We’re on NPR’s The Modern West
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A while back, we received a visitor on the Mesa. Melodie Edwards, host of The Modern West podcast from Wyoming Public Media, knocked on our door with mic already rolling. We offered her a quick tour before sitting down to answer some questions about why a family with a perfectly fine life chose to leave it behind to move into a strawbale house off-grid in the high desert of New Mexico.
The result is an episode called “The Apocalyptic American Dream” and it’s part of the podcast’s Cheap Dirt series, a season exploring what happens when people across the American West decide to opt out of the conventional housing market.
We are the final episode in the series. It dropped last week and you can listen here:
We talked about a lot of things, such as how we ended up here, what collapse actually feels like when you’re living through it slowly, why having survival skills makes the chaos of the world feel a little less overwhelming, and the strange, tangled history of how this stretch of mesa outside Taos became a kind of no man’s land in the first place.
If you’ve been reading Our Uncertain Future for a while, some of this will sound familiar, but from a different angle. The conversation is candid, surprising, and a little silly.
There were things we didn’t get to. Melodie had limited time and we could have gone on for hours. We didn’t get deep into the day-to-day practical stuff or talk much about what it’s like raising a kid out here, or the ways technology both saves us and makes things harder.
Some of that we covered in our latest podcast episode, “Reflecting on 6 Years Off-Grid Amid Collapse”, which came out earlier this week. And in fact, Melodie plans to drop that episode into The Modern West feed in the coming days. So if you’re subscribed there, you’ll hear from us again soon.
If You’re New Here
If you found us through The Modern West, welcome. Here’s the short version:
We’re Eric and Johanna. We’ve been living off-grid on the Mesa outside Taos for over six years now, with our daughter, a lot of mud, some solar panels, and the realization that the way most of us have been taught to live doesn't work.
Our Uncertain Future is where we write about what we’re learning. Some of it is practical like how to garden in the desert, how to live on less, what off-grid actually costs. Some of it is more reflective like seasonal rituals, slow living, and what collapse really means.
We publish something every week. Paid members get access to deeper how-to guides, our full archive, and nature-based essays from Johanna’s work as a certified Nature and Forest Therapy Guide.
Subscribe for free and you’ll get everything except the paywalled stuff. If what you find here is valuable, consider going paid ($5/month) to support our mission to inspire others to explore alternative lifestyles better for the Earth and each other.
We’re still a little amazed that NPR came up our dirt road. But it also makes a certain kind of sense. The questions Melodie is asking in the Cheap Dirt series about affordable housing, about the American Dream, about what people do when the system stops working for them, are our questions too. We represent one answer.
Thanks for being here. And if you listen to the episode, we’d love to hear what you think.
— Eric & Johanna
P.S. — If you’ve been thinking about going paid, now’s a good time. We’re running a free first month for new paid subscribers through the end of March. Hit the button below to try it out.
So cool! I can’t wait to listen
That was a great interview! Melodie (and you and Erick) did a great job of representing the Mesa in its current incarnation.