The Unsettlers: In Search of the Good Life in Today's America - Couverture rigide

“You say you want a revolution? These stories of “unsettlers” striving to lead more simple lives are an inspiration as well as a dose of reality on how difficult that can be. This is an important book.”
—Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia 

“A fascinating, timely, and deeply personal examination of what it means to be a non-conformist in the modern age."—Outside
 
“If talk of politics makes you pine for a life away from Twitter and cable news and the rest, Mark Sundeen's The Unsettlers offers a few tips for how to build a sustainable future." —The New York Times Book Review

"In-depth and compelling...These homesteaders show us how the other other half lives." —Los Angeles Times 

“An enlightening read... [and] exceptional reporting on a topic that we’d all be wise to familiarize ourselves with.” —Paris Review
 
“A well-crafted, intimate portrait...Sundeen is a sympathetic, self-deprecating, imperfect Virgil, and thus a perfect, humorous, yet earnest guide on a foray into uncompromising outposts where people are striving for purity in a deeply compromised world.”—San Francisco Chronicle
 
“[A] deftly written study.”—Nature

“In this deft, impeccably reported book, Sundeen offers a fresh look at the recurrent American urge for the 'simple' life ... gain[ing] personal insights that feel honest and weighty." —Los Angeles Review of Books

“This fallen world has quite enough wannabe farmers, and long may they thrive. But it's frankly hard to imagine the bunch of carrots, however lovingly husbanded, that would be more nourishing than the body of work Sundeen is building.” —Missoula Independent
 
"A mix of social history and well-crafted journalism." —USA Today’s Green Living 
 
"A seriously fascinating and inspiring read. It's a book for anyone who has ever wondered how to live more sustainably, more consciously, and also a bit more crazily (in a wow-how-can-they-live-without-the-internet? kind of way). Mark is a terrific writer and I was absorbed by every page of this deep, insightful examination of the lives of a handful of Americans who choose to live differently.”—Cheryl Strayed

“Sundeen captures a balance between idealism and realism that leaves the reader feeling inspired, introspective and, at the very least, a little bit unsettled.” —The Missoulian
 
“Pretty darn good. ... Particularly interesting is the way Sundeen compares and contrasts the white, suburban mythology of “what happened to Detroit” with the urban, black perspective on the city’s transformation. ... Probably the best, fairest portrayal of the Motor City’s postwar metamorphosis published since Scott Martelle’s Detroit: A Biography." —The Detroit Metro Times

 “By framing the book as a search for answers, not arguments, Sundeen fills [The Unsettlers] with empathy and curiosity. Each section is distinguished by strong reporting, and Sundeen’s admiration for his subjects is clear.” —The Rumpus

“[A] carefully and affectionate­ly reported account of idealists working not to leave the real world behind, but to make it better.”—BookPage

“A gorgeous new book that provides a contemporary twist on Wendell Berry’s 1977 classic, The Unsettling of America.... Sundeen finds beauty in each of the couples’ lives, he doesn’t flatten them into human Instagrams....[they] are weird, stubborn and strong, and Sundeen provides a nuanced picture of their beliefs... Importantly, Sundeen also acknowledges that the “renunciation of privilege” can become “just another means of exercising it.” —High Country News

“A mix of social history and well-crafted journalism, this book relays the deeply personal stories of today’s pioneers.”—Living Green
 
“Simplicity is a relative matter; there is no one path or goal in that quest, and the degrees of simplicity one might achieve vary widely from one person to another...Those who seek the simple life that Mark Sundeen presents in The Unsettlers reflect that diversity... Nothing is easy about riding a bicycle to La Plata in winter, or about coaxing food from the wastelands of Detroit. But all of these simplifiers have been roaring successes in one simple way: they have, through their devoted work, gained true joy in their lives.” —Missouri Historical Review

“In captivating detail, [Sundeen] explores what it takes to live off the grid, survive without government intervention and live a sustainable life...Charming, self-deprecating and honest.” —Coachella Valley Weekly

"Well researched, immediately engaging, immensely readable, and ultimately inspiring. This is the perfect read for DIY-types with dreams of saving the world, or at least their own backyards.” —Booklist

“From dirt roads in rural Missouri to Detroit’s foreclosed streets, Sundeen reports how people throughout the United States have chosen to live simple but never simply...these pages will leave any reader with a penchant for sustainability to question their own carbon footprint.” —Library Journal

“Engaging, honest, and deeply personal... Provocative reading for anyone who has ever yearned for a life of radical simplicity.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Sundeen...ask[s] important questions about technology, the economy, and the moral implications of being both critic and participant in our society.” —Publisher’s Weekly

"From a crop of orphaned garlic plants in Detroit to a tipi birth in Montana, Mark Sundeen’s The Unsettlers is rigorously reported and utterly enthralling. With candor, wit, and live-voltage curiosity, Sundeen profiles pioneers who have developed better ways to live in our overdeveloped world. The Unsettlers isn’t in the business of guilt or shame mongering, but it will certainly—if you have a pulse and a laptop, or even an electrical socket—make you question how you live in the world as well." 
—Leslie Jamison, author of The Empathy Exams

“With his chronicles of modern-day American visionaries and iconoclasts who have opted out of the mainstream culture, I’ve come to think of Mark Sundeen as our poet laureate of a new era of alternative lifestyles.”
—Bob Shacochis, author of The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

"The Unsettlers portrait of six true-hearted heroes of husbandry pitted against the Corporate Person would put the fear of God in that monster if it had a pulse. Sundeen’s opus combines fierce reasoning, romance, impeccable research, the narrative pull of a thriller, and the subliminal magic of some wondrous old myth as he takes the measure of America’s betrayed yearning for a living, thriving earth."—David James Duncan, author of The River Why and The Brothers K 

One

I was looking for people freed from commercial civilization, who might give me direction for doing it myself. Yet after a full year, everyone I'd met fell into one of five categories, none of which was exactly right.

First were single men. These guys had achieved self-reliance, but in cutting ties with the economy, they had also severed family bonds, the opposite of what I was on the verge of doing. I wanted blueprints for cohabitation, not hermitry.

Next I met people who, after leading a simple life for some period of time, decided to quit—Cedar's parents, for example. After years of eking out a living growing food and selling stained glass at craft fairs, they both got full-time jobs and eventually replaced the barn with a beautiful on-grid home. "We took poverty as far as we could," her dad told me with a laugh. A friend of mine who birthed a baby in a school bus in a snowstorm on a mountain told me that tripping in the snow on the way to the outhouse one night—pregnant, shitting herself—was not what had finally nudged her and her husband to abandon the homestead. It was the prospect of driving the kids forty minutes to school each day. People who quit the simple life were the rule; I wanted the exceptions.

In the third group were people who had launched their vision with considerable wealth or inherited land. I met a family who had deftly flipped a house in the suburbs before the crash, paid cash for acreage, and built an off-grid straw-bale house. I envied and admired them, but I couldn't afford to replicate what they'd done. Perhaps the most famous modern homesteader is Ree Drummond, who spun her massively popular Pioneer Woman blog into a series of books and TV shows that extol home cooking and homeschooling. But Drummond acquired her piece of paradise by marrying into a family that ranks among America's largest landowners.

There were also those from a tradition of simple living, such as the Amish and the Mennonites. But you had to be born into such a culture. You couldn't just join.

And then there were the moonlighters. Western Montana and southern Utah, where I'd lived for two decades, were meccas for back-to-the-landers, as were Vermont and Northern California. But those places were all expensive now, and buying in these days—or even staying afloat—required working an outside job to support a homestead hobby. I admired the commitment of those who'd figured out how to make it work. But for me a crucial motivation for living simply was to gain more freedom, not to sprint on some treadmill just to pay the bank.

"What can I actually do?" asked the British economist E. F. Schumacher in his 1973 book Small Is Beautiful, in the face of intractable tentacles of industry. "In the excitement over the unfolding of his scientific and technical powers," he wrote, "modern man has built a system of production that ravishes nature and a type of society that mutilates man." Meanwhile, the wealthy were stripping the world of its cheap fuels at such a quick rate that poor countries would never get a fair share.

Schumacher's solution: "We can, each of us, put our inner house in order." He viewed economics through a Buddhist lens, asserting that "the essence of civilization was not in a multiplication of wants but in the purification of human character." Instead of productivity for its own sake, Schumacher heralded the Buddhist ideal of "right livelihood," whose function he defined as threefold: to excel at one's craft, to overcome selfishness by working in common cause with others, and to create useful goods and services.

Wendell Berry echoed this: "How can a man hope to promote peace in the world if he has not made it possible in his own life and his own household?"

So after a year of searching for the people who had taken Wendell Berry's challenge to quit destructive technology, I found that I was equally interested in finding people who had taken his challenge to put their households in order.

Where to find homesteaders more radical, more committed, yet less isolated than the ones I'd met thus far? Not personally knowing any, I launched my search—where else?—on Facebook. Through a short chain of acquaintances I learned about a place in Missouri, the Possibility Alliance. Some people I met at an anarchist collective told me they had gone there to launch a monthlong bike ride devoted to service—a ride they'd all done dressed as superheroes. But in these instantly searchable times, it was surprisingly hard to find out more. The alliance was shrouded in analog mystery: no website or social media, no major press coverage. Was it a commune or a school or an ashram or a summer camp or a training ground for revolutionaries?

Gradually I gathered this much: Members of the Possibility Alliance used no electricity, cars, or computers. They lived by candlelight and grew their own food and rode bicycles and horses and trains. They lived in voluntary poverty rather than pay an income tax that financed war. Knowledge of the place spread by word of mouth.

I eventually obtained a phone number—landlines don't require electricity—and after a series of messages spoke with Ethan Hughes, who, along with his wife, Sarah Wilcox, had founded the Possibility Alliance after they'd disembarked that Amtrak train in La Plata in 2007. He told me that the alliance hosted 1,500 visitors per year, some for a two-hour tour or a half-day course in canning or knitting, others for a weeklong natural-building workshop or a two-week permaculture course.

"People pull up in the train and are picked up by horse and buggy or by bike," he said. "We call it 'necessary simplicity.' I don't know how to build another planet, but I know how to simplify. It creates a myth. In the age of the Internet, people get bored. There's this mystery. People track us down."

I asked what sort of people showed up.

"All kinds. Catholic Workers and anti-religious anarchists, permaculturists and Buddhists." At present they were so inundated with visitors that they could accommodate me only during "Experience Week."

The price for the nine-day visit: zero. They operated strictly on the "gift economy." I asked what that meant.

"I see objects and money like water," he said. "It's flowing. If in nature one tree kept all the water, everything downstream would die. By studying nature we see—" He stopped mid-sentence.

"The bell of mindfulness just rang," he said. "Do you mind taking a moment of silence with me?"