The Unsettlers

Description

“An in-depth and compelling account of diverse Americans living off the grid.” —Los Angeles Times

The radical search for the simple life in today’s America.

On a frigid April night, a classically trained opera singer, five months pregnant, and her husband, a former marine biologist, disembark an Amtrak train in La Plata, Missouri, assemble two bikes, and pedal off into the night, bound for a homestead they’ve purchased, sight unseen. Meanwhile, a horticulturist, heir to the Great Migration that brought masses of African Americans to Detroit, and her husband, a product of the white flight from it, have turned to urban farming to revitalize the blighted city they both love. And near Missoula, Montana, a couple who have been at the forefront of organic farming for decades navigate what it means to live and raise a family ethically.   

A work of immersive journalism steeped in a distinctively American social history and sparked by a personal quest, The Unsettlers traces the search for the simple life through the stories of these new pioneers and what inspired each of them to look for — or create — a better existence. Captivating and clear-eyed, it dares us to imagine what a sustainable, ethical, authentic future might actually look like.“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 

Mark Sundeen is the author of several books, including The Man Who Quit Money and the coauthor of North by Northwestern, which was a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller. He has taught fiction and nonfiction in the MFA creative writing programs at the University of New Mexico and Southern New Hampshire University. He and his wife divide their time between Fort Collins, Colorado, and Moab, Utah.

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, work to put our own inner house in order.” He viewed economics through a Buddhist lens, asserting that “the essence of civilization [is] 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?”

Days after our wedding and our honeymoon in a lake cabin, I left Cedar in Montana and set out, alone, for the Midwest. Summer of 2013 had lasted to September and it was hot and muggy. I drove through La PlataÕs shuttered downtown and along the edges of farms where rows of soybeans were marked with signs advertising their peculiar brand names, which sounded more like erection enhancers than vegetables-Syngenta, CruiserMaxx, Touchdown Total-and then

onto a long, straight dirt road that led to a wooden cottage.

The Possibility Alliance looked precisely like what it was when Ethan and Sarah had bought it: an Amish farm. An early-century Craftsman bungalow rested in the shade of big trees. A barn housed two draft horses, and inside a tin warehouse dozens of bikes hung from hooks. Behind the house, chickens clucked in a hutch, herbs flourished in a garden, and someone was cooking over a fire in the shade of an outdoor kitchen.

Ethan himself looked about as normal as a guy could look. He wore shorts and a ragged T-shirt and river sandals. Hair: brownish, thinnish, shortish. Likely he cut it himself. He told me where to park my car, where to pitch my tent, where to fill my water bottle.

The first order of business was trying to cool off. It was ninety degrees and humid, more of the same forecast for the week, and I was suddenly aware that there would be no air-conditioning, fans, refrigerated drinks, or ice cubes. Ethan invited me to cool down by jumping in the pond. “The only rule is you have to keep your clothes on,” he said. He didn’t want to offend the Amish neighbors.

I stepped behind a tree and changed into trunks, then beelined for the dock and leapt in. But instead of the heart-stopping chill of mountain lakes, the water caressed me like a lukewarm bath. I floated there, as if in a sensory-deprivation tank. Finally someone instructed that by diving deep I could reach the cold pockets, and I did, shivering joyfully in the deeps, then popping to the surface, finally refreshed.

So began Experience Week. There were twenty of us in all, some visiting from other intentional communities, some considering joining the PA, and others like me, the Luddite-curious. We attended classes on topics as wide-ranging as straw-bale construction, conflict resolution, organic gardening, civil disobedience, bow making, hand-saw forestry, and integral nonviolence. We rode bicycles to La Plata to sing in a nursing home. Four or five times a day we flopped off the dock into the tepid pond and floated there, slightly and temporarily cooled. There was holding hands in a circle, singing, naming things we were thankful for, icebreaker games: it felt just like the dozens of Outward Bound courses I had loved leading.

Like her husband, Sarah gave no outward indication of radicalness, in cargo shorts and sandals and a tank top, her dark hair brushed straight to her shoulders. While Ethan led many of the workshops and games, she mostly retreated from the group. She seemed to have her hands full with their two daughters, six-year-old Etta and two-year-old Isla (pronouncd I-la), beautiful, precocious girls who had hardly seen a television screen or the inside of a store. In addition to Sarah and Ethan, there was one other permanent member of the alliance and three full-time residents considering committing. It wasn’t a light decision; joining the PA required giving away all your savings-not giving it to the community, but donating it elsewhere. Another six apprentices were camped in tents for the season. The men at the PA were mostly clean-cut, shirtless Midwestern boys who split wood and milked the goats. If not for the rap about permaculture and yoga, I might have thought I had landed in a frat house.

Ethan and the others gathered us around and said, “Now it’s time to receive your superhero instructions.” They passed around a basket of folded paper notes and we each picked one. “Before the end of the week,” Ethan said, “you must complete this mission.” I opened mine. It read, Tell somebody a secret that you’re afraid to tell.

It was becoming clear that, as guests, we were not passive observers but rather subjects of the alliance’s mission: to open our hearts and minds.

“It’s easier to radicalize an institution than it is to radicalize yourself,” Ethan said.

This struck me as some bull. I was already a good-enough person. I recycled. I paid taxes. I voted Democrat. I didn’t need to change. I just needed to persuade other people to change, to live a little more lightly, to live, well, a little more like me.

That night, lying in a pool of sweat in my tent, I had a chance to reflect on exactly what sort of life I led. I thought about my own household. At home, as dishes piled up in the sink, I had Googled myself and found that someone had posted photos of me on his Tumblr page. I clicked, assuming I’d find some parade of literary excellence. Instead it was a collection titled “Balding Men.” I ran my fingers across my scalp. It’s actually called a high forehead-a Scandinavian trait. It connotes wisdom. I searched for “bald authors” to confirm that I had not made that list. But was that because of my adequate hair or my obscurity? I examined the hair of literary stars. Jonathan Franzen, David Foster Wallace: full heads of it. The Norwegian Karl Ove KnausgŒrd looked like a goddamn hŒr modell for Vidal Sassoon.

I was mid-list, mid-life, mid-forehead.

Amid everyone else on the Internet vying for acclaim, who would ever adore me? I surfed the websites of authors male and female: the lustrous hair, the bestsellers, the university appointments, the foreign translations. A fantasy of these recipients of Guggenheim grants formed in my mind, not an orgy but a Committee: in filtered sunlight behind lacquered diplomas they would encircle me like a panel of judges, praise my oeuvre, award me a fellowship, whisper sweetly that my life’s work was worth the trouble. My appetite for this sort of acclaim had been repressed before the Internet, because finding an outlet was too laborious. Now it was easy. Infinite.

But the headshots instead of lavishing praise murmured the opposite: Your career, your talent: so mediocre. And as for your marriage: Are you sure you made the right choice? Why didn’t you find someone more successful, someone on the Committee who might introduce you to the right people? Yet I kept coming back.

I had relied on a therapist over the years to condone whatever I wanted to do. Now he furrowed his brow and said, “Sounds like you’re not being a good partner.” He suggested that online voyeurism was the seed of infidelity. “Because here’s the thing about being married,” he said, “and this is the voice of God talking: You can not fuck around.”

“But it’s not exactly sexual,” I said.

Which was true. But what I was brewing was still a form of betrayal, more cowardly than outright betrayal. Despite having married the only woman I had ever wanted to marry, I still had something hollow in me, something that had been there all along and that I’d assumed would be filled by her love. For years I had chased love and acclaim, as equal rewards. But now that I had actual love, I saw that it was the opposite of acclaim. In the parlance of Schumacher, instead of purifying my character I was multiplying my wants. My longing for acclaim appeared to have no limits. Beneath my nonmaterialistic exterior, I was as driven to succeed as any salesman or stockbroker. Marrying the woman I loved would not move me up to the next career rung, and with a gasp of shame I had to admit that, somehow, I had hoped it would.

I resolved to disband the Committee. But when I sat at the screen and the link to some “Best American Essayist” appeared, I clicked it anyway. The Committee would not disband.US

Additional information

Dimensions	0.8200 × 5.4000 × 8.2000 in
Imprint	Riverhead Books
ISBN-13	09780735216082
ISBN-10	0735216088
Author	Mark Sundeen
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	HIS036070, BIO030000
Subjects	back to the land, homesteaders, urban farming, permaculture, sustainable living, narrative nonfiction, Montana, suburbs, intentional living, social activism, anarchism, missouri, Missoula, white flight, Belle Isle, food security, food production, food justice, natural farming, The Farm, Wendell Berry, Sociology, homeschooling, HIS036070, nature, farming, homesteading, sustainability, marriage, american history, midwest, environmentalism, anthropology, journalism, evolution, BIO030000, Social history, detroit, utopia, gardening, horticulture, environmental