Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Back to the Landers (an encyclopedic definition) --
http://encyclopedia.lockergnome.com/s/b/Back_to_the_land

Today, the phrase "back to the land movement" usually refers to a North
American social phenomenon of the 1960s and 1970s (which is discussed
further, below in this article). This particular back-to-the-land movement
was a migration from cities to rural areas that took place in the United
States, its greatest vigor being before the mid '70s.

Contents
1 A recurring pattern

2 The recent North American instance

3 The target lifestyle

4 The few who succeeded

5 The many who returned

6 The end of the movement?

7 Related topics

8 Bibliography

A recurring pattern
By way of context, a few things may be usefully said. The American
poet/anthropologist Gary Snyder (who is also an amateur historian) has
related in a published interview that there have been back-to-the-land
population movements down through the centuries. These have happened in
different parts of the world, largely due to the occurrence of severe
urban problems and people's felt need to live a better life, often simply
to survive.

The historian and philosopher of urbanism Jane Jacobs remarked in
interview with Stewart Brand that with the Fall of Rome city dwellers
re-inhabited the rural areas of the region.

The recent North American instance
Regarding North America, many individual persons 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 is said to have influenced thousands of urban-living people to try
a modern homesteading life during the Great Depression.

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 ‘60s and ‘70s 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 the 1954 publication of
Helen and Scott Nearing's book, Living the Good Life. The book chronicled
the Nearing's move to a cottage in a rural area of Vermont and their
simple, self-sufficient lifestyle. In their initial move, the Nearings
were driven by the circumstances of the Great Depression and influenced by
earlier writers, perhaps particularly Henry David Thoreau. Their book was
published six years after a profound and moving statement, 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.

By the late '60s, many people had recognized that, living 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
1960s counterculture movement, 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 was also fuelled 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 or boredom of "moving up
the company ladder." Paralleling the desire for reconnection with nature
was a desire to reconnect with physical work, for many were drawn by some
sense of dignity in physical labor, just as they might feel depressed
contemplating the prospect of a worklife at a desk in the city.

Besides the Nearings and other authors writing later along similar lines,
another influence from the world of American publishing was the
unprecedented, vigorous, and intelligent 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 - perhaps especially among the
young - 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 a great deal more.

Many of the North American back-to-the-landers of the 1960s and 1970s made
use of the Whole Earth Catalogs and successor publications. But as time
went on, the movement itself drew more people into it, more or less
independently of impetus from the publishing world.

The target lifestyle
Most of the back-to-the-landers wanted greater contact with nature, and
sought to become self-employed workers in a cottage industry. Many wished
to build their own house, and produce a good deal of their own food. Solar
energy was sometimes used for either heat or electricity, and wood fuel
was popular. Most back-to-the-landers wanted to know their neighbors, and
some expected to be cooperatively part of neighborhood or community
projects and processes.

Helen and Scott Nearing, in their life and their books, had embraced
organic horticulture and had pursued a healthy diet and general lifestyle.
To these interests, the back-to-the-land publications which had sprung up
around 1970 added a promotion of new (or at least recently refined)
methods of utilizing or generating energy on a modern homestead, such as
solar, wind, and small-hydro electricity generation. Worldwide, there had
been a very lengthy utilization of wind energy in villages and rural
regions, and in fact many farms in North America had employed windmills to
drive well pumps for household and irrigation water. In the 1970s, though,
electricity-generating wind turbines (which had been developed in previous
decades) were reaching new levels of efficiency. As well, passive solar
principles were becoming more widely recognized for their efficacy in
space heating (e.g., of houses or outbuildings), and photovoltaic
equipment for generating electricity was emerging and was seen to be an
exciting new realm.

With regard to community processes, a common practice was the
incorporation of barter, a form of trade where goods or services from one
individual or household are exchanged for a certain amount of other goods
or services from another individual or household, and in which no money is
involved in the transaction. The idea was that barter (along with
occasional friendly neighborly assitance) helped to reduce the need for
cash income.

The few who succeeded
Generally, the back-to-the-landers who stayed on the land shared three
common traits:

Source of regular income from external sources
Married or in a relationship with a comparable level of commitment
Previous exposure to rural living
Many had flexible occupations—like writing and other creative work, or a
trade—that they could engage in from their home. Others had steady, if
less glamorous, jobs in a nearby town. Those who succeeded were realistic
about their financial needs, and also chose a homestead that was
comfortable and practical.

The many who returned
For the most part, the back-to-the-landers of the 1970s were unprepared
for the realities of a rural lifestyle, and many believed that they could
get by without a steady source of income by selling produce and other
home-made items. In reality, the problems of costs (machinery, household
expenses, seeds and other supplies) and limited produce-distribution
options for family farms of modest scale were difficult ones even for
farmers who had been raised in the lifestyle by their parents and
grandparents. Some back-to-the-landers became integrated fully into their
adopted rural communities, but perhaps most returned to city living after
a few years in the country, mainly because of financial trouble and
relationship problems.

The end of the movement?
There is no well-defined event that can be used to mark the end of the
era. A factor that came into play was the increased cost of rural land
parcels; at the start of the back-to-the-land trend, previously low demand
for rural properties in many areas meant that they fetched low prices in
the real estate market, but this changed after some years of increased
buyer interest. Also, rising urban prosperity, and a sense that the
earlier social problems were solved (though we still hear about many of
them in the media), led to reduced interest in rural lifestyles among
urbanites in the 1980s.

Instead, the more focused environmental movement, voluntary simplicity,
and renewed interest in outdoor recreation took the place of a relocation
to the country. For example, while the influential Stewart Brand was not
"married" to the rural-homestead concept (he himself has mainly lived in
town, in coastal Northern California), he and the many thinkers and doers
associated with his publications have tended to remain involved with
exploring and promoting values related to ecological and social
"sustainability."

Interestingly, a good deal of research that could be of value to
modern-day homesteaders was carried on into the 1980s and after.
Agricultural colleges and departments within universities, as well as
independent teams of designers, engineers, agronomists, and technologists
researched and devised many refinements and new approaches to food
production, on-site energy production, waste management, home design, and
other dimensions of living well and reasonably self-sufficiently on the
land. For instance, a group of engineering graduates from Stanford
University published a thick compendium of findings and advice in the
early '80s.

As it stands, people still purchase rural properties that come onto the
real-estate market, and in many areas of North America purchases are not
limited to those by corporate farms. And clearly, there is migration in
both directions: to the cities, and to the rural areas. A Web search on
the term "back to the land" brings up very many hits that indicate a
strong interest in non-urban living.

Regarding another possible trend, it is possible that social or economic
conditions, coupled with the new technical capabilities, will result in
future waves of emigration from the cities and immigration to the rural
regions. The worldwide ecovillage movement, while not yet of a scale to be
called a "wave," has both urban and rural components that aim at building
sustainable village cultures. This global network, along with systematic
approaches to more ecologically sensitive design, such as permaculture
have evolved out of the back to the land movement. There are those who see
these phenonmena as interlinked parts of an agrarian revolution that only
began with the back to the land movement of the 1960s.

Related topics
_______________
Harrowsmith magazine
Farm
Homesteading
Foxfire books
Whole Earth Catalog
Renewable energy
Commune
Survivalism