See You in a Hundred Years by Logan Ward
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
The Empire of Scrounge by Jeff Ferrell
Farewell My Subaru by Doug Fine
The Year of Living Biblically by AJ Jacobs
Walden by Henry David Thoreau
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
Super-Size Me
Survivorman
Man vs. Wild
Alone in the Wilderness
(some) questions.to.consider
1. Why now? What has sparked this recent trend? Is there something fundamentally wrong with American culture that so many people seem to be rejecting our everyday habits to live according to new (and perhaps extreme) moral codes?
2. Thoreau performed a similar experiment in 1854. How do these "Modern-Day Thoreaus" differ from the original?
3. Would you describe these as experiments in aeseticism (look it up!) or a kind of new hedonism (look this one up too!)? Explain your answer.
4. What reasons do the authors give for their experiments? To what values do they espouse?
5. According to the authors, do they gain anything (spiritually? morally? physically? materially) from their experiments?
6. What major themes or patterns run through and across these texts? Are there commonalities between works?
7. What role does urbanism (vs. ruralism or a kind of neo-pastoralism?) play in these works?
8. What is the connection between these experiments in voluntary simplicity and the fact that many are published online? Is it possible to live as a digital environmentalist?