Jessica Dur

Americans live in a country in which bigger is often supposed to be better. Perhaps this is why our homes, like our food portions, waistlines, and debt, continue to expand…But the rise of the McMansion–and its attendant conspicuous consumption–has also helped to create the burgeoning tiny house movement, which extols the virtues of living smaller. Like Henry David Thoreau, who built his own 150 square-foot cabin on Walden Pond in the 1840s, most tiny house aficionados cite the sheer satisfaction of paring down to the basics, choosing, as he put it, “to front only the essential facts of life.”

Joel Salatin doesn’t mind being called a communist. Though the self-described “Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist-lunatic farmer” has a penchant for stockpiling adjectives, Salatin actually defies labels left and right…He’s also a veritable celebrity–having been catapulted into the national spotlight thanks to Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and dubbed the “High Priest of the Pasture” by the New York Times–but he betrays no bravado as he chats with me over the phone from his home in Swoope, Virginia.