Back to life, back to reality?

"Back from the Land" is a book about the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970's, when millions (sic) Americans left the urban congregations and took up farming at their own homesteads in the rural countryside or even the wilderness. Many of these people came from privileged middle class backgrounds. Some tried to live communally. And yes, quite a few would have been classified as "hippies". The movement back to the land was inspired by a Green-agrarian-spiritual philosophy, which predicted the imminent collapse of Western civilization.

The author, Eleanor Agnew, was one of these people. Together with her husband Kent and their two kids, she left her comfortable middle class life for a homestead in the forests of Maine. The book tells her story and is thus part autobiography. Agnew has also interviewed other back-to-the-land people about their experiences. The interviews are interspersed by relatively short attempts at scholarly analysis. To a large extent, this is a book of personal stories. Agnew is critical of the whole back to the land experience. Many of the "homesteaders" had an idealistic, carefree, "hippie" attitude and didn't know zilch about farming. Absolutist ideas about self-sufficiency ran up against the hard reality of broken cars, expensive health care bills and failed crops. Many back-to-the-land people applied for government food stamps and other forms of poor relief. The doyens of the movement, Scott and Helen Nearing, weren't really self-sufficient at all, but subsisted on money from book sales, lectures and stipends. They also had volunteers working for free on their farm!

Some anecdotes are frankly unbelievable, such as the "Morningstar commune" of completely nude hippies living below a volcano in Hawaii, subsisting on nothing but fruit and chanting Vedic mantras to greet the sunsets in the evening. (They eventually failed.) Eventually, Agnew and most other people in her situation drifted back to the urban mainstream or upgraded their homesteads with modern appliances. While the tone of the book is critical (without being overly judgemental or scandalizing), Agnew has also interviewed a few people who succeeded, usually because they learned a useful trade and could therefore set up a business, such as pottery making. However, these were clearly a minority.

Agnew, writing in 2004, seems to think that modern industrial civilization is safe. Seen from such a perspective, the back-to-the-land phenomenon was a weird idiosyncrasy. But while many "hippies" probably didn't know what they were doing, the complacency of the author might turn out to be an even bigger illusion. Everything from climate change to peak oil seems to suggest that the system is fundamentally unstable. It's not inconceivable that people will go "back to the land" again in the near future, although the driving force probably won't be 70's hippie idealism. Sheer economic necessity or "prepping" are more likely options. Perhaps the hippies were simply half a century to early? And too lightly armed...