WORK HARD, BE WELL, AT AGE 100
At the age of 100, radical economist and lifestyle rebel Scott Nearing died in his bed in the stone masonry home he and his wife, Helen, had built by hand on their Harborside, Maine farm. By example and through their best-selling writing, they fostered the ‘Back to the Land’ movement in the 1960s. Scott died in 1983 of natural causes, choosing at the end to stop eating and taking fluids. He died peacefully. Helen perished in a single car crash at the age of 94. She was not infirm when she died.
Somehow, they seemed to have stumbled upon a successful formula for living to a robust and very productive old age.
In aggregate, the Nearings lived nearly two centuries. By choice, both lived a physical lifestyle to the very end, setting aside four hours every day to labor out of doors. At first in Stratton, Vermont and later on the Maine coast, they constructed many expertly crafted stone buildings, and extensive masonry walls and garden enclosures. They gardened nonstop summer and winter, improving the living soil and growing food in recycled-material solar greenhouses throughout the coldest months of the winter. They also stored copious amounts of root crops in cold cellars.
Most interestingly, they tended to divide their days into distinct periods of time and gave equal weight to each: outdoor labor, arts and crafts, rest, and writing, reading or socializing. In this way, they had the energy and reserves throughout the day to give full attention to their many interests.
They lived unconventionally, to say the least. Their diet was rich morning, noon, and night in uncooked fruits and vegetables that they grew themselves. All of it was strictly organic fare. They produced maple syrup (bucket harvesting method), cut down and sawed most of their heating wood with hand tools, tended big gardens, heaped up brimming compost piles, perfected passive solar greenhouse culture, and built and built hundreds of feet of exquisite rock masonry walls. The two estates they fabricated by hand are to this day permanent works of art.
Coming from the world of academia at mid-life, they did not choose to languish behind a writing desk in a study or lecture in ivy covered halls. Instead, they chose a life of work in the sun and of self-reliance. Yes, during the winter they traveled on the author and speaking engagement circuit. But they were at home on the farm, outside, tending to their own needs and honing their self-sufficiency knowledge and skills.
In living as they did, they discovered a path to human longevity that, in my way of thinking, could be a model for future living on an abused planet that is conspiring to do battle with the excesses of human enterprise and population.
At the core of their experience was the tenet that humans should not sell their labor to the lowest bidder, but should provide for their own needs by producing goods for their own consumption. They also recognized that self-production of goods flew in the face of consumerism, wherein citizens who did not produce goods for daily life were squeezed into the role of dependent consumer. Such a citizen had to exchange lowest bidder wages for virtually all consumer goods: all foods, building materials or shelter, transportation, heat and fuel, medicines, health care and child care, and so on. To counter that, the Nearings became what rural Kentucky philosopher, critically acclaimed writer, and caustic mass-agribusiness critic Wendell Berry would term a “prosumer” – a producer/consumer of one’s own goods and services.
The benefits of adopting a producer/consumer lifestyle paid off for the Nearings in robust health and very long active lives. They enjoyed a nutrient-rich diet free of junk food and built and maintained strong bodies for decades by committing to physical work. Their work was varied and purposeful. They made time to devote to writing, reading, and research, thereby keeping their minds stimulated and memories sharp. Their lifestyle ensured they did not need drugs to prolong life, nor did they have much need of health services.
Contrast that to what is underway across the nation today. The hollowing out of the industrial core of America since the Reagan years is having a substantial negative impact on longevity and quality of life. The wholesale loss of good paying blue collar and middle management white collar jobs has given rise to a set of grim statistics of late. Working class Americans are dying younger, particularly white men and women, according to a host of recent studies. The loss of prospects across Middle America and the slow but real decline in earning power over a full generation are fostering substantial increases in incidences of depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, and accidents. As a result, longevity has peaked and life expectancy is in decline across broad swaths of the heartland: the Rust Belt, Appalachia, the South and Southwest. This trend is being aggravated by an increasingly sedentary population and by poor food choices: consumption of highly processed foods instead of whole, fresh foods.
In a sense, the lifestyle the Nearings adopted was one that more closely resembled that of our forebears 250 years ago. In colonial America, most immigrants to the continent and native Americans, too, lived on and worked the land. They provided for their own needs first and, if they were fortunate to be productive and have good growing seasons, traded, bartered, or sold their surplus goods into the burgeoning American marketplace. Wresting a living from the land required truly hard work and always will.
But physical work may actually be the key to long life, provided it is confined to four or five hours a day and is coupled with exceptionally fresh, whole foods, intellectual stimulation, play and leisure, and plenty of rest. To achieve that sort of healthful, balanced existence on a national or global scale would require a complete overhaul of the national culture and the globe straddling economic mono-system. A new social paradigm would have to evolve and become fully formed. The Nearings, throughout their long lives and well into advanced age, laid down a path that could take us to that new place.
(PHOTO CREDIT: Mother Earth News)
