organic farming Archives - William Powers, Author of Dispatches from the Sweet Life

Getting Away from It All… If That’s Still Possible

January 20, 2011 by William Powers Leave a Comment

Radio Eco-Shock interviewed William Powers this week; it airs on two dozen university and community radio stations this week in the U.S. and Canada. Enjoy!

Listen: William_Powers on Radio Ecoshock

About the interview: There is an emptiness that invites us all to escape. I did, for a while, living for 10 years without electricity in a self-built cabin in Northern Ontario, Canada.

William Powers did. And who is he? Google tells me about an American from Long Island, an international development and aid worker in poorer countries, a man concerned with the extinction of people, languages, and Nature.

“Mommy, I want something ‘wrapped in garbage, please”

December 27, 2010 by William Powers 9 Comments

Now we’re really stuck. The snow keeps dumping on my sister’s family dome on ten glorious white acres in Richmond, VT.

My sister lives in this dome in Richmond, Vermont

Flights are cancelled for the next days, and my parents, myself and everyone else here visiting for the holidays is stuck in Vermont.

And? My nephews—Leo (7), Huck (4), and Roy (2)— certainly don’t mind the blizzard. They dwell blissfully in the now, sledding down the hill toward the freezing creek and playing with legos by the wood burning stove. No TV for distraction here, just old-fashioned play and books and simple toys. Oh, and Another Culture.

Kids Deconstruct Super Bowl Commercials in School

August 30, 2010 by William Powers 1 Comment

In 1996, while teaching at Santa Fe Indian School, my Native American students told me their story of Jesus: Jesus, they told me, continues to fight an ongoing battle with Murosuyo, a Native American god. They duke it out in the sky and on the ground. The stakes are the fate of the earth. Just as Jesus seems to deliver the final death blow, Murosuyo tackles him in the heavens, and they fall together through the clouds and into a lake, and so it continues. I found it fascinating that their culture and environment is still hanging on today through Murosuyo’s efforts. My teaching became an exchange of ideas.

Stan Crawford’s Garlic Farm (II): Stay “maladjusted to empire”

August 11, 2010 by William Powers 3 Comments

Stan writes in A Garlic Testament about “the pound weight of the real,” the actual wrinkled dollars that are exchanged over a box of organic garlic at a farmers market. I’d weigh a pound, hand that weight to a customer, and accept the greenbacks that would pay my wage and Stan and Rose Mary’s farm expenses. They were constantly “snatching from the cash flow,” as Stan put it, living without savings right on the edge of subsistence like most of humanity. Yet that’s exactly what bound them with others. A kind of barter system existed in the area — I shear your sheep, you midwife for me — as well as a traditional communal relationship over irrigation that centered around maintaining tiny dirt canals called acequias. This wasn’t just pragmatism; I sensed a real passion and spirit that comes from subsistence. I saw it again all over the Global South, where living along the contours of enough, without much surplus, keeps you on your entrepreneurial toes and linked to others through reciprocity.

Declare Independence from Stuff

July 15, 2010 by William Powers 4 Comments

The fourth of July has come and gone, but each of us can continue to declare independence every day: independence from stuff.

Can our own personal economy and the Leisure Ethic come together as rebellion? I’m on Cape Cod now, rained in during a family vacation, and my mind is wandering back to my time in Jackie’s tiny 12 foot by 12 foot house. Her lifestyle is a twenty-first-century Boston Tea Party, but she hasn’t thrown just one product overboard; rather, she’s tossed the whole lot of planet-killing junk.

On the Road in Arizona

June 2, 2010 by William Powers 6 Comments

I’m on the road in Arizona this week, meeting with people to talk about Twelve by Twelve. But like everywhere else, we’re also talking about the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The over half-million gallons of oil spewing into the Gulf each day is terrible, but not terribly surprising. After all, we’re also losing several thousand acres of rainforest every day, heating the climate by a fraction of a degree each day, and losing an indigenous culture every two weeks as jungle homelands become cattle clear-cuts.

What’s it like to live in a 12’ by 12’, off-the-grid house?

May 12, 2010 by William Powers 24 Comments

Three years ago, I returned to America after a decade of aid and conservation work in Africa and Latin America. Abroad, I’d seen, starkly, the grave impact the global economic system was having on our environment—Amazon rainforests clear-cut for fast-food cattle, African rivers poisoned by multinational mining—and began asking myself a daunting question: How could humanity transition to gentler, more responsible ways of living by replacing attachment to things with deeper relationships with people, nature, and self?

Fortunately, I stumbled upon someone with some clues: Dr. Jackie Benton (a psudonym, per her request). I met this slight, sixty-year-old physician, she was stroking a honey bee’s wings in front of her twelve-foot by twelve-foot, off-the-grid home in North Carolina.