Nearing Enough

Image Gallery At ages 68 and 89, Helen and Scott began building these stone buildings and garden walls to make their last homestead, which is open to the public today. Lynn Karlin

By Linnea Johnson

By candlelight and snuggled away under quilts in a cozy, slant-ceiling guest room one winter's night long ago, I read Helen and Scott Nearing's Living the Good Life, which had been left on the bedside table for me by my host.

The Nearings wrote, "We maintain that a couple, of any age ... with a minimum of health, intelligence and capital, can adapt themselves to country living, learn its crafts, overcome its difficulties, and build up a life pattern rich in simple values and productive of personal and social good."

Helen and Scott Nearing lived a self-sufficient life in the 1930s and '40s in Vermont and, later into the 1990s, in Maine, their principles always directing their choices.

Still today, the Nearings' initial questions, dilemmas and fears are shared by many people who want to take their lives into their own hands and live in a simpler, less routinized, more socially sensible manner, with sun, wind and rain on their faces and organic food in their bellies, while leaving far, far behind them highrises and fluorescent lights, suburbs and office cubicles, processed air and food and water, the proverbial Joneses, and those ubiquitous racing rats equipped with cell phones and beepers.

Can we feed ourselves from our own garden? Will a farm be another sort of drudgery? Is a principled life really a possibility in today's world? Can I learn all I need to know? Will the garden tie me down in new and even more profound ways? Can I integrate the life of the mind and continue to do my art/music/writing even as I pick off chewing creatures from my Swiss chard? Can I really live what I believe?

Scott Nearing (1883-1983), well educated and teaching in higher education, wrote textbooks, pamphlets and essays, and lectured widely, protesting inequity, exploitation and social injustice as his way of life, as a tenet of living. In Conscience of a Radical (1965), he wrote, "My studies and my personal experiences led me to avoid superficial living; led me to dig to the roots of personal life and social problems; led me, in other words, to become a radical."

In 1919 he was tried by a U.S. federal grand jury (and cleared) on charges of obstructing recruitment and enlistment in the U.S. military. He had written a pamphlet, The Great Madness, asserting that the causes of World War I were largely commercial, benefiting corporations and the wealthy.

Scott Nearing criticized unjustness and hypocrisy wherever he found it and, indeed, he was ousted from the Communist Party for having published a book which the Party heartily disliked.

By 1930 he had lost a succession of four academic jobs because of his radical views on a matrix of issues such as opposing child labor laws and opposing U.S. military imperialism.