefit of knowing that their morality is the right one. This surety of being right has created a set of assumptions that few in the movement have thought to address properly. Happily this disjuncture has left a very open space for discussion and critique that this book intends to part-colonise.

Before moving on to discuss being off-grid – which I shall argue is qualitatively different from going off-grid – it is worth just stating clearly that what is at stake in the contemporary approaches to living off-grid to be examined in this book is very different from what was at stake in the comparative and historical cases outlined here. In short, matters seem very much to be less visceral and less extreme. Making such comparisons has value, however, if it can illustrate where this specific ethnographic example makes an anthropological impact. Intersections between going off-grid in rural Wales, green lifestyle migration more broadly and even some migration in the colonial period are connected by shared elements of social organisation and entanglements with others. Without the benefit of this comparative framework, sharper critical analysis could be lost.

Being off-grid

Having discussed both the idea of going on-grid and of going off-grid, and attempting to situate these practices societally – in terms of the grid’s relationship to population management and ‘statecraft’ – and historically in terms of comparable migrations and the quest for autonomy, it remains to address the question of being off-grid from a cultural standpoint. In order to do this, I want to draw an important distinction between being off-grid and going off-grid. The latter is a rather more deliberate action, the former more of a political-economic, or even ontological state. Being off-grid might be an appropriate way to describe groups such as the Traveller-Gypsies in Okely’s (1983) ethnography who resisted settlement on council-run traveller sites, or the activist group described by Graeber (2009), which couldn’t find a legal way to own a gifted car without somehow becoming legible. Equally, the anthropological canon contains numerous examples of indigenous groups whose traditional way of life might very well be described as off-grid. One