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- Info
New pioneers: the back-to-the-land movement and the search for a sustainable future
| Author: |
Jacob, J. |
| Date: |
1997 |
| Periodical: |
University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Press |
| Abstract: |
The chapters that follow tell the story of the back-to-the-landers in a straightforward narrative contextualized within reoccurring sustainability themes. Chapter 1, “Conventional Radicals: Back-to-the-Land Profiles,” is first account of how I tracked down potential back-to-the-landers and then decided which were authentic back-to-the-country types. With the methodological issues out of the way, I outline the background characteristics of the kinds of people who take up smallholding – their age, education, marital and family status, residence patterns, property size, and farm experience. In Chapter 2, “Seven Ways of Living Back-to-the-Land: Work, Time, and Money in the Country,” I develop a typology of seven different ways of living back-to-the-land, from the “weekenders” who have full-time jobs away from their smallholdings to the “purists” who attempt to support themselves completely from the resources of their homesteads. Chapter 2 includes an income profile of the neohomesteaders and introduces the time-money dilemma, with which most back-to-the-country people struggle; full-time work away from their properties leaves them insufficient time to develop sustainable homesteads, but without full-time work many smallholders would not be able to make the payments on their homestead mortgages.
This theme of the neohomesteaders’ having to balance competing demands on their time and energy carries over to the subject matter of Chapter 3, “Quest for Wholeness: Back to the-Land Values.” In Chapter 3, I explore the back-to-the-landers’ encounter with two core values of the movement, self-reliance and voluntary simplicity. The description and analysis here show smallholders at some distance from becoming ideological zealots as they pragmatically juggle the often contradictory requirements of the values to which they subscribe. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the quality of country life in terms of the degree of satisfaction and happiness the smallholders feel in relation to a variety of back-to-the-land experiences. Chapter 4, “Soft Paths: Back-to-the-Land Technology,” covers the practical application of smallholder values. The extent to which the neohomesteaders are able to apply ecological design principles through appropriate technologies on their farmsteads is primarily a measure of their technical success in practicing a sustainable way of life in the country. Sustainability, however, is a multidimensional concept and includes social as well as technical components. Chapter 4, consequently, looks at the farmstead division of labor, recounting how smallholders divide up the homestead chores between husbands and wives, and parents and their children.
Chapter 5, “Urban Pioneers,” is a side journey into the world of the urban homesteaders, some quite content to stay city-bound, while others actively pursue strategies to make it back to the land. This city excursus permits an examination of a key variable in the sustainability equation, right livelihood. Right livelihood is a Buddhist precept that encourages one to express one’s unique talents through service, regardless of how mundane, rather than in search of wealth, power, and status. Back-to-the-land living itself could be considered an ideal-typical expression of right livelihood. But I use case studies of city residents with back-to-the-land sensibilities and plans to explore the dimensions of right livelihood.
Making a move to the countryside, setting up some semblance of a sustainable farmstead, and finding a job to pay for it all is a complicated process. There are, however any number of additional complications that conspire to undermine the neohomestead dreams of a peaceful country existence. Chapter 6, “Organizing for Change: New Pioneers as Activists,” examines what for most smallholders is an unanticipated aspect of country life. It is not an overstatement to say that much of rural America suffers from multiple cries. Rural unemployment rates are as high as those of inner cities. Farm foreclosures are common, and as the tax base erodes, rural hospitals, schools, and even entire towns are closing down. Rural wealth in the form of natural-resource extraction has been disappearing for years, and in its place are clear-cuts, polluted and silt-clogged rivers, exhausted soils, and toxic waste dumps. Back-to-the-landers have the kinds of educational credentials and professional experience that could make them valuable activists working in behalf of their adopted communities. But one has to wonder, as I do periodically through the first five chapters, whether the smallholders can possible have time or energy, much less the disposition and interest, to devote to community organizing after the last of the homestead chores are completed. On occasion, though, even the most reclusive back-to-the-landers become reluctant activists when clear-cuts arrive at their property lines or effluents from open-pit copper mines leak into once pristine rivers that flow by their farmstead properties.
By the time the narrative and analysis arrive at the last chapter, Chapter 7, “Back-to-the-Landers as New Pioneers: The Search for a Sustainable Future,” it will be evident that smallholders are an ordinary group of people whose achievements fall considerably short of their dreams. The neohomesteaders’ experiences, however, do demonstrate just how far highly motivated individuals can go, by themselves, in piecing together sustainable lifestyles. The distance between the back-to-the-landers’ aspirations and their accomplishments raises the question of public support for those who want to align their behavior more closely with the principles of ecological responsibility. After exploring a number of policy options that would allow the mainstream society to capitalize on the neohomesteaders’ idealism, I conclude the chapter, and the book, with a reconsideration of back-to-the-landers as legitimate new pioneers. By extending the definition of sustainability beyond its technical prerequisites to its more broadly based social and spiritual dimensions, the smallholders appear to be much closer to the progressive edge of a movement toward a sustainable future than their ever-incomplete farmsteads would suggest.
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