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Back-to-the-land movement
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Back-to-the-land movement
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 conventional industrial or postindustrial way of life. Some of the motives behind such movements have included 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; 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.
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.[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 to distributism, a 1920s and 1930s attempt to find a "Third Way" between capitalism and socialism.
The American social commentator and poet Gary 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.
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.
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 book Topophilia (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 the Hellenistic, Roman, Augustan, and Romantic eras, as well as, from one of the earliest recorded myths, the Epic of Gilgamesh.[citation needed]
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Back-to-the-land movement
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 conventional industrial or postindustrial way of life. Some of the motives behind such movements have included 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; 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.
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.[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 to distributism, a 1920s and 1930s attempt to find a "Third Way" between capitalism and socialism.
The American social commentator and poet Gary 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.
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.
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 book Topophilia (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 the Hellenistic, Roman, Augustan, and Romantic eras, as well as, from one of the earliest recorded myths, the Epic of Gilgamesh.[citation needed]