At Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America

Notes

Abbreviations The following abbreviations of publication titles are used throughout the notes. cb i The Life and Letters of John Burroughs, vol. 1, by Clara Barrus cb ii The Life and Letters of John Burroughs, vol. 2, by Clara Barrus cgl Continuing the Good Life, by Scott and Helen Nearing flight The Flight from the City, by Ralph Borsodi gl Living the Good Life, by Scott and Helen Nearing hc Home Comfort, ed. Richard Wizansky journals The Heart of Burroughs’s Journals, by John Burroughs ll Loving and Leaving the Good Life, by Helen Nearing llp Life, and Love and Peace, by Bolton Hall mr The Making of a Radical, by Scott Nearing ms Man’s Search for the Good Life, by Scott Nearing tal Three Acres and Liberty, by Bolton Hall talks John Burroughs Talks, ed. Clifton Johnson wpf What Are People For? by Wendell Berry 243 NOTES Preface Epigraph: Helen Knothe Nearing, Loving and Leaving the Good Life (Post Mills, VT: Chelsea Green, 1992), 102. Hereafter Loving and Leaving the Good Life is cited as LL. 1. It is important to point out from the outset that “homesteader” was not Scott Nearing’s primary identity. He saw himself first as a teacher, scholar, and activist who advocated a socialist society that could avert the evils of both capitalism and totalitarian communism. At the same time, however, homesteading became for him not only a means to an end when he could no longer teach professionally (because he had been blacklisted for his socialist convictions) but also a way of bringing to fruition his earlier experiences in social reform and simple living. 2. The dates given here are the ones the Nearings publicized, although they did not live year-round in Vermont until 1935. Throughout their homesteading lives they often left for portions of the winter for research, lecturing, and travel and did not give up their apartment in New York City until 1940. The Nearings’ most well-known “Good Life” book is Living the Good Life, first published by the Social Science Institute (the Nearings’ own press) in 1954. It was republished by Schocken in 1970 to an enthusiastic reception. Continuing the Good Life (New York: Schocken, 1979) was also quite popular. The two texts have been republished in one volume, The Good Life (New York: Schocken, 1989). So that the reader may know which of the two texts is being cited, Living the Good Life is hereafter cited as GL, and Continuing the Good Life is cited as CGL, but with pagination given from the combined 1989 edition. 3. Letter to the author from the Bontas, dated January 1, 1997. Cited with permission . Contemporary interest in homesteading appears to be growing. One source of evidence for growth can be found in the circulation health of various magazines on homesteading and rural life (Mother Earth News, Harrowsmith, Countryside and Small Stock Journal, Back Home Magazine, and Backwoods Home Magazine) as well as an increasing number of books, Web sites, and Internet discussion groups on homebased ecology and self-sufficiency. This “build your own house and grow your own food” literature also belongs to a wider context of growing cultural urges toward slowing the pace of life, protecting the environment, pursuing simplicity, and practicing alternative health care. Representative popular texts include Cecile Andrews, The Circle of Simplicity (New York: Perennial Books, 1999); Duane Elgin, Voluntary Simplicity: Towards a Life That Is Inwardly Simple, Outwardly Rich (New York: William Morrow, 1981); Thomas Moore, The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life (New York: HarperCollins , 1996); Jim Nollman, Why We Garden: Cultivating a Sense of Place (New York: Henry Holt, 1994); Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez, Your Money or Your Life (New York: Viking, 1992); E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful (London: Blond and Briggs, 1973); and Jerome Segal, Graceful Simplicity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). 244 Notes to Pages xiii–xiv For analytical commentary on the social and historical forces behind some of these developments, see Meredith McGuire, Ritual Healing in Suburban America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1988; paperback reprint, 1991); Catherine L. Albanese, “Fisher Kings and Public Places: The Old New Age in the 1990s,” in Religion in the Nineties, ed. Wade Clark Roof, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 527 (May 1993): 131–43; Juliette B. Schor, The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure (New York: Basic Books, 1991), especially 139...