Farewell my Subrau:
An epic adventure in local living

By Doug Fine
Villard, 2008

So you want to “go green.” Here is a guy who has done just that. Doug Fine, a National Public Radio reporter who has written about Burma, Rwanda, Laos, Guatemala, and Tajikistan, has now bought some rural—make that desert—property in New Mexico and is working hard to reduce his carbon footprint there. His story about his experiences in Farewell My Subaru is just as humorous as it is informative. Anyone who calls his local chicken-eating coyote Dick Cheney and his rooster Donald Trump has my attention.

Fine struggles but is ultimately very successful. He converts his ranch to solar power, raises goats for milk and chickens that produce an overabundance of eggs despite the Cheney raids, cultivates a garden that gives him much of his own food, and installs a water system that air conditions and (over)heats his shower water at the same time.

But his major task is converting a diesel-powered ROAT—for ridiculously oversized American truck—into a pick-up powered by vegetable oil obtained free from local Chinese restaurants. When he finally surmounts all the associated problems, he has a truck whose exhaust gas may smell like Kung Pao chicken but that uses diesel oil only to get started.

Fine goes far beyond what most of us would even contemplate. Just managing his ranch becomes more than a full-time job. (Female companions help.) Hopefully, however, his extremes will pull us all partway in his direction.

A quick read. Highly recommended. Walter Simpson gets my copy.

—gerry rising