Coperthwaite William S - A handmade life : in search of simplicity

The main thrust of my work is not simple livingnotyurt design, not social change, although each of these isimportant and receives large blocks of my time. Butthey are not central. My central concern is encouragementencouraging people to seek, to experiment, toplan, to create, and to dream. If enough people do thiswe willfind a better way.

T hese are the words of Bill Coperthwaite. This book is about his lifelong commitment to living in a way that can create a world of justice, beauty, and hope.

Bill Coperthwaite has spent better than forty years on a homestead in the wilds of Maine. He has also traveled the globe in search of cultural skills, practices, and designs that can be blended and enhanced for contemporary use. He builds as much for joy in the process of building as for the beauty of the result. He is as devoted to working with his hands as he is to the highest ideals of democracy. He lives on the furthest margins of the market economy as an experiment in sustainable living.

Several themes anchor his life practices: education, nonviolence, simple living, democracy, and the fallacy of discipleship. Bill has developed his thinking in detail around each of these, yet they are interrelated and mutually reinforcing, and my attempt to give each area separate attention for the sake of clarity must oversimplify.

Bills thoughts and actions have been profoundly shaped by those he describes as people in particular whom I admired for their intellectual acuity, their work with their hands, and their dedication to a better societymen such as Morris Mitchell, Richard Gregg, and Scott Nearing. Each of them influenced Bill in specific ways as he set his own course. He has neither followed nor looked to be followed, yet his way of being in the world embraces the linking of past, present, and future, providing a sense of irrefutable hope and abundant optimism.

EDUCATION

Bills undergraduate years at Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, proved uninspiring. Real learning took place elsewhere, out of the classroom and away from campus. He read Gandhi on his own. He established connections with the International Student Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, jumping a bus to spend weekends discovering a wider world than the one offered through higher education. A senior semester abroad at the University of Innsbruck stimulated a yearning for culture and perspective; he became an expatriate who reluctantly returned to Bowdoin to complete a degree in art history.

Through connections in Cambridge, he was invited to apply for graduate study by Morris Mitchell, the director of the Putney Graduate School of Teacher Education. Mitchell, renowned for his slow moving, bold thinking presence, had come to Putney with a reputation as a tenacious southern Quaker and visionary organizer of school-based rural cooperatives in Alabama and Georgia. His Quaker faith and experiences as a soldier in World War I had made him a resolute pacifist. As an educator, he embraced experiential education and the application of knowledge for social purposes. In Mitchell, Bill found a mentor who blended cabinet-making and gardening with his leadership of the school. The students at Putney Graduate School were apprentices to a special view of education and the role of the teacher. The life of a teacher, Mitchell instructed, is as important a life as any person may live. Viewed broadly, it is a life of leadership in a world of contradictions and crisis. It is a particularly human life, one of total involvement with human beings as they face human questions.