Realize that your ability to live in a house in the mountains is on the tail end of a supply chain that is literally the size of the planet. Look at the clothing you wear, the food that you buy (cheaply and readily), and the items that furnish your mountain home – how many of them were locally made, vs. made in China? How much did you pay for these items?

Arguably, by choosing to live so remotely you actually have a larger impact on the world because the infrastructure needed to supply you with power, sewage, and food is so much greater on a per-capita basis because you are so remote.

My point is that we, the well off and the technologically literate, are able to disengage from the society that gives us this benefit. It is a mistake, though, to think that your reducing your individual footprint can happen on a meaningful scale.

Yes, please, vacation and enjoy the outdoors. Certainly we should preserve them. But don’t pretend that we can all go back to being hunters and gathers without significant losses to our technological bases and quality of life.

I was on a long-distance, largely self-supported bicycle tour (camping in a tent, cooking my own food, propelling myself, digging my own bathroom facilities, etc).  I had *no* illusions that I was off the grid – I was just sort of acting like a cellphone or laptop, temporarily untethered but needing to plug in now and again for sustenance.  There was no meaningful, feeding-myself-without-food-stores, not-using-technology, not-engaged-in-economic-activity iiving.  Yes, the trip required fewer resources than I use at home, but the resources I used remained essentially the same – food and equipment stores, electricity, toilets, laundry, bathing facilities, et cetera.  And I probably ate more than at home ;-)

Anyhow, I met and played road-hopscotch with a group of cycle tourists who claimed to be ‘totally off the grid.’   Upon a bit of examination, I found them about as off the grid as I was – in other words, pretty much dependent upon it.  They bought food at farmers’ markets, using common currency.  They wild-camped about as much as I did – which is to say, on long stretches with no towns, they wild camped, and in more populated areas, they’d camp in places where they could use electricity, toilets, laundry and bathing facilities, Internet, etc.  They engaged in economic activity – playing music (busking or sometimes playing shows in bars) and a few other things frowned upon by the war on (some) drugs.  They also had no compunction in buying things (when they were fiscally capable of doing so). 

When I pointed this out to them, the goalposts shifted – they claimed that because they had no final destination in mind as I did, they were ‘techical nomads,’ free of the constraints of everyday workaday society, somehow capable of an existence independent of the standard workday world.   Somehow they didn’t get that ‘nomad’ doesn’t equate to ‘off-the-grid’ in the sense that the latter implies near-complete self-sufficiency.   

I think the US has some very odd ideas about what individualism and self-sufficiency actually mean. Needless to say, we’ve romanticized it without actually thinking about it.  I wonder whether this would change if we stopped teaching the frontier mythos? 

And Y,  Thinking about it, it’s not that strange that Sociologists should be strong modernists. There is no Sociology written in Ancient Greek or Latin; no St Thomas’ or Anselms.  The thing was conceived out of modernity in the 19th century: the industrial revolution; urbanisation and secularisation.  The work of Marx, Weber, Durkheim et al was the first real accommodation with modernity in the sense that modernity was treated as a given.

I totally understand and admire someone who lives close to the earth for apolitical reasons.  But when you do something with a certain politics behind it, you’re making a statement.  You’re saying, “This is good and everyone should do it.”

All I’m saying is that some people can’t follow that injunction, not because the oppressiveness of society is holding them back but because the oppressiveness of nature is.

To give you a better clue, I’m in a wheelchair.  I depend on others to be fed, bathed, clothed and transported around the city.  Every month, a truck comes from the government with crates of formula that I put into my feeding tube at night.

You can’t socially deconstruct these facts because they aren’t social constructs in the first place.

Now are people with disabilities still oppressed by the very system that keeps them alive?  Big time.  But, for the record, I would rather be oppressed than dead.