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Aback-to-the-land movement is any of variousagrarian movements across different historical periods. The common thread is a call for people to take upsmallholding and to grow food from the land with an emphasis on a greater degree ofself-sufficiency,autonomy, and localcommunity than found in a conventional industrial or postindustrialway of life. Some of the motives behind such movements have includedsocial reform,land reform, and civilianwar efforts. Groups involved have included political reformers,counterculture hippies, and religiousseparatists.
The concept was popularized in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century by activistBolton Hall, who set upvacant lot farming inNew York City and wrote many books on the subject;[1] and by his followerRalph Borsodi, who is known for his practical experiments in self-sufficient living during the 1920s and 1930s. The practice, however, was strong inEurope even before that time.[2]
DuringWorld War II, whenGreat Britain faced a blockade byGermanU-boats, a"Dig for Victory" campaign urged civilians to fight food shortages by growing vegetables on any available patch of land.[citation needed]
Between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, the USA had a revived back-to-the-land movement, with substantial numbers of people migrating from cities to rural areas.[citation needed]
The back-to-the-land movement has ideological links todistributism, a 1920s and 1930s attempt to find a"Third Way" between capitalism and socialism.[3]
The American social commentator and poetGary Snyder has related that the many back-to-the-land population movements throughout the centuries, and throughout the world, can be largely attributed to the occurrence of severe urban problems where people felt the need to live a better life or were otherwise simply trying to survive.[4]
The historian and philosopher of urbanismJane Jacobs remarked in an interview withStewart Brand that with theFall 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, who wrote in his bookTopophilia (1974): "Awareness of the past is an important element in the love of place." 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 is known about the farmer's attitudes to nature..." Tuan finds historical instances of the desire of the civilized to escape civilization in theHellenistic,Roman,Augustan, andRomantic eras, as well as, from one of the earliest recorded myths, theEpic of Gilgamesh.[citation needed]
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 experimenterRalph Borsodi (author ofFlight from the City) is said to have influenced thousands of urban-living people to try a modernhomesteading life during theGreat Depression.[6]
In 1933, theNew Deal town ofArthurdale, West Virginia, was built using the back-to-the-land ideas current at the time.[7]
After World War II, interest in moving to rural land once again began to rise. In 1947,Betty MacDonald published what became a popular book,The Egg and I, telling her story of marrying and then moving to a smallfarm on the Olympic Peninsula in Washington state. This story was the basis of a successful comedy film starringClaudette Colbert andFred MacMurray.[citation needed]
The Canadian writerFarley Mowat says that many returned veterans afterWorld War II sought a meaningful life far from the ignobility of modern warfare, regarding his own experience as typical of the pattern. InCanada, those who sought a life completely outside the cities, suburbs, and towns frequently moved into semi-wilderness environs.[citation needed]
During the 1960s and 1970s, the phenomenon of the rural relocation trend became sizable enough to be identified in the American demographic statistics.[citation needed]
The roots of this movement can perhaps be traced to some ofBradford Angier's books, such asAt Home in the Woods (1951) andWe Like it Wild (1963),Louise Dickinson Rich'sWe Took to the Woods (1942) and subsequent books, or perhaps even more compellingly to the publication ofHelen andScott Nearing's book,Living the Good Life (1954). This book chronicles the Nearings' move to an older house in arural area ofVermont and theirself-sufficient andsimple lifestyle. In their initial move, the Nearings were driven by the circumstances of the Great Depression and influenced by earlier writers, particularlyHenry David Thoreau. Their book was published six years afterA Sand County Almanac, by the ecologist and environmental activistAldo 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.[citation needed]
The narrative ofPhil Cousineau's documentary filmEcological Design: Inventing the Future asserts that in the decades afterWorld 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 thecounterculture of the 1960s, the two movements had some overlap in participation.[citation needed]
Many people were attracted to getting more in touch with the basics mentioned. Still, the movement could also have been fueled by the negatives of modern life: rampantconsumerism, the failings of government and society, including theVietnam War, and a perceived general urban deterioration, including growing public concern about air and waterpollution. Events such as theWatergate scandal and the 1973energy 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 couldbuy."[8]
One prominent segment within the movement included those who were familiar with rural life and farming, had skills, and wanted land of their own on which they could demonstrate thatorganic farming could be made practical and economically successful.[citation needed]
Besides the Nearings and other authors writing later along similar lines, another influence from the world of American publishing was theWhole 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.[citation needed]
Another important publication wasThe Mother Earth News, a periodical (originally on newsprint) that was founded a couple years after theCatalog. 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.[citation needed]
Many of the North American back-to-the-landers of the 1960s and 1970s used theMother Earth News, theWhole Earth Catalog series, and derivative publications. As time went on, however, the movement drew more people into it, more or less independently of any impetus from the publishing world.[citation needed]
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