William H. Funk • Journalist | Documentarian | Environmental Attorney
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  • Portfolio
    • Aliens Among Us
    • Berea College: Radical Equality in Appalachia
    • Birds, Blades, and the Brutal Business of Clean Energy
    • A Century of Conserving Virginia's Wildlife Resources
    • Climbing the Last Light: An Afternoon of Hawkwatching
    • Corruption and Lack of Law Enforcement Threaten the Last great Apes of Africa and Asia
    • Eden Besieged: Amazonia's Matchless Wildlife Targeted by Traffickers
    • Epiphany on Pilot Mountain: How the Raven Set My Soul to Rights
    • From Cheetahs to Wood Ducks
    • A Fundamental Freedom: Retaining Hunting Opportunities Through Land Conservation
    • Gallinaceous Grand Slam: One Man’s Cross-Country Obsession with Quail
    • Glimpses of Seasons: A Pilgrimage to the Birthplace of Robert Penn Warren
    • Guns & Roses
    • Grub Street Revisited
    • Hearts of Darkness
    • Hemlock Woolly Adelgid & the Race to Save the East's Old-Growth Forests
    • A Hunter's Paradise That Pays for Itself
    • Highways of Death, Corridors of Life
    • In the Forests of the Night: The Great Horned Owl
    • Like Him We Prey; Like Him We Slay: A Call for Shark Conservation
    • Look What's Killing Our Oldest Trees
    • A Master Archer Channels the Past
    • A Most Patient Predator: North Carolina's Resurgent Alligator
    • Nature Needs Half
    • The Night Riders: Sacred Fire & Revolutionary Justice in the Black Patch
    • Old Man of the Mountains: The Northern Raven in Virginia
    • On the Hunt for Appalachia's Secretive Golden Eagles
    • Preserving the Real World
    • Retaining a Geography of Hope: How Conservation Easements Preserve Virginia's Family Farms and Wildlife Habitat
    • Return of a Native: The Virginia Elk
    • Room Enough for All: How Farmland Preservation Can Help Wildlife Thrive
    • A Sad Tale's Best for Winter: White-Nosed Syndrome Casts an Icy Shroud Over the East's Bat Populations
    • Scavenger Angel: The Turkey Vulture Reconsidered
    • Some Reflections on Frog Hunting
    • The Territory Ahead: A Bobcat's Tale
    • Five Easy Pieces >
      • The Anthropocene: Mankind’s Grim Legacy Writ in Stone
      • Bee Fences Reduce Human - Elephant Conflict
      • Loss of Matriarchs Means the End of Elephant Memory
      • Of Lynx, Rabbits, and a Warming World
      • South Sudan's Precarious Profusion of Wildlife
    • An Unnatural Silence: Colony Collapse Disorder and the Pollination Crisis
    • What the World Would Look Like If Humans Hadn't Killed All the Animals
    • With What Time Remains: Land Conservation in North Carolina
    • Virginia's Black Bear: Saga of a Survivor
    • Photography & Film >
      • Commercial Fishing Harbor, Wanchese, North Carolina
      • The Least of These
      • Return of a Native: The Atlantic Puffin Comes Home to New England
      • Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum, Weston, West Virginia
    • Metinic Island in the Gulf of Maine
    • Book Reviews >
      • Abbey, Edward • Desert Solitaire
      • Abbey, Edward • The Fool's Progress
      • Bass, Rick • The Lost Grizzlies
      • Bonner, Raymond • At the Hand of Man: Peril and Hope for Africa's Wildlife
      • Bunker, Michael • Surviving Off-Grid: Decolonizing the Industrial Mind
      • Capstick, Peter Hathaway • Warrior: The Legend of Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen
      • Chappel, Steve • Confessions of an Eco-Redneck
      • Cokinos, Christopher • Hope is the Thing with Feathers
      • Crosby, Alfred • Ecological Imperialism
      • Devall, Bill and George Sessions • Living as if Nature Mattered
      • Elton, C. S. • The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants
      • Freyfogle, Eric D., editor • The New Agrarianism
      • Fuller, Lon • The Morality of Law
      • Maehr, David, Reed F. Noss and Jeffrey L. Larkin, editors • Large Animal Restoration
      • Manes, Christopher • Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization
      • Matthiessen, Peter • The Birds of Heaven
      • Matthiessen, Peter • Men's Lives
      • Matthiessen, Peter • Wildlife in America
      • McKibben, Bill • The End of Nature
      • McNeely, Jeffrey A. • Economics and Biodiversity
      • Nabhan, Gary Paul • Enduring Seeds: Native American Wild Plant Agriculture and Wild Plant Conservation
      • O'Brien, Dan • The Rites of Autumn
      • Paehlke, Robert • Environmentalism and the Future of Progressive Politics
      • Reisner, Marc • Game Wars: The Undercover Pursuit of Wildlife Poachers
      • Shafer, Craig L. • Nature Reserves: Island Theory and Conservation Practice
      • Todd, Nancy and John Todd • Bioshelters, Ocean Arks, City Farming: Ecology as the Basis of Design
      • Weber, Michael L. • From Abundance to Scarcity: A History of US Marine Fisheries Policy
      • Weidensaul, Scott • Living with the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds
  • Under the Sun Blog
  • About Me
    • My Regular Blog Posts for the African Wildlife Foundation
514 Marquis Street
Staunton, Virginia 24401~4667
540.292.8581
williamhfunk@icloud.com
​williamhfunk@pressfolios.com
​@WilliamHFunk
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Bunker, Michael. Surviving Off Off-Grid: Decolonizing the Industrial Mind. New York: Refugio Press, 2011.

This is an angry, noisy book by a man whose ferocious estrangement from modern techno-industrial society burns through every page; this statement should be endorsement enough for those with eyes enough to see the quickening catastrophe in which our pollutive industries and booming population explosion has presently mired us, and while the author’s heated passion for his (frankly, holy) mission can be tedious and even banal, there can be no denying that his central themes of resource exploitation, technological dependence, unthinking consumption and a hysterical denial of science embody an uncomfortable, even an agonizing truth.

Mr. Bunker attempts to found his arguments in historical analogy, imaging a classical Greece of pastoral democrats and stout yeomen, with Rome a satanic megalopolis of depraved urbanites who actively despise the agrarian “barbarians” (this well-versed author evidently skipped reading Virgil’s Georgics—available in a handsome edition from Yale translated by Staunton’s own Janet Lembke). Bunker, an evangelical “Christian Agrarian Separatist,” blames Rome’s collapse—and therefore the West’s—on covetousness, of all the deadly sins surely the most apt choice for the destruction of civilization, as we’re privileged to note in today’s public affairs. God, claims Bunker, “commanded man to live simply and be satisfied with food and raiment,” and to exceed this draconian directive, as the vast majority of humankind does or aspires to do, is sinful, period.

It is this kind of literalist interpretation that confounds the non-evangelical reader, even those naturally sympathetic to the general message of Bunker’s propositions and pronouncements. He certainly does score some inarguable points: Hurricane Katrina proved, unforgettably, that city dwellers exist in their packed density and enforced conformity to social norms only when their necessities and comforts are continually trucked in to them. When the city’s ability to import its sustenance is interrupted and the rule of law withdrawn, the various components of this tenuous society panic, run amok, and turn on one another. Only massive governmental intervention can prevent the wholesale meltdown of these crowded and antagonistic populations when accustomed diversions and official intimidation suddenly cease to exist.

This author’s fundamental flaw, like that of Marx, is a myopic inability to understand, or at least acknowledge, the realities of human nature. Bunker curses our pursuit of happiness, or pleasure, as poisonous to the rural virtues he longs for: “I would say that almost 100% of the objections raised against Agrarian Separatism and Off-Grid Homesteading have as their root the inordinate love of COMFORT….” A related assertion claims, against all understanding of supply and demand and with an eerie semblance to the pabulum serving as propaganda in the “war on drugs,” that “If enough people were to pull out of the system and begin questioning all technology and rejecting most of it, then the industrial system that supports the massive sale of these addictive drugs at low cost will disappear.” By “drugs” Bunker here refers to addictions in general, whether to cocaine, concrete, the internet, internal combustion engines, or the other detritus of modern life.

In his favor Bunker supplies ample suggestions for those wishing, like him, to sever ties with our increasingly corrupt and unsustainable corporate hegemony.  Chapters detail the nuts and bolts of building a homestead, supplying water, growing and preserving food, providing on-site heat and light, and in short rejecting the false promises that consumerism forever dins in our collective ear: that Progress means a never-ending ascent to higher and greater levels of luxury and idleness, attainable through expensive goods that may be had only to those willing to submit their lives to the grindstones of today’s frantic urban workplace. Cut loose, blast free, and set out for the territory, exhorts Mr. Bunker, where thou shalt find thy true calling.

The only problem with this reasonable suggestion is the awful fact that the territory is itself under mortal siege, our open spaces, rural areas, wildlife habitat and untrammeled land being steadily annihilated to create yet more housing, factories, roads and shopping opportunities for an ever expanding upwardly mobile population base, dead set on having all that there is in the here and now.

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