Wilderness guide and writer Kurt Hoelting will read from his new book, The Circumference of Home: One Man’s Yearlong Quest for a Radically Local Life, at Darvill’s Bookstore on Thursday, June 3rd at 7pm. The Whidbey Island writer will also sign books after the reading.

In 2008, after realizing the gap between his convictions about the environment and his own carbon footprint, Zen practicioner Hoelting embarked on a yearlong experiment: he traded in his car and air transportation for a kayak, a bike, and his own feet, traveling a radius of roughly sixty miles: his circumference of home, for a serious participation in climate change. Part quest and part guidebook, Hoelting’s unique experiment is moving and inspiring as his pilgrimage ends not at some holy site, but at the very place where he started: his own home.

Hoelting grew up in the Pacific Northwest, graduating from the University of Washington and Harvard Divinity School. He has worked as a clergyman, commercial fisherman in Alaska, a wilderness guide and meditation teacher, leading a migratory life with winters in Puget Sound and summers in Alaska. In 1994 he founded Inside Passages, a sea kayaking outfitter-guide business in Alaska that combines his love for wilderness exploration, conservation, and contemplative practice.

The writer himself describes his motivation for the project in very practical terms: “This much is clear to me. If I can’t change my own life in response to the greatest challenge now facing our human family, who can? And if I won’t make the effort to try, why should anyone else? So I’ve decided to start at home, and begin with myself.”

Such notable authors as Bill McKibben, Scott Russell Sanders, and Jon Kabat-Zinn have lauded the project and the book. Kabat-Zinn called it a “moving and brave narrative of place, perception, and participation…all this in the service of awakening to our predicament as a species.”