Agrarian movement advocating a self-sufficient farming lifestyle
A
back-to-the-land movement
is any of various
agrarian
movements across different historical periods. The common thread is a call for people to take up
smallholding
and to grow food from the land with an emphasis on a greater degree of
self-sufficiency
,
autonomy
, and local
community
than found in a prevailing industrial or postindustrial way of life. There have been a variety of motives behind such movements, such as
social reform
,
land reform
, and civilian
war efforts
. Groups involved have included political reformers,
counterculture
hippies, and religious
separatists
.
The concept was popularized in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century by activist
Bolton Hall
, who set up
vacant lot farming
in New York City and wrote many books on the subject;
[1]
and by his follower
Ralph Borsodi
, who is known for his practical experiments in self-sufficient living during the 1920s and 1930s. The practice, however, was strong in Europe even before that time.
[2]
During
World War II
, when Great Britain faced a blockade by German U-boats, a
"Dig for Victory"
campaign urged civilians to fight food shortages by growing vegetables on any available patch of land. In the USA between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s there was a revived back-to-the-land movement, with substantial numbers of people migrating from cities to rural areas.
The back-to-the-land movement has ideological links to
distributism
, a 1920s and 1930s attempt to find a
"Third Way"
between capitalism and socialism.
[3]
Throughout history
[
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]
The American social commentator and poet
Gary Snyder
has related that there have been back-to-the-land population movements throughout the centuries, and throughout the world, largely due to the occurrence of severe urban problems where people felt a need to live a better life and/or often simply to survive.
[4]
The historian and philosopher of urbanism
Jane Jacobs
remarked in an interview with
Stewart Brand
that with the
Fall of Rome
city dwellers re-inhabited the rural areas of the region.
[5]
From another point of departure,
Yi-Fu Tuan
takes a view that such trends have often been privileged and motivated by sentiment. "Awareness of the past is an important element in the love of place," he writes, in his 1974 book
Topophilia
. Tuan writes that an appreciation of nature springs from wealth, privilege, and the antithetical values of cities. He argues that literature about land (and, subsequently, about going back to the land) is largely sentimental; "little," he writes, "is known about the farmer's attitudes to nature..." Tuan finds historical instances of the desire of the civilized to escape civilization in the
Hellenistic
,
Roman
,
Augustan
, and
Romantic
eras, and, from one of the earliest recorded myths, the
Epic of Gilgamesh
.
North America
[
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]
Regarding North America, many individuals and households have moved from urban or suburban circumstances to rural ones at different times; for instance, the economic theorist and land-based American experimenter
Ralph Borsodi
(author of
Flight from the City
) is said to have influenced thousands of urban-living people to try a modern
homesteading
life during the
Great Depression
.
[6]
The
New Deal
town of
Arthurdale, West Virginia
, was built in 1933 using the back-to-the-land ideas current at the time.
[7]
There was again a fair degree of interest in moving to rural land after World War II. In 1947,
Betty MacDonald
published what became a popular book,
The Egg and I
, telling her story of marrying and then moving to a small
farm
on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. This story was the basis of a successful comedy film starring
Claudette Colbert
and
Fred MacMurray
.
The Canadian writer
Farley Mowat
says that many returned veterans after
World War II
sought a meaningful life far from the ignobility of modern warfare, regarding his own experience as typical of the pattern. In
Canada
, those who sought a life completely outside of the cities, suburbs, and towns frequently moved into semi-wilderness environs.
But what made the later phenomenon of the 1960s and 1970s especially significant was that the rural-relocation trend was sizable enough that it was identified in the American demographic statistics.
Roots of this movement can perhaps be traced to some of
Bradford Angier
's books, such as
At Home in the Woods
(1951) and
We Like it Wild
(1963),
Louise Dickinson Rich
's
We Took to the Woods
(1942) and subsequent books, or perhaps even more compellingly to the 1954 publication of
Helen
and
Scott Nearing
's book,
Living the Good Life
. This book chronicles the Nearings' move to an older house in a
rural
area of
Vermont
and their
self-sufficient
and
simple lifestyle
. In their initial move, the Nearings were driven by the circumstances of the Great Depression and influenced by earlier writers, particularly
Henry David Thoreau
. Their book was published six years after
A Sand County Almanac
, by the ecologist and environmental activist
Aldo Leopold
, was published, in 1948. Influences aside, the Nearings had planned and worked hard, developing their homestead and life according to a twelve-point plan they had drafted.
The narrative of Phil Cousineau's documentary film
Ecological Design: Inventing the Future
asserts that in the decades after
World War II
, "The world was forced to confront the dark shadow of science and industry... There was a clarion call for a return to a life of human scale." By the late 1960s, many people had recognized that, leaving their city or suburban lives, they completely lacked any familiarity with such basics of life as food sources (for instance, what a potato plant looks like, or the act of milking a cow)?and they felt out of touch with nature, in general. While the back-to-the-land movement was not strictly part of the
counterculture of the 1960s
, the two movements had some overlap in participation.
Many people were attracted to getting more in touch with the basics just mentioned, but the movement could also have been fueled by the negatives of modern life: rampant
consumerism
, the failings of government and society, including the
Vietnam War
, and a perceived general urban deterioration, including a growing public concern about air and water
pollution
. Events such as the
Watergate scandal
and the 1973
energy crisis
contributed to these views. Some people rejected the struggle and boredom of "moving up the company ladder." Paralleling the desire for reconnection with nature was a desire to reconnect with physical work. Farmer and author Gene Logsdon expressed the aim aptly as: "the kind of independence that defines success in terms of how much food, clothing, shelter, and contentment I could produce for myself rather than how much I could
buy
."
[8]
There was also a segment within the movement who already had a familiarity with rural life and farming, who already had skills, and who wanted land of their own on which they could demonstrate that
organic farming
could be made practical and economically successful.
Besides the Nearings and other authors writing later along similar lines, another influence from the world of American publishing was the
Whole Earth Catalogs
.
Stewart Brand
and a circle of friends and family began the effort in 1968, because Brand believed that there was a groundswell of biologists, designers, engineers, sociologists, organic farmers, and social experimenters who wished to transform civilization along lines that might be called "
sustainable
". Brand and cohorts created a catalog of "tools"?defined broadly to include useful books, design aids, maps, gardening implements, carpentry and masonry tools, metalworking equipment, and more.
Another important publication was
The Mother Earth News
, a periodical (originally on newsprint) that was founded a couple years after the
Catalog
. Ultimately gaining a large circulation, the magazine was focused on how-to articles, personal stories of successful and budding homesteaders, interviews with key thinkers, and the like. The magazine stated its philosophy was based on returning to people a greater measure of control of their own lives.
Many of the North American back-to-the-landers of the 1960s and 1970s made use of the
Mother Earth News
, the
Whole Earth Catalogs
and derivative publications. But as time went on, the movement itself drew more people into it, more or less independently of impetus from the publishing world.
See also
[
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]
References
[
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]
- ^
"Bolton Hall, 84, Single Taxer, Dies,"
New York Times,
December 11, 1938
Access to this link requires a subscription to the newspaper or its website.
- ^
"Helping the Poor Back to the Land,"
New York Times,
August 24, 1909
Access to this link requires a subscription to the newspaper or its website.
- ^
Letter, Joseph Nuttgens, London Review of Books, 13 May 2010 p 4
- ^
Snyder, Gary (Sept/Oct 1984) "Choosing Your Place-and Taking a Stand" interview with G.S.,
The Mother Earth News
- ^
Brand, Stewart.
"Vital Cities: An Interview with Jane Jacobs"
. Archived from
the original
on August 25, 2017
. Retrieved
August 17,
2014
.
- ^
"Ralph Borsodi and The School of Living"
.
newschoolofliving.blogspot.co.uk
. Retrieved
August 25,
2017
.
- ^
C.J. Maloney. Back to the Land: Arthurdale, FDR's New Deal, and the Costs of Economic Planning (2013) Wiley,
ISBN
1118886925
, pp. 195?196
- ^
Logsdon, Gene 1995
The Contrary Farmer
. White River Junction, Vt:Chelsea Green
Further reading
[
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]
- Agnew, Eleanor.
Back from the Land: How Young Americans Went to Nature in the 1970s, and Why They Came Back
. 2005.
- Brand, Stewart
et al.
, editors 1968-1998
Whole Earth Catalogs
- Coffey, Richard A.
Bogtrotter
.
ISBN
0-9641908-1-8
(reprint edition with afterword by author).
- Curl, John 2007.
Memories of Drop City: The First Hippie Commune of the 1960s and the Summer of Love
. iUniverse.
ISBN
0-595-42343-4
.
- Faires, Nicole 2006.
Deliberate Life: The Ultimate Homesteading Guide
.
ISBN
0-9782042-0-4
- Fairfield, Richard.
The Modern Utopian: Alternative Communities of the '60's and '70's
. Process Media, 2010.
- Grant, Brian L. "Surveying the Back to the Land Movement in the Seventies". Published online at
Back To The Land
- Jacob, Jeffrey Carl.
New Pioneers: The Back-to-the-Land Movement and the Search for a Sustainable Future
.
Penn State University Press
. 1997.
ISBN
978-0-271-02989-4
.
- Nearing, Helen and Nearing, Scott 1954.
Living the Good Life
.
ISBN
0-8052-0970-0
(Reprint edition).
- Nearing, Helen and Nearing, Scott 1979.
Continuing the Good Life
.
- Philips, Jared M.
Hipbillies: Deep Revolution in the Arkansas Ozarks.
The University of Arkansas Press, 2019.
ISBN
9781610756594
- The Mother Earth News
, a magazine devoted to the lifestyle
- Daloz, Kate, 2016 "We Are As Gods: Back to the Land in the 1970s on the Quest for a New America"
ISBN
1610392256
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