Most of us have thought about chucking it all — the job, the bills, and the stuff. All of it. But then what? In Dispatches from the Sweet Life: One Family, Five Acres, and a Community’s Quest to Reinvent the World (September 2018), William Powers actually does it, chronicling the trials and joys of a family striving to live sustainably off the work-and-spend treadmill in South America.
In his first book, Twelve by Twelve, Powers lived in an off-grid tiny house in rural North Carolina. In New Slow City, he and his wife, Melissa, inhabited a Manhattan micro-apartment in search of slow in the fastest city in the world. In Dispatches from the Sweet Life, the couple, with baby in tow, search for balance, humanity, and happiness in a subtropical town in Bolivia, where the Andes meets the Amazon. Surequeta is also a Transition Town — a model community that aims to increase self-sufficiency to reduce the potential effects of peak oil, climate destruction, and economic instability.
Leaving behind America’s work-and-spend treadmill La Familia Powers embrace the potential of the Sweet Life (vivir bien) — the Bolivian idea that happiness is best achieved in deep community in balance with nature.
Initially, the young family discovers a blossoming Transition Town with a miniscule carbon footprint, organic farms, community work parties, and a pace of life reflected in its denizens’ longevity and happiness. They build an adobe house beside a prolific orchard and weave their lives into a creative community of Bolivians and foreigners.
But it isn’t long before tropical insects ravish their organic garden and invade their house, carbon-neutral transition initiatives sputter, and North American-inspired capitalism —mines, malls, Big-Ag — extends its seductive tentacles, threatening Bolivia’s pioneering Law of Mother Earth and the very foundations of the Sweet Life.
Joining the battle is a motley crew of permaculturists, bio-builders, artists, beer brewers, earnest university students, creative businesspeople, and public officials who, against all odds, struggle to forge a Global South model of self-sufficiency and sustainable happiness.
Can one family overcome the obstacles to living a sustainable, happy life? Can a vulnerable town confront fast corporate globalization, defending a slow economy and community? Can the Bolivian nation, in the end, forge a workable alternative to inspire an endangered planet? No matter the outcome, Powers delivers a timely, inspirational, and thought-provoking personal exploration of what sustainable living looks like.