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.

Here, 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.

Full audio copyright: 2019 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved. Excerpts on pages 213 and 214 from the poems “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps” and “Prayer” from A New Selected Poems by Galway Kinnell, © 2000 by Galway Kinnell. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Inc. Excerpt on page 239 from The Quotidian Mysteries by Kathleen Norris, © 1998 by Kathleen Norris. Reprinted by permission of Paulist Press, Inc.