William Powers discusses his book: Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin off the Grid & Beyond the American Dream

Friday 6/25  7pm-8pm
William Powers discusses his book: Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin off the Grid & Beyond the  American Dream

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.

William Powers hails from Long Island, NY and has worked for over a decade in development aid and conservation in Latin America, Africa, Washington, D.C., and Native North America. From 2002 to 2004 he managed the community components of a project in the Bolivian Amazon that won a 2003 prize for environmental innovation from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. His essays and commentaries on global issues have appeared in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune, and on National Public Radio. Mr. Powers has worked at the World Bank, and holds international relations degrees from Brown University and Georgetown's School of Foreign Service.  A 2004-2005 recipient of the Open Door Foundation for non-fiction, he is the author of the Liberia memoir Blue Clay People, the Bolivian memoir Whispering in the Giant's Ear and the memoir of living “off-the-grid” in a twelve-foot-square cabin Twelve by Twelve: A One-Room Cabin Off the Grid & Beyond the American Dream.