Scott Nearing, Vermont's Founding Father?

Your government is no longer mine - Scott Nearing, The Making of a Radical: A Political Autobiography [Harborside, Maine: Social Science Institute, 1972, p. 152]

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. - Scott & Helen Nearing, The Good Life'.

Recently, Thomas Naylor was kind enough to invite me to a lecture at Middlebury College about Scott Nearing, an anti-war radical who was blacklisted from academia for, among other things, his unpopular stance against child labour (The Solution of the Child Labor Problem).

Nearing became a Vermont Homesteader in the mid-Twentieth Century and successfully set up a large scale maple sugaring operation in Winhall, Vermont. He and his wife Helen wrote a book about the experience called, Living the Good Life: How to Live Simply and Sanely in a Troubled World. The Nearings also travelled the world to teach about (among other things) the importance of the rebuilding soil. This was at a time when almost nobody questioned the rise of agribusiness and factory farming, despite the Dust Bowl.

Did Nearing's life and work change the course of Vermont history? He certainly attracted more than his share of interesting people to Vermont, reversing the brain-drain. Yet Nearing gets scant mention in the Vermont histories that I've read.

Nearing's Biographer Saltmarsh wrote, 'Nearing moved through a series of secessions — from Christianity, from politics, and finally from American society itself. He voyaged to the wilderness as if on a pilgrimage to a sacred place. His experience, along with a deeper understanding of American culture, led to the inescapable consciousness that capitalist cultural dominance was too strong to eliminate and therefore too powerful to control or mold...'

In 1945, Nearing wrote to Truman, who had just destroyed two cities in Japan with atomic bombs, 'Your government is no longer mine'. Is Scott Nearing the spiritual 'Founding Father' of the Second Vermont Republic?

Regardless of your opinion, this is essential reading for anyone interested in the evolution of the Vermont independence movement... whether you're working toward secession or just feel that it's important to build the soil and sequester carbon. The Good Life is available from GoodLife.org or from Amazon. A good short biography may alse be found on the web here.