Books & Music...

At 23, Cleveland Cavaliers' superstar LeBron James can't even escape his mother's shadow, as he endured the embarrassment of having dear ole mom defend her son's honor courtside after a hard foul against the Boston Celtics in the playoffs. But for Doug Fine, escaping the shadow of his mother--and everything else--was easy enough: Move to New Mexico and live off the land on a ranch.

Fine's new book Farewell, My Subaru: An epic adventure in local living chronicles his choice to leave city life behind and leave the smallest footprint possible. The result is a light-hearted look into the mind of a regular guy who isn't ready to give up all the comforts of modern living--just simply have them powered by solar energy.

Here's a green nugget from Fine's truly fine book where he's talking about what happened when his car began drifting downhill:

"Epiphany in the desert Southwest is not subtle. Almost nothing in this stark, gorgeous ecosystem is. I moved several thousand miles from my place of birth in order to kick fossil fuels and live locally. Three days later, MY CAR WAS LITERALLY RUNNING AWAY FROM ME. This is how lessons are taught in a place where even sitting down means a possible impaling. I figured I would forge success from astonishing, seemingly irrevocable defeat, you know, like Al Gore.

"I didn’t need the message hammered home so literally. The time was absolutely right for me personally to embark on this adventure in living green—other than having no electrical, plumbing, building, engine mechanical, horticultural, or animal husbandry skills at all, that is. After growing up on Dominoes Pizza in the New York suburbs, at age thirty-six I wanted to see if a regular guy who enjoyed his comforts could maintain them with a reduced-oil footprint. In concrete terms, this meant raising animals and crops for my food, figuring out some way besides unleaded to get anywhere, and making bank account–draining investments in solar power.

"I’d lived and worked in extreme conditions on five continents since the beginning of my career as a journalist fifteen years ago, but time and again, after shivering in Alaska and dodging bullets in Tajikistan, I reaffirmed what I already knew: I like my Netflix, wireless e-mail, and booming subwoofers. In fact, I didn’t want to live without them. I just wanted to power them by the sun. If my ear- melting music could go solar, and still make my UN-fearing neighbors complain about bass lines interrupting their nightmares of Hillary Clinton, I’d consider this experiment a success.