self-sufficiency

"With urban farming and backyard chicken flocks becoming increasingly popular, Coleman has written this timely and honest portrait of her own childhood experience in Maine with her two homesteading parents during the turbulent 1970s. A luminous, evocative memoir that explores the hope and struggle behind one family's search for a self-sufficient life."

To escape civilization Daniel Hays he "bought an island, built a house, packed up his wife and stepson and two dogs and three boatloads of supplies, and moved there for a year." He harnesses electricity from solar power and an unpredictable windmill, funnels rainwater for their showers, creates a toilet seat out of a whale vertebra and a kitchen sink out of a jawbone, and strings the bed up on pulleys so that it lifts to the ceiling."