There are brilliant writers and thinkers who are questioning technological progress from a philosophical perspective, others who raise alarms about cognitive and social dangers, some who warn of privacy incursions, and a few who prescribe setting careful limits. All of them are in some ways tinkering at the edges, trying to reconcile living in a modern society that they can’t imagine abandoning even as they see decent human values increasingly under assault. And then there is Ethan Hughes.

Hughes is the founder of The Possibility Alliance at Still Waters Sanctuary, an intentional community built into a permaculture farm on over 100 acres in La Plata, Missouri. The farm has no electricity, no petroleum products, and nearly everything they have they make with their hands. Hughes will not get in a car unless it’s an emergency. He is living out a life in complete alignment with his values, and also, one could argue, in complete alignment with the planet. In doing so, he has seemingly solved, in a single grand stroke, all of the problems that have vexed the great writers and thinkers above. What’s more, he seems fulfilled. The Possibility Alliance, then, in some ways seems to be the near platonic ideal of the opposite of our current technology obsession.

Of course, Hughes is hardly the first back-to-lander. Thoreau lived in his tiny cabin but eventually went back to civilization. The integrity of the Amish community is legendary but so is its closed nature and fundamentalist rigor. The hippie collectives of the 60s and 70s seemed to be glorious social experiments until they went awry or faded away. But The Possibility Alliance is a little bit different.

For one thing, Hughes is neither hippie nor religious zealot. He grew up in what might be considered unremarkable modernity in Gloucester, Massachusetts, a working-class town that is famous for the Gorton’s fisherman. For another, he’s not merely interested in carving out a private sanctuary for his family and friends. Deeply woven into his endeavor is a mission of social justice. That means connecting what he’s doing to the world at large. In addition to approximately a dozen full-time residents which include Hughes’s wife and two children, the Possibility Alliance hosts an astonishing 1500 visitors per year and takes up an incredible range of service projects, including nonviolent actions to disrupt fracking and nuclear power, to support farmers’ rights, and to stand in solidarity with indigenous people, among others.

The Alliance has also launched what are known as the biking superheroes: a network of hundreds of generous individuals who dress in colorful costumes and ride bicycles from place to place to offer spontaneous help or kindness to people. The superheroes have performed tens of thousands of hours of community service.

I met with Hughes recently in the home of a family who was hosting him for a few nights in Somerville, Massachusetts and whose daughter lives at Still Waters Sanctuary. He had just given an inspiring and challenging talk to a small group of people, where he revealed that living out his intention meant, among other things, laughing all his laughter and crying all his tears. Hughes is unassuming, engaging, and real—charismatic without being magnetic. He would not look out of place wandering through a Home Depot. If you’re trying to reach a wide variety of people, that’s probably a good thing. And Hughes is trying to reach everyone. He admits the odds of saving the world through viral activism and radical simplicity are incredibly tiny, it’s just that those same odds are infinitely higher than the odds when doing nothing. It’s a point that’s hard to argue.

What follows is a reorganized and edited version of our hour-long interview, in two parts.

Seeds of Transformation
Mo Lotman: You went on a journey. You came out of modern society and you’ve made a choice to live in a sustainable [community].

Ethan Hughes: You’re born into the culture and it just seems normal, and so it’s really hard to look outside of it. But I think one of the two big events that got me really thinking was one, losing my dad to a drunk driver at 13. Which, the interesting part was, of course, incredible heartbreak. But then when my mom joined MADD and I looked at statistics, I found that the leading cause of death between 16 and 25 was automobiles. More people have died from automobiles than all the wars.

But what really shifted it, I did a semester abroad in Ecuador and got involved in the indigenous rights movement there. What had just happened when I arrived was the Texaco pipeline built under Petroecuador busted, and almost twice the Valdez spilled down the Andes into the Amazon, the Aguarico. Now, they’re watching this and just weeping, the whole bank covered in oil and animals covered in oil and a lot of the Secoya and Siona and Shuar that I was working with being paid a dollar a day to scoop up the oil out of the river and then bury it in trash bags. They had no responsibility for it. And then I reached out to friends in the United States, “You know, this is a global catastrophe,” and they’re “What are you talking about?”

ML: When was this?

EH: I was there in the early 90s when it happened, and it was later that it all came out. So that kind of heartbreak led me to really start shifting, that led to, I think it’s been 16 years, car-free. Only for emergencies. So it’s not a fundamentalist view.

Life in the Amazon
EH: I spent a month in the Amazon with the Siona Secoya hunting boar by blow-gun, seeing like, here’s a culture where there’s no homelessness, there’s no mass shootings.

ML: How were you able to integrate with them?

EH: Partly through School for International Training. But as we went out on a biological look at impacts of the oil spill, I was really drawn to want to live with them. Someone from Gloucester! One of our facilitators went to one of the tribal heads and said, “Well this 19-year-old really wants to live with you and is working on this campaign as much as he can.” And they asked, “Does he have a doctorate? Is he an engineer?” And they asked all these questions, and then all the answers [were] no. So they said “Yes, he can come.”

So I had this amazing month. That was also transformative. It was the first month of my life where everything I touched didn’t have a global impact. And the singing, the humor, all the kind of stereotypes, like progress and everything, were blasted out of the water. There’s 84-year-olds running around, full health. Wow, when you’re indigenous, a nature-based people, you live [on average] to age 40…most likely you might not live from zero to one. [But] the 80-year-olds were healthier there in the rainforest than most friends in their 30s, cause they’re not taking care of themselves, industrial food, stress. Here’s an 80-year-old who’s the best hunter getting us a sloth for dinner.

ML: What was the daily life like?

EH: One, the education was interesting. The kids were expected to be somewhere, but they had choice, so they could go to the dugout canoe maker, or someone else was boiling down poison arrow frogs for their blow-gun tips. So everyone was engaged. I was there for the full moon, so we went on a wild-boar hunting party at night and I had to go barefoot ’cause the Western shoe, the foot, the animals can hear that. Lot of life transformation, like wow, there are different ways to live.

Over the Threshold
EH: It started to shift in Vermont. I did a study of bears being disrupted from skiing and I was a downhill skier, so at 20 I said, OK, I’m just going to hike up mountains. I would hike up a mountain and go back country skiing, which was better!

So those steps kept happening. Then it was getting in airplanes, and then it was free-diving instead of scuba gear. And each thing, I noticed that as I shifted, I had to be in better shape and hold my breath to free-dive and it was actually more life-rewarding.

How the Possibility Alliance came to be is, at 29 is when I was like, OK, that was this threshold. I had inherited $100,000, I wasn’t using it, I paid off my college debt and that’s when I just imperfectly went for it all. That money was split into three. Some of it was realizing some of that inheritance was stolen from the Africans that were kidnapped and brought and built the country’s wealth through slave labor, some of it Native Americans. So it was like, trying to really, imperfectly, give some of it to those who it was taken from. I’m going to give some of it back to also the species with no voice, so helping nature reserves and things that were protecting endangered species.

As I started to give it away, I was like, “Give me some more!” ’Cause I started to see the world I want to see. Right here in Chelsea High, a friend who I gave some of the money to has this amazing garden in Chelsea High School. And you know, I was like, what’s better, money in the bank or actually seeing the world, through these resources become [better]?

If I was to say in high school, “I’ve got my occupation. I want to live in a gift economy, post petroleum, educational, transformational center…” If I had raised my hand, they’d have said, “That doesn’t exist.” Your messaging around technology, that wasn’t an option when you looked at putting together your work, and so often we have to invent, out of scratch. So we visited projects that were doing petrol-free living and activism and studied and included us sailing to Europe by boat.

We started the Possibility Alliance which is 100 acres. 50 acres is a working permaculture post-petroleum [homestead], you know, beeswax candles that we hand-dip, you want to fish, you catch it in the pond. Draft horses and bikes for transportation. People from all over come, and we ask the question, “What’s your vision?” We have networks, so if you’re from the west we have a sister project Be the Change in Reno, and Loving Earth Sanctuary in California. And so, creating a network where people are actually starting to say yes to our crazy ideas.