I've just finished reading The Good Life, Helen and Scott Nearing's Sixty Years of Self-Sufficient Living. This is from the introduction, it is amazing to me how this could have been written today in the wake of 9/11:

During the deepest part of the Great Depression, in 1932, we moved from New York City to a farm in the Green Mountains... When we moved to Vermont we left a society gripped by depression and unemployment, falling prey to facism, and on the verge of another world wide military free-for-all; and entered a pre-industrial, rural community. The society from which we moved had rejected in practice and priciple our pacifism, our vegetarianism and our collectivism. So thorough was this rejection that, holding such views, we could not teach in the schools, write in the press or speak over the radio, and were thus denied our part in public education. Under these circumstances, where could outcasts from a dying social order live frugally and decently, and at the same time have sufficient liesure and energy to assist in the speedy liquidation of the disintegrating society and to help replace it with a more workable social system?

The Nearings were inspiring radicals - they became homesteaders, growing almost all of their own food, building their own buildings, and mostly trading for other things that they needed. They did this until Scott's death at 100 and then Helen kept right on going alone. She died recently, in her 80s I think. The thing is that they didn't have kids, and reading their book, I kept wondering how things would have been different for them with little ones.