"This calm and unjudgmental account of living a little more lightly on the earth will do readers more good than a thousand of the self-help books crowding the bestseller lists. It will make you think about your own life more than you've thought about it for years, and for that service we can be deeply grateful to the talented Eric Brende." -BILL McKIBBEN, author of The End of Nature and Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age

What happens when a graduate of MIT, the bastion of technological advancement, and his bride move to a community so primitive in its technology that even Amish groups consider it antiquated?

Eric Brende conceives a real-life experiment: to see if, in fact, all our cell phones, wide-screen TVs, and SUVs have made life easier and better--or whether life would be preferable without them. By turns, the query narrows down to a single question: What is the least we need to achieve the most? With this in mind, the Brendes ditch their car, electric stove, refrigerator, running water, and everything else motorized or "hooked to the grid" and begin an eighteen-month trial run--one that dramatically changes the way they live, and proves entertaining and surprising to readers...

Cast of Neighbors

Prologue

Taking Orders

Section I:

Planting

1 Seeds of Discontent

2 Paring Back

3 Lightening Up

4 Artfully Answering Nature

5 The Ram

6 The Missing Refrigerator

7 The Sounds of Silence

Section II:

Growing

8 Quickening

9 A Church Meeting

  10 A Barn Raising

  11 The Dating Game

  12 Meet the Neighbors

  13 Secrets and Politics

  14 Heatstroke

  15 Weighing the Work

Section III:

Harvesting

  16 As the Pumpkins Turn

  17 After the Fall: Even Farmers Get the Blues

  18 Birth

  19 Husbandry

  20 Pulling in the Reins

  21 Closing Time

  22 Outside, and the Box

Epilogue

  Recipe for a Leisurely, Laborsaving Life