William Powers, Author of Dispatches from the Sweet Life

Author, Speaker, Professor, Activist

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New World Library
(2018-09-04)
304 pages
ISBN: 978-1608685646

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Dispatches from the Sweet Life

One Family, Five Acres, and a Community’s Quest to Reinvent the World

Excerpt

I gaze out over Suraqueta’s clay roofs and white colonial façades, the green hills cupping it, framing a scene that could be Tuscany if not for the sparks of green-and-red parrots flaring over our heads. Strong notes from mariachi trumpets drift upward from a wedding somewhere below, and I catch the invigorating scent of eucalyptus. Higher mountains loom to the north, and there lie cloud forests of rare giant fern trees in the biodiversity-rich Amboró National Park bordering the town. Over my shoulder is a massive jaguar-shaped Inca ruin. A breeze releases soft static from the yellow-flowering carnaval tree overhead as my half-Bolivian daughter, Amaya, swings from its branches, yellow petals snowing down.

She climbs down from the carnaval and begins plucking purple guapurú fruit, popping the grape-size morsels into her mouth. We follow Amaya’s lead. The juice warm on my cheek, I imagine ditching my American life for a simpler one abroad. We could build a custom adobe house on this very hillock and grow much of our own food on these acres — mandarins, pomegranates, bananas, vegetables of all sorts. We’d reforest the agriculturally degraded flatter portions of it to create more habitat for the native guinea pigs and iguanas I hear rustling in the quiñe shrubs, and re-channel the creek through the land to create fishponds. I imagine rising with the sun, working part time via laptop and Wi-Fi, opening abundant time to raise my family in community.

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