A simple, inspiring message buttresses author/journalist/goat herder Doug Fine’s ambitious carbon-neutral misadventures in his new book “Farewell My Subaru.”

If he can do it, so can you.

But not in any preachy, condescending or scare-tactic sense.

“What I do is I screw up a lot, and hopefully by reading it other people will feel like they can do it better,” he quipped.

Fine cloaks an extremely environmentally conscious message with witty and often hilarious banter as he recounts his quest of living free of fossil fuels and off the electricity grid at the place he calls home, Funky Butte Ranch in New Mexico.

The late-30s-aged writer was born and raised on the East Coast, living on “concrete and Domino’s pizza” in his formative years with immigrant parents who believed they’d found the American dream there in suburbia.

Consequently, Fine chased his dream throughout the world as a renegade freelance journalist. Now he feels he’s found it at this solar-powered ranch in the desert.

He’ll be talking about it when he comes to read from “Farewell My Subaru” at 4 p.m., April 27 at Eagle Harbor Books on Bainbridge.

He calls it the indigenous gene.

“I think I was always inclined to live this way,” Fine said, speaking by cell phone from the Berkeley, Calif., stop of his Carbon Neutral National Book Tour. “The indigenous gene is dominant in me. I always knew the concrete and Domino’s and the baseball tomatoes weren’t the way to go.”

After growing up in Long Island, N.Y., then going onto graduate from Stanford University, Fine took to the world in his 20s with a customized style of investigative journalism — strapping on a backpack and traveling and living in nooks of the globe like Burma, Rwanda, and Laos as an independent freelance, sending dispatches to mainstream American media like The Washington Post, U.S. News and World Report and Salon magazine.

During those years, while becoming a respected and successful journalist, he also harkened to his yearning for living in the wild and followed his impulse to extreme rural Alaska to see if he, a former suburbanite, could survive the elements. He did.

And he wrote a book about it called, “Not Really An Alaskan Mountain Man,” in 2004. So he’s definitely got an upper hand in experience with living amongst the elements to the extreme, but still he contends with his new book — “If I can do it, you can do it.”

“I’d say, 90 percent of what I did in ‘Farewell My Subaru’ anyone can do,” Fine said. “Because it was so easy.”

All you have to do to kick your gasoline habit tomorrow, Fine said, is equip a diesel engine vehicle to process pure vegetable oil. He traded his Subaru for a Ford F250.

“Instead of altering the vegetable oil, you alter your vehicle engine, so it will accept the vegetable oil from unhealthy restaurants,” Fine said.

There’s many modern mechanics who know the engine altering process, and once it’s converted, fill ups on gasoline are replaced by collecting used grease from restaurants.

“It’s expensive at first, but anyone can do it,” Fine said, adding that the investment has repayed itself in fuel costs.

Same with living off the grid. All you need for that is a solar panel setup with access to direct sun light, at an average price, Fine noted of about $15,000. But once again, utility costs and tax rebates can make up for the investment.

“Truth is that everywhere, including Washington state and pretty much anywhere in the Pacific Northwest, there’s great potential for solar power,” he said.

Fine’s Funky Butte Ranch in New Mexico is set up with eight solar panels charging 12 deep-cycle golf cart batteries which power the entire ranch, supplying lights and refrigeration as well as internet surfing and power to the stereo.

There are a few modern-day conveniences that even a man like Fine living by solar power can’t live without, one of them being NetFlix. WU

Fine also dispatches regular blog posts on the happenings at Funky Butte Ranch, including a well-put-together You Tube documentary piece on the place at www.dougfine.com.