Hokyoung Kim for BI
After an hour of driving down winding dirt roads without cell reception, I caught up with the plume of dust billowing behind Jesse Fisher's pickup. We were headed for the same destination, the only one for miles in any direction: Riverbed Ranch, a burgeoning off-grid community in the high desert of western Utah.
Riverbed isn't a commune or a typical farming community; it's a land cooperative made up of 135 shareholders with a single goal: living independently of modern mass-scale systems of production. "True wealth is how long you can survive without money," Fisher, one of the community's earliest members, said. He and Philip Gleason, the founder, agreed to show me around the property last July.