Peter has become a leader for the American conservation movement by
creating a life in conservation as photographer, writer, and
storyteller about the relationship between people and place. For
the last fifteen years, Peter has focused his energies on bringing
together and strengthening the worlds of environmentalism and
social justice and offering those professions his experience with
story, facilitation, contemplative practice, and relationship to
nature. Peter is always learning and innovating across the
boundaries of profession, culture, and home, and this has made his
work influential to the different fields of leadership development,
sustainability, philanthropy, and conservation. You might find him
teaching spoon-carving on a city street, or giving a keynote
address on courage at a national conference, or helping to heal a
fracture within a community, or photographing a lost art.
What he cares most about is strengthening people’s connections to
one another and the land that sustains them, the most visible and
important example being his family’s farm and tapestry in the Mad
River Valley of Vermont. He is the co-editor of Our Land,
Ourselves, author of The Great Remembering and What Is a Whole
Community, and co-author of Coming to Land in a Troubled
World, and collaborated with William Coperthwaite as the
photographer for A Handmade Life. You can learn more about him at
Peterforbes.org.
Helen’s life as an educator, farmer, and writer follows a career in
book publishing, where she was most recently an acquiring editor
for W. W. Norton and the publisher of their Countryman Press
imprint. She left publishing to cofound, with Peter Forbes, what
became a nationally recognized place of learning and
change-making—Center for Whole Communities—at their home place of
Knoll Farm in central Vermont. She now manages their organic family
farm and consults for Vermont Farm Viability and the Northeast
Organic Farming Association of Vermont while also homeschooling
their daughter and continuing her writing life. She is the editor
of Dead Reckoning and co-editor of Our Land, Ourselves and The
Story Handbook, among other works. You can learn more about their
farm and ongoing projects at www.knollfarm.org.
Booklist- "Many environmentally conscious consumers fantasize about
going off the grid and living a sustainable lifestyle, but few are
able to achieve that state. Bill Coperthwaite was an author, social
critic, and architect who actually succeeded, living out his
ecological ideals at a remote Maine homestead for nearly five
decades, until he died at the age of 83 in a tragic car accident in
2013. In addition to his award-winning book, A Handmade Life
(2003), Coperthwaite was famous for his design and popularization
of a modern variation on the conical dwelling known as a yurt. In
this loving tribute to Coperthwaite, Forbes and Whybrow have
crafted an inspiring biography, complete with photographs and
architectural drawings, of a man treasured as both a close friend
and a mentor. Interweaving anecdotes of their own interactions with
Coperthwaite, including the construction of a final,
sunlight-filled yurt, the authors capture the full spectrum of this
sometimes curmudgeonly man’s gregariousness, resourcefulness, and
optimism. Although Coperthwaite’s dreams of worldwide cooperative
and sustainable communities have not yet been realized, this
reverent memoir will help keep his environmental ideals alive.”
"William Coperthwaite was a man of vision and integrity, as well as
a personal inspiration to Peter Forbes and Helen Whybrow. His
desire to live simply led him to a remote stretch of the Maine
shore, where Coperthwaite’s commitment to carving wooden bowls and
building elegant yurts created human elegance answering to the
beauty of his surroundings. Forbes’s luminous photographs evoke
this aspect of his achievement. Exceptional integrity can sometimes
feel rigid or bruising to those whom it also attracts, however. As
Emerson once wrote about Coperthwaite’s predecessor Thoreau, “I'd
sooner take an elm tree by the arm.” A great achievement of Forbes
and Whybrow in A Man Apart is to convey the complexity of this
strong-minded life fully and honestly. Such an approach makes their
reflections on love, struggle, and grief all the more
powerful."--John Elder, author of Reading the Mountains of
Home
“This is a terrific book, honestly drafted and beautifully wrought.
As it is with yurts, so it is with communities and with books—their
lasting strength comes from the integrity of their parts and the
genius of their joinery. Deep gratitude to Peter Forbes and Helen
Whybrow for their work of grace and love.”--Kathleen Dean Moore,
author of Wild Comfort
“What a rare and important offering. Peter and Helen have given us
a deeply honest portrait of a man. We are invited to witness him
from above, from beneath, from the side, from within, in his light,
in his darkness. This story is about building one last yurt without
knowing it’s the last; it’s about how one solitary man’s ethic
influenced the lives of many; it’s about the complexity, joy, and
frustration of friendship. Bill Coperthwaite once said, ‘Bite off
less than you can chew.’ He was right! This book calls out to those
of us seeking connection in our modern era. A Man Apart left me
with the exquisite sense of having traveled somewhere and been
transformed because of it.”--Molly Caro May, author of The Map of
Enough: One Woman’s Search for Place
“In this remarkable and deeply moving book, Peter and Helen tell
the story of Bill Coperthwaite, a Maine homesteader, designer, and
social thinker whose unique way of life and passionate ideals
inspired all who knew him. Beautifully and sensitively told, the
story explores the complexities of the relationship between
them—the shared ideals, hard realities, disappointments, and joys
of intensely interwoven lives. Bill’s life—a monumental
testament to creativity, brilliance, integrity, and courage—invites
the reader to reexamine the profound questions of how each of us
chooses to live a life. A Man Apart is a riveting and
intensely human story—a treasure to be revisited many
times.”--Olivia Ames Hoblitzelle, author of Ten Thousand Joys & Ten
Thousand Sorrows: A Couple’s Journey Through Alzheimer’s
“Not many know that Walden is not just the product of a
brilliant experiment in living: Thoreau spent two years penning six
painstaking revisions to arrive at the classic book. In Bill
Coperthwaite, Forbes and Whybrow discover a ‘Walden’ of a man, only
to uncover gaps, in him and in themselves, between brilliant
solitary achievement and the kind of touch needed to ground and
guide a viable community. Many revisions, much pain and
forgiveness, and only partial fulfillments follow. But if there is
another way to move from our anti-culture into communities ruled by
loving intention, I don’t know what it is. ‘Explore your
misunderstandings to your advantage,’ advises Zen master
Dogen. A Man Apart does exactly that. This is a
beautifully raw account of loving grief, instructive failure, and
steadfast allegiance to an utter planetary necessity: major
cultural transformation.”--David James Duncan, author of The
River Why and The Brothers K
“What is a good life? The models offered by our celebrity culture
are mostly shabby and shallow. To find worthier examples you need
to look elsewhere—to books, for example, where you can meet
Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Gary Snyder, Barbara
Kingsolver, and Wendell Berry, among others. To that lineage of
American rebels you can now add Bill Coperthwaite. In this eloquent
portrait, Peter Forbes and Helen Whybrow document the search for
integrity, wide-ranging competence, and high purpose, not only in
Coperthwaite’s life, but in their own. This is a wise and beautiful
book.”--Scott Russell Sanders, author of Earth Works: Selected
Essays
“Two remarkable people writing about a third remarkable man—and
full of lessons for the ordinary rest of us. This is a lovely and
important book.”--Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy
“A loving tribute to Bill, a wonderful man who inspired all of us
with his dedication to indigenous building, natural materials, and
above all else, use of human hands.”--Lloyd Kahn, author of Shelter
and Tiny Homes: Simple Shelter
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