Hanging on to My Subaru, for now...

How can a tale about freaks, geeks, and goats, and about abandoning a Subaru, of all things, resonate with anyone truly interested in “living greener” or in the environmental movement in general? Doug Fine’s Farewell My Subaru fails to approach Lawrence Buell’s prophecy that environmental writing and criticism “at the turn of the twenty-first century will also come to be looked back upon as a moment that did produce a cluster of challenging intellectual work…that established environmentality as a permanent concern for literary or other humanists…and about the importance of vision and imagination in changing minds, lives, and policy as well as composing words, poems, and books” (133). Fine’s book is a study in antithesis. He writes about some pretty important ideas such as reducing his carbon footprint, being less dependent on oil, eating food that is locally grown and organic, and living a more self-sustained rather than a corporate-directed lifestyle. But, his anecdotes about the hardships, the loony individualists he encounters, and his mistakes and lack of know-how make me wonder who he is trying to convince, and of what?

While I give kudos to Fine for making the lifestyle change and learning how to operate independently of conveniences that are often taken for granted, and especially for chronicling all of the bumps and detours he encountered along the way lest anyone else who gets the same starry-eyed notion to live off the land may think it easy, I wonder what type of response Fine thought he might evoke. The question of audience is important. Would teens, twenty-somethings, or people in the throes of mid-life read Farewell My Subaru, and want to race out of their cities and head to a farm? Is the book aimed at disaffected yuppies? Who identifies and aspires to hanging out with the Wills, Kevins, and Herbies as they slog through swollen rivers, milk goats, make cheese, cadge waste grease from restaurants to run their ROATs, and spend the majority of their time creating the means for their survival, as if they were on a permanent camping trip?

Independence and forging a new life on the frontier was part of the American mythos at one time; in 2010 all we have to do is glance at our media or our economy to remind us that easy is good, faster is better, and more is best. While the tales Fine tells are amusing and instructive, I feel that they do more to position him and independent, environmentally minded individuals like him as the “other.” From Kevin Forrest, “who bore the unmistakable aura of the mad scientist” and to watch him “was like watching Gilligan’s Island when they sped up the film” (71) to the likes of Herbie who “was not an ex-hippie. He was a current one…whom everyone in Silver City described as a ‘character’” (126), all of Fine’s escapades and encounters create a moat of distance between his experiences and reality that are difficult to approach, much less to bridge.

Granted, Fine’s intention in writing was probably not to create a piece of work that would create change by motivating hundreds of people to jump off the “McGlobal Economy” and get some land and a couple of goats. Couched in a personal narrative, Farewell My Subaru reads like an instructional manual, and Fine eventually allows that he was “learning lessons about how to live” (134). The life lessons that Doug Fine imparts are about having a conviction and pursuing it with integrity and honesty. He doesn’t build much of a case for growing one’s own crops, drilling for one’s own water, and supplying one’s own electricity--because this stuff is damned difficult--so much as he does for having an ideal and committing to it.

Rather, the idea of truly and wholeheartedly committing to something, is the beauty of this little book, and is exemplified by Herbie: “Behind his activism was Herbie’s belief that the world is a place of love and opportunity rather than competition and greed” (126). In extracting Herbie’s ethos, Fine reveals his own perspective.

Despite his anecdotal approach, Fine makes the seriousness of his intentions known early on: “Unlike any society that came before, we’ll figure out a way to keep this Super-Bowl-watching, espresso drinking, GPS-guided-car-driving party going no matter what the ice caps, a couple of Jihadists, the petroleum engineers, and some nasty microbes in the Hot Zone have to say. It’s the societal equivalent of not thinking about dying” (15-16). So while his surface banter is light-hearted, and living an off-the-grid, sustainable lifestyle seems fraught with isolation, hardships, blunders, and kooky characters--not a lifestyle or milieu that most people would be drawn to—Fine’s sense of commitment and responsibility is laudable.