Coming Out of the Woods: The Solitary Life of a Maverick Environmentalist

A pioneer of the back-to-the-land movement, Kaufman established Saralyn, an ecologically minded community, on 330 acres of North Carolina woodlands in 1968. Some 35 families--owner-builders who created their own homes--attempted to live the simple life in what locals dubbed ""Hippie Town."" The colony's diverse residents have included ""three Irish bricklaying brothers,"" a Zen monk, a saxophone-playing dentist, a Quaker stone mason and a retired lieutenant-colonel who built a Japanese solar house. In this gracefully written, leisurely memoir, Kaufman wages a running argument with his former guiding light, Thoreau. Whereas Thoreau, convinced that wilderness could save civilization, advocated voluntary simplicity and voluntary poverty, Kaufman--by dint of hard experience pursuing a frugal, back-to-nature lifestyle--comes to the opposite conclusion: that managing land and natural resources is built into human behavior. Embracing technology as necessity, he notes that ""to live as [Thoreau] did is to live in malnutrition, in violation of the law, and in generally substandard conditions."" In 1974, Kaufman designed and built his own house in a forest half a mile from Saralyn. Among his welcome if uninvited house guests are fearless Carolina wrens, flying squirrels living in the attic, snakes and bees in an observation-box in the living-room wall. A vegetarian and organic gardener, Kaufman doesn't condemn hunting, and his critique of what he sees as the romantic fallacies of environmentalists and back-to-the-land enthusiasts undergirds this iconoclastic meditation on our place in nature and on the kinship between humankind and animals. (June)