Whenever Dutch John goes into town, which is as seldom as possible, he tends to walk or take the bike.

He describes himself as a “low profile anarchist and an off-gridder in the broadest senses of the word”. But it’s not just his environmental beliefs that prevent him from taking the car.

Every time he uses his twenty year old Volvo 240, first he has to clean up the cyclone bin, dump the char dust on the compost, fill the fuel bin with sixty pounds of wood, stacking a few sacks on the back seat for extra mileage, spark up the gasifier with a diesel glow plug, wait four minutes for it to heat up,  flare off the surplus carbon monoxide and hydrogen. And then he’s off. (more…)