By Joanna Fuller, Friend of Simple Intentions
In 1932, at perhaps the most devastating point of the Great Depression, Helen and Scott Nearing moved from New York City to a run-down maple sugar farm in rural Vermont. No longer able to make a living in the ‘wage economy,’ they set out to subsist on the land—building a simple home from stones found on the property, growing their own food, and bartering for necessities they couldn’t produce themselves.
The Nearings chronicled their sixty-year adventure in homesteading in the book The Good Life, which later came to be regarded as the pre-eminent how-to manual for the post-WWII back-to-the-land movement in North America. In it, Helen Nearing recounts the daily routine she and Scott maintained, along with their many and frequent guests:
Each day was divided into two main blocks of time—four morning hours and four afternoon hours. At breakfast time on week-days we first looked at the weather, then asked, ‘How shall we arrange the day?’ Then by agreement we decided which of these blocks of time should be devoted to bread labor and which to personally determined activities. Of necessity the weather was the primary factor in making the decision.
Suppose that the morning was assigned for bread labor. We then agreed upon the tasks that each member of the group should take on—in the garden, in the woods, on construction, in the shop, at sugarmaking or packing. If one’s bread labor was performed in the morning, the afternoon automatically became personally directed. One might read, write, sit in the sun, walk in the woods, play music, go to town. We earned our four hours of leisure by our four hours of labor.
[…] We took our time, every day, every month, every year. We had our work, did it and enjoyed it. We had our leisure, used it and enjoyed that. During the hours of bread labor we worked and worked hard. We have never worked harder and have never enjoyed work more, because, with rare exceptions, the work was significant, self-directed, constructive and therefore interesting.
It sounds idyllic, doesn’t it? And yet there was much more to the Nearings’ motivation than a desire to step off the proverbial treadmill and lead a simpler life. Their decision to homestead was also driven by their commitment to social justice.
Scott Nearing was an accomplished economist, a professor at the Wharton School, and a devout Socialist. Eventually fired for what were considered to be highly radical views, those views formed the cornerstone of the Nearings’ lives, and livelihoods:
We left the city with three objectives in mind. The first was economic. We sought to make a depression-free living, as independent as possible of the commodity and labor markets […] Our second aim was hygienic. We wanted to maintain and improve our health […] Our third objective was social and ethical. We desired to liberate and dissociate ourselves, as much as possible, from the cruder forms of exploitation: the plunder of the planet; the slavery of man and beast; the slaughter of men in war, and of animals for food.
The Nearings believed that the so-called American way of life—centered as it was on a relentless pursuit of profit—had not only depleted the earth’s natural resources, it was also only achievable for an elite few, who benefited from a concentrated distribution of resources at the expense of an otherwise impoverished class. In his essay The American Way of Life, written in 1949, Scott writes:
The United States is fabulously rich. It also spends more on military preparations than any other nation. Its citizens are surrounded by public enterprises, such as highways, schools and hospitals, and by privately owned gadgets—automobiles, telephones, radios, electric refrigerators. But are bigness and manyness a sound measure of success?
Eighty years later, Nearing’s question is still relevant and the need for conversation around it is more important than ever. Since then, the consumption required to achieve our American aspiration of the ‘good life,’ has only escalated. In her book The Overworked American, sociologist J