Helen and Scott Nearing

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Helen Knothe Nearing (1904-1995) and Scott Nearing (1883-1983) and were well known American back-to-the-landers who wrote extensively about their experience living what they termed "the good life".

Scott was a trained economist and former college professor (he had lost his position due to his anarchist and pacifist beliefs, and his anti-war activism during World War I). Helen had grown up in an economically comfortable family of Theosophists, and as a young woman had been with J. Krishnamurti during his "enlightenment" experience under the pepper tree. She was trained as a musician, and also had some brief experience in the factory work world before moving into the agrarian life with Scott.

The Nearings began their simple life on an old farm on the foot of Stratton Mountain near Jamaica, Vermont in 1932, in the pit of the Great Depression. In 1952 they moved to Maine, ultimately settling on their "Forest Farm" at Cape Rosier (in the village of Harborside, within the town of Brooksville Maine), where they lived until their deaths. Scott remained a thinker, writer, and lecturer on economics and social issues for many years. Their best known books are Living the Good Life (published 1954) and Continuing the Good Life (1979). The first of these is often credited with being a major spur to the U.S. back to the land movement that began in the late 1960s.

Helen and Scott were devoted to a lifestyle giving importance to work, on the one hand, and contemplation or play, on the other. Ideally, they aimed at a norm that would divide most of a day's waking hours into three blocks of four hours: "bread labor" (work directed toward meeting requirements of food, shelter, clothing, needed tools, and such); civic work (doing something of value for their community); and professional pursuits or recreation (for Scott this was frequently economics research, for Helen it was often music - but they both liked to ski, also).

The Nearings were experimenters and were also very widely read (they frequently quoted authors of centuries past in their own books). They found wisdom in some of the attitudes of the past, but did not feel tied to the life patterns or technologies of the past. Apart from the necessity that drove them to the land, when they sought a good life during the Depression, keys to their success in the lifestyle included intelligence, commitment, and self-discipline.

In Vermont, the Nearings had adopted some innovations in their structure and equipment for preparing maple syrup and maple sugar from their tapped maple trees; these maple products were sources of cash income for them. During a period when manufactured fertilizers and pesticides were becoming standard practice, they pursued the organic approach to food gardening. In Maine, without sugar maples to provide a cash crop, they cultivated blueberries. The Nearings utilized new techniques of building houses and outbuildings from stone and concrete (the Flagg method). The Nearings built 12 stone structures, from small to large, on their Vermont land, and nine on their Maine land. In Maine, projects on the new land included a concrete and rock dam the Nearings constructed, resulting in a 1.5 acre (6,000 m²) pond. If anything, Helen was more the stone mason than Scott, though Scott (21 years older than Helen) also worked hard physically, into advanced age.

Their best-known books draw mainly on their personal experience on their homesteads. Secondary content is drawn from reflections on mainstream-American society (which they were critical of and basically rejected), their neighbors, and the positive values they believed in (self-responsibility, healthy exercise and diet, social cooperation, environmental consciousness, etc.)

The cycles and rhythms of nature were the Nearings' guide as they successfully provided for about 80% of their food needs. Their approach to living, based largely on the reduction of wants and a mostly non-monetary return from their organic horticulture and other sorts of labor, appealed to many people. The Nearings offered an almost "open-house" situation on their land for several decades, so that visitors could experience this way of life and learn a bit from them. Living as a couple, without the chore support of a traditional New England farm family, meant they had to get needed assistance in other ways. The Nearings' text and photos in their books make it plain that the labor from guests helped the Nearings' projects along (indeed, the Nearings wrote they had also sometimes hired local expertise and help, when they needed it).

After nearly two decades, they assessed "we had built up our good life in Vermont, improving the soil, clearing out and enlarging the sugar orchard, replacing shacks with concrete and stone buildings, reconstructing roads, and generally converting a sickly, bankrupt farm into a vigorous, healthy enterprise..."[Continuing the Good Life, p. 8].

The Nearings saw opportunity for the cooperative development of the lumber industry (and other industries) in their Vermont valley. Ultimately, while they considered their original Vermont-homestead project to be successful in providing a livelihood, as well as contact with nature and enjoyment of life, they felt frustrated by an extreme local household independence – which they felt contrasted unfavorably with the reality in many rural parts of Europe. Their valley neighbors in Vermont, the Nearings wrote, “…looked upon cooperative enterprise as the first step toward super-imposed discipline and coercion. They were suspicious of organized methods and planning. They would have none of it.” For this reason — in addition to the fact that Scott disliked the new ski developments on Stratton Mountain, and the mindset of cityfolk who patronized them — the Nearings moved on to another rural place, Cape Rosier, Maine.

Due to the publication of their books, and to their open-house practices toward guests, the Nearings' approach was emulated by thousands of people who wanted a life that afforded play and contemplation in addition to work.

Many sympathetic journalists and admiring friends have published articles about the Nearings. But another view of their lives was written by their sometime neighbor Jean Hay Bright, titled Meanwhile, Next Door to the Good Life (2003). The author notes that Helen and Scott spent winters traveling a lecture circuit (hinting that a reason might be that a stone house on the waterfront in Maine could be cold). Also (as mentioned in Helen Nearing's own autobiographical Loving and Leaving the Good Life), Hay Bright makes clear that they were not extremely "vegan" in their vegetarianism (for instance, they ate yogurt and even ice cream), and that they made good and regular use of the volunteer labor of young idealistic visitors who were always warmly welcomed and fed a hearty meal of fresh greens, Helen's famous soup, and Scott's gruel — a combination of raw oats, raisins, peanut butter and honey. Hay Bright also conveys that, despite having been critical toward the electric transmission grid and its pitfalls (a nuclear power plant was once proposed for Cape Rosier), the Nearings built a new house with normal modern conveniences, including grid electricity, next to the original Cape Rosier house. That house is now home of "The Good Life Center," which carries on the Nearing's work. (www.goodlife.org)

[edit] Books

Books written or edited by Helen and Scott Nearing:

Living the Good Life (1954), by Helen and Scott Nearing
Man's Search for the Good Life (1954), by Scott Nearing
Freedom: Promise and Menace (1961), by Scott Nearing
The Conscience of a Radical (1965), by Scott Nearing
The Maple Sugar Book (1972), by Helen and Scott Nearing
The Making of a Radical: a Political Autobiography (1972), by Scott Nearing
The Good Life Picture Album (1974), by Helen Nearing
Civilization and Beyond: Learning From History (1975), by Scott Nearing
Continuing the Good Life (1979), by Helen and Scott Nearing
Simple Food for the Good Life (1980), by Helen Nearing
Loving and Leaving the Good Life (1992), by Helen Nearing
Light on Aging and Dying (1995), by Helen Nearing
Guiding Principles for the Good Life (1997), by Helen Nearing
Wise Words for the Good Life: a Homesteader's Personal Collection (1999), by Helen Nearing