A Fortean radical—though a Fortean mostly by admiration.
Scott Nearing may need to be introduced to the modern world, but for a time he was quite famous as a leftist and early advocate of the back-to-the-land movement. His life is well documented, by himself and his second wife, biographers, and historians. So I’ll keep the biographical portion of this relatively brief.
Nearing was born in Pennsylvania on 6 August 1883, almost a decade after Charles Fort and almost two decades before Tiffany Thayer. He lived a privileged life in coal country and attended Penn Charter School, where he was a classmate of future Fortean Society founder J. David Stern. As Stern recalled, the two worked together on a paper about the Fourier movement in America, but had to turn in separate essays because they could not agree on an interpretation: Nearing blamed the downfall of that early Utopian society on external factors, while Stern thought the silly ideas held by the members was to blame. It was a telling split, Stern going on to become a business liberal, friend of the New Deal, while Nearing—alone among his family—nurtured a sensitive social consciousness that would drive him to the left of socialism and toward a kind of primitivist anarchism.
Scott Nearing may need to be introduced to the modern world, but for a time he was quite famous as a leftist and early advocate of the back-to-the-land movement. His life is well documented, by himself and his second wife, biographers, and historians. So I’ll keep the biographical portion of this relatively brief.
Nearing was born in Pennsylvania on 6 August 1883, almost a decade after Charles Fort and almost two decades before Tiffany Thayer. He lived a privileged life in coal country and attended Penn Charter School, where he was a classmate of future Fortean Society founder J. David Stern. As Stern recalled, the two worked together on a paper about the Fourier movement in America, but had to turn in separate essays because they could not agree on an interpretation: Nearing blamed the downfall of that early Utopian society on external factors, while Stern thought the silly ideas held by the members was to blame. It was a telling split, Stern going on to become a business liberal, friend of the New Deal, while Nearing—alone among his family—nurtured a sensitive social consciousness that would drive him to the left of socialism and toward a kind of primitivist anarchism.