A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears)

by Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

“I believe in spiritual healing,” she said. “And that you can turn things around with your mind-set. As long as you’re breathing, there’s a chance you can change yourself and the world around you.” The next time Soule and her helper went to Walmart, she left her wheelchair behind. A few times after that, she left the helper behind too. In Phoenix, Soule has risen again. She walks into her backyard under her own power and looks upon the red rock and boundless blue sky, taking one miraculous step after another, knowing she is free.

And the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department concluded that there were too many bears in the Grafton area. In 2015, they set a goal to reduce the population by 34 percent from 2013 levels. It could take ten years to achieve that goal. Babiarz told me that he was not sure how much longer Grafton’s fire department can last, relying as it does on a shrinking group of volunteers to massage a few more months of service out of each vehicle and piece of equipment.

“I’ve seen the trends. More and more regulations, until you can’t do anything on your own property. And if people come in demanding more services, Grafton would no longer be an affordable place to live.” But the Free Town Project was over. Babiarz said that the long-term effects of the social experiment will be ephemeral—“a blip on the radar”—like a June snowstorm melting away in the sunshine.

That was the very quality that Babiarz believed was overlooked in every discussion of the Free Town. The combative libertarian colonizers didn’t get it. The overly regulatory state government didn’t get it. And the myopic media certainly didn’t get it. “They don’t recognize,” he said, “that the town was already free.”

We talk of deviations from natural life, as if artificial life were not also natural. The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white bear, omnipotent to its own ends. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature, 1836