Sarah Myers (left) and Herb Myers '66 (center) are building onto the home of son-in-law Jason '99 and Janelle '01 Myers-Benner and granddaughter kali. Sarah, who formerly directed a non-profit, and Herb, a psychiatrist, are moving as retirees from Pennsylvania to Virginia.

Upon their graduation from EMU, Jason ’99 and Janelle ’01 Myers-Benner knew that living sustainably would be an overarching priority in their lives. In the decade-plus since, this desire has grown into “a vast and consuming project … engaging and energizing, even while exhausting,” Jason writes.

The Myers-Benners minimize their travel by vehicle, heat their house entirely with its passive solar design and backup wood stove, and try to grow, raise or gather as much of their food as possible from their land in Keezletown, Virginia.

Intertwined and inseparable elements of their approach to sustainability are the Myers-Benner’s significant emphasis on community and connection. They live out these values, in part, by homeschooling their 7-year-old daughter, Kali, building relationships with their neighbors and investing in nurturing, caring interactions across multiple generations. (Janelle works 30 hours per week as academic program coordinator at EMU’s Center for Justice and Peacebuilding.)

As Janelle’s parents, Herb ’66 and Sarah (class of ’67) Myers, began planning for their retirement, the family saw an opportunity to further develop its commitment to multi-generational living. In 2010, Herb and Sarah began building a 900-square-foot addition to Janelle and Jason’s house. The two living quarters are separated by a shared laundry room, utility room bathroom, and office. Their addition includes a rainwater cistern, a solar water heater, and other features intended to maximize the structure’s energy efficiency.

The new arrangement – a modern twist on the traditional Amish dawdy haus for aging parents – will make it easy for the family to share appliances, vehicles, tools and other household items. Moreover, Sarah writes, moving in beside Janelle and Jason will allow them all to share in the work of trying to live sustainably: tending the garden, harvesting and preserving food, caring for livestock, gathering wood and more.

Herb and Sarah’s addition also anticipates the physical challenges of aging by building all the main rooms to accommodate wheelchair access. That feature will make life easier both for them and their family caregivers next door.
“This building project … [will not] render our lives perfectly ‘sustainable,’” Sarah writes. “But for us it seems to be an opportunity worth taking for the health of our planet and for our own sense of wholeness.”

In 2005, Lind drew on her professional expertise and personal experience to write Simply In Season (Herald Press), a cookbook arranged by season with an emphasis on fresh and local foods. Lind co-wrote the book with a Goshen College graduate, Cathleen Hockman-Wert.

“That whole sense of eating locally and seasonally [that I grew up with] was what was so important about Simply In Season,” said Lind. She hopes the book will help broaden the horizons of recent generations of home cooks who don’t “know where their food comes from other than the supermarket, [and] who want to support the local, seasonal food economy but to whom it is not part of their heritage.”

A decade before Simply In Season’s publication, Lind and her sister, Sarah Myers (class of ’67) co-wrote Recipes from the Old Mill: Baking With Whole Grains (Good Books, 1995), inspired by childhood memories of their uncle, who ran a water-powered grain mill in West Virginia.

Herald Press celebrated the 30th anniversary of a kindred bestseller, Living More with Less, with last year’s release of a new edition edited and expanded by Valerie Weaver-Zercher ’94. Living More with Less was originally written by Doris Janzen Longacre, who died of cancer just before completing her manuscript (her husband, with three others, ushered it into publication). Longacre had previously written the bestselling More-with-Less Cookbook (Herald Press, 1976 & 2000) – 860,000 copies sold by 2010, including British and German editions – which provided inspiration for Lind and Hockman-Wert’s Simply in Season.