I like what Earthpeace and their family is doing over in France. I've seen a lot of people in the US and Canada moving into a similar lifestyle.
Here in the US we have an interesting group of people called the Amish, and their community and the resource outlets that cater to them have been the source for many of the older style knowledge and equipment that otherwise would be hard to obtain.
Many of you probably know about them. The Amish are a religious community of German speaking Swiss that immigrated into the USA in the 19th Century, and they have done their very best to try and remain in the 19th Century. They usually avoid using electricity, motorized vehicles, etc. They live a very horse and manual labor intensive, agricultural environment.
The traditional Amish strongholds in the American states of Pennsylvania and Ohio are getting crowded and land there is getting urbanized and expensive. As Amish families grow, many have moved to other areas where they can live their lifestyle with more opportunity for land and growth, such as the states of Arizona and Missouri.
For example, if you want to see how to build a house that is efficient without electricity but well built with materials from a modern lumber yard, you see how the Amish are doing it. If you want to buy a wood stove, of the style that you cook with, smart people see what the Amish use and maybe even buy one just like it.
There is a company out of Ohio called Lehmans that serves as a major supply house for the Amish and their needs. Some of the stuff that they sell went off the market most other places in the western world a century ago.
www.Lehmans.com
You have to decide just how 'primitive' do you want to go. Many find that the furthest back that they can go and still operate in today's world is to transition back to where they have one foot in the 19th Century and one foot in the 21st - the 19th Century being the pinnacle of non-electric civilization
Our ancestors in medieval Europe were pretty primitive by today's standards, and even primitive by 19th Century standards, yet they totally outclassed many of the aboriginal peoples, such as the North American natives who lifestyle had remained frozen in time since the last ice age.
We live in a world awash with metal. Even in remote places of the US, like the High Sierras, I've found metal flotsam and jetsam in large quantities laying about. It sometimes feels like we're almost to the point that you have to kick man made metal debris out of the way to find a piece of flint for napping. There's so much glass laying around that some people practice knapping glass as a survival skill. One abandoned car, rusting out in the middle of nowhere, has enough metal to outfit an small Roman military unit or keep the entire Commanche nation in arrowheads and knives for a generation, and the number of autos built just in the USA in the last 100 years numbers in the hundreds of millions, not to mention other sources of metal, such as abandoned railroad track, old mining camps, etc.
The North American Indians, for example, started large scale transitioning from stone tools to iron tools as fast as they could hundreds of years before the western frontier officially closed. Ordinary barrel hoops became plentiful enough that the Indians learned fast to convert them into iron arrowheads that were far superior to stone ones.
I've seen photos of an iron age re-creation village in Britain where they practiced skills from millennia ago where they lives a lifestyle not too dissimilar from the American Indian except they wove cloth and smelted iron ore. They had a very primitive lifestyle by our standards, but it was not a stone age one since they had the use of iron tools and weapons.
