Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin off the Grid & Beyond The American Dream
Categories: Books, Engineering & Transportation, Engineering

Why would a successful American physician choose to live in a twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot cabin without running water or electricity? To find out, writer and activist William Powers visited Dr. Jackie Benton in rural North Carolina. No Name Creek gurgled through Benton’s permaculture farm, and she stroked honeybees’ wings as she shared her wildcrafter philosophy of living on a planet in crisis. Powers, just back from a decade of international aid work, then accepted Benton’s offer to stay at the cabin for a season while she traveled. There, he befriended her eclectic neighbors — organic farmers, biofuel brewers, eco-developers — and discovered a sustainable but imperiled way of life. In these pages, Powers not only explores this small patch of community but draws on his international experiences with other pockets of resistance. This engrossing tale of Powers’s struggle for a meaningful life with a smaller footprint proposes a paradigm shift to an elusive “Soft World” with clues to personal happiness and global healing.


Publisher: New World Library; Illustrated edition (October 6, 2010)
Publication date: October 6, 2010
Language: English
File size: 986 KB
Text to Speech: Enabled
Screen Reader: Supported
Enhanced typesetting: Enabled
X Ray: Not Enabled
Word Wise: Not Enabled
Sticky notes: On Kindle Scribe
Print length: 298 pages