“Who Were the Nearings?”

“Who Were the Nearings?” July 30

Greg Joly will present “Who Were the Nearings? Living the Good Life in the 21st Century” at the Camden Public Library on Tuesday, July 30, at 7:00 pm. Joly will explore both the intellectual and homesteading life of Scott and Helen Nearing with the use of anecdotes, writings, and archival photos. He will flesh out their practices and the philosophical underpinnings of a Good Life and show how the ideas of the Nearings continue to inform various 21st century sustainability movements both here and abroad.

Arriving in Maine from Vermont in 1953, the Nearings established Forest Farm, enriching the soil with compost, building a stonewalled garden, continuing their lecture tours, and writing, while also welcoming intellectual friends from around the world as well as a young generation of seekers who had read their seminal book, Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World, published in 1954. The Nearings have been called the inspiration for the “back to the land” movement of the 1960s and 1970s.

Greg Joly homesteads with his wife in Jamaica, Vermont (the town where the Nearings began their homesteading odyssey in 1932) and has been researching and writing about the Nearings for over 20 years. He is also the Chair of the Board of the Good Life Center in Harborside, Maine.

Camden resident Nancy Caudle-Johnson, a Good Life Center board member, will also speak briefly at the program. She says, “The Nearings’ philosophy and principles of simplicity, sustainability, nonviolence, and social and economic justice become more relevant to humanity which each passing year for their ideas and pursuit of a purposeful life offer an alternative path for any of us to explore.”

The program at the Camden Public Library is in the tradition of “Monday Night Meetings” which the Nearings hosted at their home, offering a forum for their many eminent visitors and an opportunity for discussion of ideas to anyone interested in attending. The Nearings continued to live in Harborside until their deaths – Scott in 1983 at age 100 and Helen following in 1995 at 91.