Courtesy
A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears) by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, PublicAffairs, 288 pages. $28. Many volumes have been written about the back-to-the-landers who flooded into Vermont in the 1960s and 70s, chronicling their colorful experiments with communes and other new forms of community. Even as we celebrate our own quirky utopians, however, Vermonters may know considerably less about a back-to-the-land movement of more recent vintage that happened right next door to us in the Granite State. Unlike those older experiments, the Free Town Project was a movement of libertarians who organized to free themselves from the shackles of government. And Vermont journalist Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling, a contributor to the
BBC Science Focus Magazine In this extract from
A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town, author Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling explains how a sleuth of genius bears tore apart one US town. Published:
At first, the bears went unseen in the nighttime, like mischievous elves descending from the woods. But instead of mending shoes or spinning straw into gold, they cracked compost bins, tore open beehives, and licked small traces of beef tallow from backyard grills, only to disappear with the first hint of the rising sun.
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Bungtowners [residents of Burlingham, Ohio] watched uneasily as a series of raids in a century-old barn reduced a feral colony of hardy barn cats from a population of 20 to nought.