Living The Good Life With Helen And Scott Nearing

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After due consideration and in the spirit of the times, we drew up a ten-year plan:

1. We wish to set up a semi-self-contained household unit, based largely on a use economy, and, as far as possible, independent of the price-profit economy which surrounds us.

We would attempt to carry on this self-subsistent economy by the following steps: [1] Raising as much of our own food as local soil and climatic conditions would permit. [2] Bartering our products for those which we could not or did not produce. [3] Using wood for fuel and cutting it ourselves. [4] Putting up our own buildings with stone and wood from the place, doing the work ourselves. [5] Making such implements as sleds, drays, stone-boats, gravel screens, ladders. [6] Holding down to the barest minimum the number of implements, tools, gadgets, and machines which we might buy from the assembly lines of big business. [7] If we had to have such machines for a few hours or days in a year (plow, tractor, rototiller, bulldozer, chain saw), we would rent or trade them from local people instead of buying and owning them.

2. We have no intention of making money, nor do we seek wages or profits. Rather we aim to earn a livelihood, as far as possible on a use economy basis. When enough bread-labor has been performed to secure the year's living, we will stop earning until the next crop season.

People brought up in a money economy are taught to believe in the importance of getting and keeping money. Time and again folk told us, "You can't afford to make syrup. You won't make any money that way."

Our attitude was quite different. We kept careful cost figures, but we never used them to determine whether we should or should not make syrup. We tapped our trees as each sap season came, along. When the season was over and the syrup on hand, we wrote to various correspondents in California or Florida, told them what our syrup had cost, and exchanged our product for equal value of their citrus, walnuts, olive oil, or raisins. As a result of these transactions, we laid in a supply of items, at no cash outlay, which we could not ourselves produce.

We also sold our syrup and sugar on the open market. In selling anything, we tried to determine exact costs and set our prices not in terms of what the traffic would bear but in terms of the costs, figuring in our own time at going day wages.

Just as each year we estimated the amount of garden produce needed for our food, so we tried to foresee the money required to meet our cash obligations. When we had the estimated needs, we raised no more crops and made no more money for that period. In a word, we were trying to make a livelihood, and once our needs in this direction were covered, we turned our efforts in other directions ... toward social activities, toward avocations such as reading, writing, music making, toward repairs or replacements of our equipment.

3. All of our operations will be kept on a cash and carry basis. No bank loans. No slavery to interest on mortgages, notes, and IOU's.

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