The small farm in Brooksville where homesteading icons Helen and Scott Nearing lived has drawn thousands of people, inspired by their model of “living sanely and simply in a troubled world,” even decades after their deaths.
Year after year, visitors have driven down a narrow road to the stone home and gardens the couple built by hand overlooking Penobscot Bay in the local village of Harborside, now open to the public as the Good Life Center.
Jordan Humphrey and Lucy Marcus, who started work as travelling farmsitters during the pandemic, were hired to serve as its stewards this year. They were initially drawn to the job by the Nearing example of responding to troubled times by working hard, growing food and building, along with their principles of pacifism, vegetarianism and self-reliance.
But in recent years, the politics of homesteading has expanded to the right to include more libertarian and conservative views. A new presidential administration has embraced a politically charged approach to healthy living that’s challenged the stereotype of the lifestyle as a mostly left-leaning pursuit.
Meanwhile, the COVID pandemic has given rise to another boom in homesteading, while land has become increasingly unaffordable and other technological and climate challenges have accelerated and put up new barriers.
To some extent, the people stewarding the Nearings’ legacy see this as another chapter in the country’s history of reactions to societal upheaval. But in response to these changes, they now see a need to adapt while staying true to the couple’s ideals.
“We’re still in a troubled world,” said the center’s board chair Rachael M Rollson, referencing the subtitle of the Nearings’ seminal book: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World.
It’s been 55 years since a reprint of the couple’s book “Living the Good Life,” originally published in 1954, helped spur the back-to-the-land movement in Maine. Since the Nearings died — him at age 100 in 1983, her 12 years later at the age of 91 — The Good Life Center has become dedicated to preserving their legacy.
But the growing conservative faction in homesteading — including a Mormon “tradwife” ranch influencer in Utah, a “Make America Healthy Again” subdivision in Ohio, a homesteading development in Tennessee founded for the online “New Right” — runs counter to the Nearings’ outspoken advocacy for pacifism, vegetarianism and self-reliance.
The conservative threads of homesteading have not taken much root in the Nearing orbit around coastal and mid-Maine, members of the center’s board and staff said. The couple were anti-capitalist vegetarian pacifists; the center’s events often focus on social justice causes.
Many of the issues Scott Nearing in particular critiqued nearly a century ago still seem just as fresh to his followers today, including income inequality, social upheaval, distrust of government and the pitfalls of materialist culture.
Populist responses to such issues have created something of a pendulum swing of back-to-the-land style movements in America since the industrial revolution, according to Margot Kelley, a Maine writer who explored that history in her 2022 book “Foodtopia.”
For those groups, Kelley found, a major goal was to have access to nutritious food outside of a commercial system they viewed as tainted.
“The people, in the moment, felt they could no longer trust the institutions in their country to take care of them,” Kelley said. “People did respond by upping their own self-reliance.”
Most recently, the pandemic seemed to feed another wave of distrust in the system, according to Warren Berkowitz, who left Boston for Maine in the late 1970s, inspired by the Nearings’ column in Mother Earth News. He’s now a member of the center’s board.
Berkowitz and his wife, Nancy, both responded to the issues of their day by seeking an alternative lifestyle in homesteading. On the Blue Hill peninsula, where they still live, the couple found a close community of likeminded homesteaders that have helped shape the area’s identity.
They haven’t seen major cultural changes locally, though Warren Berkowitz said people seem to have become more vocal about homeschooling their children and putting up food for different, more survivalist reasons than left-leaning back-to-the-landers.
“[The Nearing] legacy is very important, and I think even as time goes on, we’re in that phase of life that’s very…you know, up in the air, in this country, and so that’s when homesteading is important,” he said.
Kelley and the Good Life Center stewards also wonder how climate change and artificial intelligence will change our relationships to physical work, the natural world and successful farming. How those issues develop also could bring new relevance to the Nearings’ ideas.
“[The Nearings] worked really hard, they didn’t just write about it,” Marcus said. “So that feels very relevant now … when so much of AI can kind of rob people of the tangled and laborious process of doing things.”
M Rollson, Humphrey and Marcus also see the increasing unaffordability of land as a major shift to the typical image of homesteading. It’s already leading to more collaborative models in Maine.
Kelley, the author, noted that farming independently on private property is a founding American theme, but even homeownership is now a challenge for many.
Humphrey and Marcus recalled a group of visiting college students who questioned whether such a life was still possible without preexisting wealth. Land ownership is out of reach for the couple themselves, who hope social connections will lead them to a homestead.
Humphrey and Marcus also observed a new feeling of scarcity nationally, from the recent delays in federal food benefits to the effects of climate change. Affordability has risen as a focal point in national politics and was a major topic shaping November elections, according to NPR.
Amid these challenges, the Nearings’ philosophy drew more than a thousand visitors to the center in Harborside this season, according to the stewards.
Many were interested in gardening, self-reliance, stone building construction or family memories of the Nearings’ influence. A notable number came from South Korea, where the ideas of self-discipline and sufficiency have become popular with a religious leader who preaches austerity.
Crucially, the concept of self-reliance promoted by the Nearings doesn’t imply isolation — the couple themselves were frequently busy with visitors, workers and neighbors, according to M Rollson, who is also a Nearing scholar. Nancy Berkowitz, who lived and worked with the couple, recalls their generosity above all.
Rather, the Nearings’ version of self-reliance is one of personal responsibility for a person’s actions in the world, M Rollson said, an idea rooted in New England’s philosophical tradition. Actually doing physical homesteading work is transformative in that way, she said.
“Scott started with the idea that with that self-reliance, we can also build the kind of world that we want to see, like, literally,” she said.
M Rollson said the center needs to work on promoting the couple’s messages – as the Nearings themselves did, traveling the country to speak in the off-season – and that it is currently taking “big strides” to do so.
“I think the national and international mood is kind of calling for us to step up and be a little more [active] than we’ve been,” she said. “Frankly, it’s not enough for us to just grow food for ourselves.”
The center is working on partnerships with organizations in Maine and afield, expanding Scott Nearing’s reference library and making it easier to access, preparing for researchers and school groups and hosting a digital story recorder for people to share their memories.
“It shows we are in this particular place where people are looking for answers,” M Rollson said of the renewed efforts. “It’s always been that way, but things feel more unsteady now.”
In October, the state’s historic preservation commission nominated the center to the National Register of Historic Places, based on its social significance. The designation is headed for a review by the National Park Service, which administers the register, early next year, according to M Rollson.
Looking ahead to the next chapter of the “Good Life” in Maine, those involved at the center believe living and working in community will continue to grow – replacing the idea of rugged individuals leaving society.
“That’s one of the things that Scott always said,” Warren Berkowitz said. “He said when they wrote that book, they didn’t write it to make everybody [live] their life the way Helen and Scott did it. They talked about ‘a’ good life, not ‘the’ good life.”
