The Back to the Land Movement:
Why it Failed and Why we Need to Try Again Anyway
By Alice Friedemann

Although much has been said about why communes and Utopian communities
failed, little has been written about the fate of individual homesteaders.

Eleanor Agnew, in her 2004 book, "Back from the Land. How Young
Americans Went to Nature in the 1970s, and Why They Came Back" (Ivan
R. Dee), discusses the millions of young adults who tried
homesteading. Agnew speaks from experience -- she went back to the
land with her husband and two boys in Troy, Maine.

Unless otherwise noted, most of what follows is based on Agnew's book.

Agnew estimates between 750,000 and one million people dwelled on
communes in the 70's. Millions more went back to the land
independently. On the whole the movement consisted of educated,
young, white, middle class men and women.

Their rejection of the current system wouldn't have been possible if
the overall economy hadn't been so wealthy, it was a luxury to be able
to experiment.

Many, if not most, were naïve and unrealistic about what it would take
to make the urban to country transition. Some discovered you
couldn't borrow money from banks without assets, had to acquire home
building, car repairing, and farming skills from scratch, and nearly
all grew tired from the hard work and discomforts. In the end the
vast majority weren't able to live apart from the Capitalist society
surrounding them.

Why People Went Back to the Land

There were many reasons people went back to the land. The oil crisis
in 1973 led many to believe that the capitalist system was in imminent
danger of collapse, so going back to the land would be a matter of
survival.

The value system of American society was repulsive to many
back-to-the-landers. They abhorred the rat race, boring jobs, crowds,
the corrupt establishment; consumerism, destruction of wilderness, and
advertising to get people to buy things they didn't need. Some also
felt the need to "redeem their souls" because they'd done nothing to
deserve the abundance they'd experienced. America has a long tradition
of associating virtue with moderation, hard work, self-denial, and
simple living. Many associated farming with the romantic notion of
self-sufficient pioneers.

Homesteaders wanted to invent a new and better civilization based on
community, healthy food, a love of nature, and avoidance of toxic
chemicals.

Going Back to the Land was Hard

The joy of raising animals on the farm was shattered when they were
slaughtered. Agnew writes "How many of us had ever watched the blood
spurt from a slaughtered animal before, watched the light fade from
its eyes—by our own hand, no less?"

Goats could be ornery and raising animals meant no days off. Many
animals died on the learning curve of animal husbandry.

Farming was far harder than people realized. Some bought unsuitable
land, i.e. land that was mostly rocks, which made building homes and
starting gardens very hard. Good topsoil was washed away in storms.
Then there were assaults by wasps, flies, and no-see-ums, blistered
hands, and aching muscles while tending crops, which in the end were
often lost to drought, frost, hail, and pests. The surviving crops
required hard work to harvest and prepare for storage.

In the country, there were times when you had to scrape ice off the
floors and walls, spend most of the year chopping wood to be sure
there was enough when winter came.

Cold weather led to frozen pipes, immobile cars, slippery roads and
paths, the risk of hypothermia, and extremely cold homes since most
weren't built to code. Snow entombed homes, equipment, and woodpiles.
Uncovered wood piles froze into a block of wood ice blocks.

Fires weren't as easy to make as Boy Scout camp fires. Wood needed to
age for up to a year or it wouldn't burn well. If the wood was too
green, it put creosote into the chimney, which could catch on fire and
potentially burn your home down.

Cooking with wood required constant attention, you couldn't run off
and do other chores, because you need to keep putting kindling in and
ensure an even distribution of heat throughout the body of the stove,
or the food would cook unevenly – burned on one side and raw on the other.

Chopping trees down to build a home was another big ordeal. Clearing
land was just the start of the hard work, after that, there was
digging holes for the foundation through thick tangles of roots or
bedrock.

Things were always going wrong, septic tanks blowing over, tractors
broken, escaped farm animals, broken chainsaws, falling trees gashing
holes in cabins, and so on.

Middle class homesteaders had an idealized, romantic view of poverty,
because they'd never experienced it and didn't know anyone who was
poor. Poverty was what artists, writers, and musicians experienced in
their creative pursuits. Poverty was hard-working, clean, and
honorable. But Dorothy Allison, who grew up poor, wrote that poverty
was "dreary, deadening, and shameful". In "Nickled and Dimed",
Barbara Ehrenreich writes that poverty was "not a place you would want
to visit for touristic purposes; it just smells too much like fear."

Most hadn't imagined being poor on the land would really be poverty –
after all, they'd be growing their own food, building their own homes,
and trading with community members for what was needed.

What they hadn't reckoned with was that they could not be independent
of the outside economy. Being isolated meant even more dependence on
cars, and repairs were expensive. People couldn't grow all of their
own food and needed to get some items at the supermarket. And just
about everything required money on the farm: seeds, animals, stoves,
and so on. It wasn't cheaper to live on a farm than in the city.
Food and clothes weren't cheaper and there were fewer choices and
opportunities to price compare. Health care was expensive and -- only
taxes were cheaper.

People and publications made it seem easy to live off the land

Books like "Independence on a 5-acre Farm" made it seem it was no big
deal to go back to the land. Mother Earth News had many articles like
"Raise Worms for Fun and Profit" that misled people into thinking
they'd earn enough money on the farm to pay for necessities.

Eliot Coleman told people that they didn't need health insurance, and
since everyone knew how evil insurance companies were, they were glad
to opt out. Agnew devotes a hair-raising chapter to how wrong Coleman
was – just because you're young doesn't mean there won't be a need for
emergency care, especially on a farm doing heavy manual labor, where
the odds are many times higher than an office job that an accident
will occur.

Health care also sucked in the country – there weren't nearly enough
doctors per capita, so there were usually long waits.

Those who thought they could doctor themselves with herbs were
sometimes dead wrong. Comfrey, which was supposed to cure just about
everything, turns out to have liver damaging and carcinogenic effects.
An alternative doctor prescribed Chinese herb cocktails that led to
total kidney destruction in 100 women. Natural is not always better.

Scott and Helen Nearing were the role models for the back-to-the-land
community. They had managed to build the ideal homestead working only
four hours a day, spending the rest of their time reading, writing,
playing music, etc. They made it seem possible to do all this with
very little cash.

But the Nearings made money from speaking, writing books, and
donations. They had many followers who worked on their farm free of
charge.

Thoreau also made it sound easy to build a cabin and live in the
wilderness. But the truth is, he was two miles from town, where he
went nearly every day and visited friends, family, and he dined out
often there.

The counterculture had a reverse snobbery and one-upmanship about what
was a necessity versus a luxury. But who could really decide that?
As Thomas Hine, author of "I Want That! How We All Became Shoppers"
noted, if he came to your house and started throwing out things he
thought were unnecessary, it wouldn't be long before you began arguing
with him!

Some see the voluntary simplicity movement (VSM) as the latest, new
age version of the back to the land movement, with similar problems.
What someone in the VSM movement would see as a luxury, say, buying a
good suit to go on an interview with, would be seen as essential to
the job seeker. What about deodorant, or dressing nice so that people
are more likely to buy your vegetables at the farmers market? Hine
summarizes the problem with VSM as it often "seems that our definition
of a luxury is something we don't buy for ourselves".

And then there is basic human nature. Human beings love things and
have always exchanged items with each other.

Money was needed to buy and repair cars, absolutely essential in the
country.

Back from the Land – Why did people leave?

Economics

The economy was racked with inflation, in 1978 all prices rose 12%,
and in 1979 prices rose 13%. Before then, a modest income could have
provided most necessities.

Many idealists had one-dimensional ideas about capitalism, that it was
nothing but ruthlessness, and that they could avoid the capitalist
system by becoming self-sufficient.

But Copthorne Macdonald concluded after several years that Alternative
society never got large enough to separate from the mainstream
society. You had to buy your tools at the hardware store since there
weren't enough people making them on forges. The basic infrastructure
of the economy forced people to buy outside the alternative lifestyle
community. The bottom line is that small economies like communes and
homesteads don't have the "size, complexity, cash flow, or diversity
of goods and services to survive very well independently".

Doing something at home didn't pay well either. One farmer worked out
he was making about ten cents an hour by the time he'd grown wheat and
turned it into flour. Agnew spent three hours making ketchup and
ended up with a mess and only half a jar of ketchup, which she could
have bought for 75 cents. Meanwhile, she could have earned a great
deal more working for three hours.

People had confused consumerism with cash – but even a sparse
existence requires necessities that can't be made or grown on the
homestead.

To afford necessities and improvements, people found they had to take
jobs that were body destroying, degrading, and low paying, with no
health care or benefits, that were also boring and sometimes
dangerous. Those who'd thought the well-paid middle class careers
they'd thought were hard or dull discovered otherwise. Since most
homesteads were far out in the country, it wasn't usually possible to
return to abandoned careers.

Agnew says that many discovered their work to be much like what Tom
said to Amanda in the play "The Glass Menagerie". Here's how he
describes his warehouse job: "I'd rather somebody picked up a crowbar
and battered out my brains—than go back mornings! I go! Every time
you come in yelling that Goddamn `Rise and Shine!' `Rise and Shine!' I
say to myself, `How lucky dead people are!' But I get up, I go! For
sixty-five dollars a month, I give up all that I dream of doing and
being ever!"

By leaving homesteads to work outside, they lost the time and energy
needed to make themselves self-sufficient – time versus money. They
needed time to build homes, weed, and so on, but they needed money to
buy cement, garden tools, etc.

Just as some communes failed because they didn't manage the delicate
balance between group cohesion and interaction with the outside
community, so did homesteads fail as they tipped towards more time
spent off the farm working than improving the homestead. People began
to realize that rather than being homesteaders with outside jobs, they
had unrewarding, low-paying jobs and happened to own a homestead. So
many decided to return to the middle-class high-paying, rewarding
careers they'd abandoned.

And many had not choice but to leave the land – they were bankrupt,
out of savings if not deeply in debt. Many couples had children, and
didn't feel it was fair to them to lead isolated lives on farms, far
from good schools.

In the end they found they had to participate in the economy,
capitalism infused every aspect of life and was beyond overthrowing or
disregarding. And Agnew asks, what if we had succeeded in making
capitalism go away – "did we really want to trade places with people
in the Third World who involuntarily lived back-to-the-land lives of
simplicity, with no hope of escaping?

Divorce

Despite love being what the counterculture was all about, a return to
neighbor helping neighbor, the reality of never-ending hard work,
poverty, and lack of privacy in one-room or small cabins took a toll
on marriages. Agnew says no one has studied the rate among
back-to-the-landers, but she bets it was higher than the national
divorce rate.

When a marriage failed, one partner usually had to quit the land and
go back to civilization. And the partner remaining on the land often
found someone else who wasn't enamored of the homestead lifestyle. Or
didn't find anyone, and couldn't cope with all the work on their own.

Commune failures

Meanwhile, people who went back to the land via communes were
returning as well. Agnew lists these reasons for commune failures:
lack of clear goals and structures, aggravations of shared space,
irritating personal habits, not liking each other once acquainted,
exasperating interpersonal relationships, etc. Factions developed and
people divided over all sorts of things – religion, pacifism versus
self-defense, politics, etc. There were individual resentments
between people, and just one out-of-sync person could rattle the whole
group.

Children could be a problem – they were good at manipulating all of
the adults to try to get stuff they wanted, causing all the grown-ups
to fight among each other, and out-of-control kids added to irritation
levels.

The "unanimous consent" nature of decisions also caused problems –
either there was a hung jury or underground resistance. Mutual
consent favors the verbally aggressive and quiet people lose out, but
giving in all the time soon made the silent ones resentful and feeling
degraded.

New people threw communes off balance too. Initially a group tended
to be young and single, but as people paired up and brought new
partners to the farm, some of them didn't fit in with the group, and
that caused conflict.

Probably the most important factor that broke communes up was the
resentment the hard workers felt for slackers. People disagreed about
work contributions, money making efforts. People who worked hard
didn't want to share money with people who didn't work at all or hard
enough. The workers tried to get shirkers to work four hours, to do
assigned tasks, or contribute their fair share of money, but there was
no way to enforce it, so these measures failed.

And in the end, who owned the property became a matter of huge
importance and caused many ruptures as this issue was sorted out among
commune members.

There are many in the Peak Oil community who believe that times will
get so hard that individual homesteaders will be vulnerable to roving
country gangs and urban dwellers fleeing the city in search of food.
They also believe that lone families don't have enough skills to
maintain a separate existence as infrastructure declines and people
are truly on their own.

If they're right, then it's especially important to understand why
past communities ended.
Hine's "California Utopian Colonies" delves into why these communes
failed:

• Fountain Grove, Santa Rosa, 1875. Rich members backed out with
$90,000. Newspaper sensationalism in the San Francisco papers
suggested that there was a great deal of sexual license and immorality
going on.
• Point Loma, 1897. The Los Angeles times accused them of being a
"fanatical cult" protected by armed men under the hypnotic influence
of founder Mrs. Tingley, and women and children were starving. There
were also financial problems, which increased during the Great
Depression, and the demands for housing were so great in WWII that the
land was sold off.
• Icaria Speranza Commune, near Cloverdale. The Great Depression,
lack of a dynamic leader, financial problems, and a lack of presses to
make wine with.
• Kaweah near Visalia. Lost their land claim because the timber
interests and government were hostile to them. They spent too much
time building a road to the Sequoias rather than farming, had an
overly complicated form of government, constant internal bickering,
schisms, factional divisions, lazy members, and the leader had an
argumentative and undependable personality. Plus they didn't screen
new members well enough.
• Altruria, Sonoma valley, 1894. Mainly economic. New members
didn't bring in enough financial capital, the goods produced weren't
always the best choices, and what was produced wasn't done in a
coordinated fashion.
• Llano del Rio, Antelope valley. Politics and fighting among the
members (too much democracy). Fraud. Not enough water caused them to
sell and move to Louisiana, but these Socialists did not fit in with
the greater community, which was very conservative. The great
Depression caused a lot of free loaders to join.

Albert Bates, at The Farm in Tennessee, believes that if people want
to join a commune, they should go to one that already exists – it's
very hard to make them work.

The Malthusian Die-off didn't happen

Back-to-the-landers hoped to escape the famine, overpopulation, war,
and chaos that threatened to result from energy shortages and
ecological destruction. But life went on, and friends and family on
the outside were having it much easier, having more fun, and leading
far more interesting and intellectual lives in cities. In the city
you could make a social contribution, live in a warm home, go back to
school, and attend cultural events.

Fatigue

The novelty and idealism of hauling cold clean spring water in heavy
buckets over rough ground, endlessly chopping wood and getting up in
the middle of the night to feed fires, running to outhouses in
freezing weather, getting headaches from kerosene lamp fumes and other
hardships grew thin.

Agnew writes "We had grown tired. We now understood why our
pioneering ancestors hand only lived to be 35 or 40… The sheer
physical discomfort alone was enough to change most of our minds".

Bacl to the Land Conclusion

Nearly everyone Agnew interviewed has very fond memories of their
experiences and would do it all over again.

But few succeeded. According to Jeffrey Jacob's research on the
success rate of back-to-the-landers, only 3% subsisted on a
combination of cash crops and bartering, only 2% through "intensive
cultivation of cash crops". The others all found themselves
preoccupied with money:
44% worked full-time away from homesteads
18% had pensions and investments
17% survived on part-time or seasonal work
15% got their income from businesses they could run from home

Peak Oil (water, topsoil), why aren't people going back to the land now?

Of the very few people going back to the land now, many are motivated
by the same Malthusian fears of their predecessors, especially since
this time energy shortages are going to be real, and resource
shortages "Limits to Growth" predicted are evident.

Most young people are aware they're being handed a crummy planet, but
they have a vague sense of unease, not a fine-tuned understanding of
the situation, because the vast majority don't read -- they spend most
of their time on computers with facebook and computer games, watching
TV, and so on.

Those in the younger generation who are fully aware of the situation
and taking Permaculture and bio-intensive workshops can't afford to go
back to the land – farm land prices have skyrocketed. Many find the
work too hard and pursue other careers.

Yet people need to go back to the land – the fossil fuels that made it
possible for one farmer to feed 100 people will not last much longer.
Worse yet, one of the ways we were able to grow from 100 million to
300 million people in the United States was to shift from oxen and
horses, who did the most difficult and brutal farm labor, to tractors.
Farm animals also provided transportation, but we shifted to cars and
trucks. Not having to feed oxen and horses for farm labor and
transportation freed up a lot of land which was then used to grow food
for people and build suburbia on instead.

When we return to the land, we won't have enough land to feed oxen and
horses for farm labor and transportation. There isn't enough land to
sustain both people and animals any more.

Since what we face is a convergence of resource shortages, resulting
in ecological collapse, I believe western civilization will go down
hard and fast. You can't compare previous civilizations to this one –
there has never been a society so dependent on a non-renewable
resource that makes every single aspect of survival possible: food,
heat, air-conditioning, transportation, homes, clothes, health care,
and so on. Before the fossil fuel age, societies collapsed from
climate change, wars, and so on. But the "technology" and
infrastructure didn't need to change for people to survive – they
could just move back to the country and continue to use animal muscle
power as they always had to farm and for transportation. Most
people's work and skills were directly related to survival already,
even if they weren't farmers, they made bricks, did iron smithing, or
some other job related to food, shelter, protective clothing and
footwear, etc.

To make the transition back to a mainly agricultural society, urban
dwellers will need to spend a lot more money on food. The only time
most farmers ever made a decent living was after World War I, and city
dwellers screamed bloody murder at having to pay so much, and used
their greater political power to throw farmers back into poverty again.

The organic, local, and slow food movements are gaining momentum,
especially among wealthier people who can afford to pay more for food.
But it's likely that once energy shocks hit, there'll be massive
unemployment and inflation, deflation, or stagflation, and many people
will be hard-pressed to afford food.

We also need more organic, sustainable agriculture departments in
universities to shift agriculture to a sustainable mode as fast as
possible, but entrenched petrochemically funded departments make that
shift very difficult.

Pest management will be difficult too. Migrating to IPM (Integrated
Pest Management) and getting rid of all those agrichemicals requires a
great deal of education to a massive, non-existent, new cadre of
students, since it requires understanding of many different fields to
make it work, such as entomology, soil science, botany, plant
diseases, irrigation, and so on.

But the huge number of agricultural students we need isn't enrolling
at universities. In "Agriculture schools Sprucing up their image",
the Los Angeles Times has an article about how agricultural schools
are seeking students because large numbers of agricultural workers are
nearing retirement, but few are applying.

So, if you can talk any young people you know into taking their offer
up, they will probably be grateful one day – since their expertise
will be essential. And there will come a time when food prices are so
high and so many people are unemployed that people will band together
to jointly buy land, especially if the alternative is to be a poorly
paid laborer on someone else's farm. The expertise of those who've
gotten IPM and other agricultural knowledge at universities will make
it much more likely these enterprises will succeed.

This time around, the model to follow for a group endeavor is already
here – Community Supported Agriculture. Lazy members who don't farm
their tract will earn far less than hard-working members. And the
pooling of resources will have a huge advantage over individual farms,
if the members can learn to get along and cooperate (and find a good
leader).

These CSA's should be forming now, because it can take ten years to
learn the necessary skills. But there's no central place for people
to find each other like in the `70s, when Mother Earth ads helped
people find one another to pool money to buy land with.

Given how little time is left before disruptions in energy start to
make life unpleasant, there is a chance that at some point, if there's
not chaos, local or state governments will have to put citizens on
large collective farms, and this will likely lead to a feudalist or
fascist form of government. It will be hard to avoid this no matter
what, because land ownership is concentrated in so few hands.

However the future unfolds, less and less energy will mean that
eventually up to eight or nine in ten survivors will find themselves
going back-to-the-land. The people who don't make it to the
agricultural level will have died from starvation, succumbing to
pandemics, fighting abroad or here for a slice of the declining pie.

It would be better if people chose this future with hope and courage.
For this to work though, the birth rate and immigration would need
to fall drastically.

Farming can be an immensely satisfying and rewarding lifestyle. It
would be best for democracy and preserving topsoil, water, and forests
if Americans could embrace reality and take appropriate
back-to-the-land action.

Alice, this is a valuable contribution. I hope it gets posted on a
bunch of other energy sites. We need to know what worked, what
failed, in previous "back to the land" movements, and learn from
that. What most people aren't ready for is the unrelenting hard
work and poverty of attempting to live off the land. We really know
very little about how our ancestors - homesteading families in the
midWest and Western U.S. - managed to make a go of it, 200 years ago.

I see Albert Bates frequently, always wanted to ask him about life
on The Farm and how it worked (or didn't) there. I did hear that
most households there have at least one person with a
steady "outside" job, and very little farming goes on there, now.

Albert will be in Houston, at least some of the time staffing the
table for New Society publishers.

I will call you or email about getting this piece some wider
distribution.

- Dick Lawrence
ASPO-USA

--- In energyresources@yahoogroups.com, "Alice Friedemann"
<alice_friedemann@...> wrote:

>
>
> The Back to the Land Movement:
> Why it Failed and Why we Need to Try Again Anyway
> By Alice Friedemann
>
> Although much has been said about why communes and Utopian

communities failed, little has been written about the fate of
individual homesteaders.

>
> Eleanor Agnew, in her 2004 book, "Back from the Land. How Young
> Americans Went to Nature in the 1970s, and Why They Came Back"

(Ivan R. Dee), discusses the millions of young adults who tried

> homesteading. Agnew speaks from experience -- she went back to the
> land with her husband and two boys in Troy, Maine.

Donnella Meadows, author of Limits to Growth, lived on a N.H. commune near Dartmouth. She was a lovely person. I imagine it takes real determination to live that way.




-----Original Message-----
From: energyresources@yahoogroups.com [mailto:energyresources@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of Alice Friedemann
Sent: Thursday, October 11, 2007 6:46 PM
To: energyresources@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [energyresources] Back to the Land: why it failed and why we need to try again anyway




The Back to the Land Movement:
Why it Failed and Why we Need to Try Again Anyway
By Alice Friedemann

Although much has been said about why communes and Utopian communities
failed, little has been written about the fate of individual homesteaders.

Eleanor Agnew, in her 2004 book, "Back from the Land. How Young
Americans Went to Nature in the 1970s, and Why They Came Back" (Ivan
R. Dee), discusses the millions of young adults who tried
homesteading. Agnew speaks from experience -- she went back to the
land with her husband and two boys in Troy, Maine.

Unless otherwise noted, most of what follows is based on Agnew's book.

Agnew estimates between 750,000 and one million people dwelled on
communes in the 70's. Millions more went back to the land
independently. On the whole the movement consisted of educated,
young, white, middle class men and women.

Their rejection of the current system wouldn't have been possible if
the overall economy hadn't been so wealthy, it was a luxury to be able
to experiment.

Many, if not most, were naïve and unrealistic about what it would take
to make the urban to country transition. Some discovered you
couldn't borrow money from banks without assets, had to acquire home
building, car repairing, and farming skills from scratch, and nearly
all grew tired from the hard work and discomforts. In the end the
vast majority weren't able to live apart from the Capitalist society
surrounding them.

Why People Went Back to the Land

There were many reasons people went back to the land. The oil crisis
in 1973 led many to believe that the capitalist system was in imminent
danger of collapse, so going back to the land would be a matter of
survival.

The value system of American society was repulsive to many
back-to-the-landers. They abhorred the rat race, boring jobs, crowds,
the corrupt establishment; consumerism, destruction of wilderness, and
advertising to get people to buy things they didn't need. Some also
felt the need to "redeem their souls" because they'd done nothing to
deserve the abundance they'd experienced. America has a long tradition
of associating virtue with moderation, hard work, self-denial, and
simple living. Many associated farming with the romantic notion of
self-sufficient pioneers.

Homesteaders wanted to invent a new and better civilization based on
community, healthy food, a love of nature, and avoidance of toxic
chemicals.

Going Back to the Land was Hard

The joy of raising animals on the farm was shattered when they were
slaughtered. Agnew writes "How many of us had ever watched the blood
spurt from a slaughtered animal before, watched the light fade from
its eyes-by our own hand, no less?"

Goats could be ornery and raising animals meant no days off. Many
animals died on the learning curve of animal husbandry.

Farming was far harder than people realized. Some bought unsuitable
land, i.e. land that was mostly rocks, which made building homes and
starting gardens very hard. Good topsoil was washed away in storms.
Then there were assaults by wasps, flies, and no-see-ums, blistered
hands, and aching muscles while tending crops, which in the end were
often lost to drought, frost, hail, and pests. The surviving crops
required hard work to harvest and prepare for storage.

In the country, there were times when you had to scrape ice off the
floors and walls, spend most of the year chopping wood to be sure
there was enough when winter came.

Cold weather led to frozen pipes, immobile cars, slippery roads and
paths, the risk of hypothermia, and extremely cold homes since most
weren't built to code. Snow entombed homes, equipment, and woodpiles.
Uncovered wood piles froze into a block of wood ice blocks.

Fires weren't as easy to make as Boy Scout camp fires. Wood needed to
age for up to a year or it wouldn't burn well. If the wood was too
green, it put creosote into the chimney, which could catch on fire and
potentially burn your home down.

Cooking with wood required constant attention, you couldn't run off
and do other chores, because you need to keep putting kindling in and
ensure an even distribution of heat throughout the body of the stove,
or the food would cook unevenly - burned on one side and raw on the other.

Chopping trees down to build a home was another big ordeal. Clearing
land was just the start of the hard work, after that, there was
digging holes for the foundation through thick tangles of roots or
bedrock.

Things were always going wrong, septic tanks blowing over, tractors
broken, escaped farm animals, broken chainsaws, falling trees gashing
holes in cabins, and so on.

Middle class homesteaders had an idealized, romantic view of poverty,
because they'd never experienced it and didn't know anyone who was
poor. Poverty was what artists, writers, and musicians experienced in
their creative pursuits. Poverty was hard-working, clean, and
honorable. But Dorothy Allison, who grew up poor, wrote that poverty
was "dreary, deadening, and shameful". In "Nickled and Dimed",
Barbara Ehrenreich writes that poverty was "not a place you would want
to visit for touristic purposes; it just smells too much like fear."

Most hadn't imagined being poor on the land would really be poverty -
after all, they'd be growing their own food, building their own homes,
and trading with community members for what was needed.

What they hadn't reckoned with was that they could not be independent
of the outside economy. Being isolated meant even more dependence on
cars, and repairs were expensive. People couldn't grow all of their
own food and needed to get some items at the supermarket. And just
about everything required money on the farm: seeds, animals, stoves,
and so on. It wasn't cheaper to live on a farm than in the city.
Food and clothes weren't cheaper and there were fewer choices and
opportunities to price compare. Health care was expensive and -- only
taxes were cheaper.

People and publications made it seem easy to live off the land

Books like "Independence on a 5-acre Farm" made it seem it was no big
deal to go back to the land. Mother Earth News had many articles like
"Raise Worms for Fun and Profit" that misled people into thinking
they'd earn enough money on the farm to pay for necessities.

Eliot Coleman told people that they didn't need health insurance, and
since everyone knew how evil insurance companies were, they were glad
to opt out. Agnew devotes a hair-raising chapter to how wrong Coleman
was - just because you're young doesn't mean there won't be a need for
emergency care, especially on a farm doing heavy manual labor, where
the odds are many times higher than an office job that an accident
will occur.

Health care also sucked in the country - there weren't nearly enough
doctors per capita, so there were usually long waits.

Those who thought they could doctor themselves with herbs were
sometimes dead wrong. Comfrey, which was supposed to cure just about
everything, turns out to have liver damaging and carcinogenic effects.
An alternative doctor prescribed Chinese herb cocktails that led to
total kidney destruction in 100 women. Natural is not always better.

Scott and Helen Nearing were the role models for the back-to-the-land
community. They had managed to build the ideal homestead working only
four hours a day, spending the rest of their time reading, writing,
playing music, etc. They made it seem possible to do all this with
very little cash.

But the Nearings made money from speaking, writing books, and
donations. They had many followers who worked on their farm free of
charge.

Thoreau also made it sound easy to build a cabin and live in the
wilderness. But the truth is, he was two miles from town, where he
went nearly every day and visited friends, family, and he dined out
often there.

The counterculture had a reverse snobbery and one-upmanship about what
was a necessity versus a luxury. But who could really decide that?
As Thomas Hine, author of "I Want That! How We All Became Shoppers"
noted, if he came to your house and started throwing out things he
thought were unnecessary, it wouldn't be long before you began arguing
with him!

Some see the voluntary simplicity movement (VSM) as the latest, new
age version of the back to the land movement, with similar problems.
What someone in the VSM movement would see as a luxury, say, buying a
good suit to go on an interview with, would be seen as essential to
the job seeker. What about deodorant, or dressing nice so that people
are more likely to buy your vegetables at the farmers market? Hine
summarizes the problem with VSM as it often "seems that our definition
of a luxury is something we don't buy for ourselves".

And then there is basic human nature. Human beings love things and
have always exchanged items with each other.

Money was needed to buy and repair cars, absolutely essential in the
country.

Back from the Land - Why did people leave?

Economics

The economy was racked with inflation, in 1978 all prices rose 12%,
and in 1979 prices rose 13%. Before then, a modest income could have
provided most necessities.

Many idealists had one-dimensional ideas about capitalism, that it was
nothing but ruthlessness, and that they could avoid the capitalist
system by becoming self-sufficient.

But Copthorne Macdonald concluded after several years that Alternative
society never got large enough to separate from the mainstream
society. You had to buy your tools at the hardware store since there
weren't enough people making them on forges. The basic infrastructure
of the economy forced people to buy outside the alternative lifestyle
community. The bottom line is that small economies like communes and
homesteads don't have the "size, complexity, cash flow, or diversity
of goods and services to survive very well independently".

Doing something at home didn't pay well either. One farmer worked out
he was making about ten cents an hour by the time he'd grown wheat and
turned it into flour. Agnew spent three hours making ketchup and
ended up with a mess and only half a jar of ketchup, which she could
have bought for 75 cents. Meanwhile, she could have earned a great
deal more working for three hours.

People had confused consumerism with cash - but even a sparse
existence requires necessities that can't be made or grown on the
homestead.

To afford necessities and improvements, people found they had to take
jobs that were body destroying, degrading, and low paying, with no
health care or benefits, that were also boring and sometimes
dangerous. Those who'd thought the well-paid middle class careers
they'd thought were hard or dull discovered otherwise. Since most
homesteads were far out in the country, it wasn't usually possible to
return to abandoned careers.

Agnew says that many discovered their work to be much like what Tom
said to Amanda in the play "The Glass Menagerie". Here's how he
describes his warehouse job: "I'd rather somebody picked up a crowbar
and battered out my brains-than go back mornings! I go! Every time
you come in yelling that Goddamn `Rise and Shine!' `Rise and Shine!' I
say to myself, `How lucky dead people are!' But I get up, I go! For
sixty-five dollars a month, I give up all that I dream of doing and
being ever!"

By leaving homesteads to work outside, they lost the time and energy
needed to make themselves self-sufficient - time versus money. They
needed time to build homes, weed, and so on, but they needed money to
buy cement, garden tools, etc.

Just as some communes failed because they didn't manage the delicate
balance between group cohesion and interaction with the outside
community, so did homesteads fail as they tipped towards more time
spent off the farm working than improving the homestead. People began
to realize that rather than being homesteaders with outside jobs, they
had unrewarding, low-paying jobs and happened to own a homestead. So
many decided to return to the middle-class high-paying, rewarding
careers they'd abandoned.

And many had not choice but to leave the land - they were bankrupt,
out of savings if not deeply in debt. Many couples had children, and
didn't feel it was fair to them to lead isolated lives on farms, far
from good schools.

In the end they found they had to participate in the economy,
capitalism infused every aspect of life and was beyond overthrowing or
disregarding. And Agnew asks, what if we had succeeded in making
capitalism go away - "did we really want to trade places with people
in the Third World who involuntarily lived back-to-the-land lives of
simplicity, with no hope of escaping?

Divorce

Despite love being what the counterculture was all about, a return to
neighbor helping neighbor, the reality of never-ending hard work,
poverty, and lack of privacy in one-room or small cabins took a toll
on marriages. Agnew says no one has studied the rate among
back-to-the-landers, but she bets it was higher than the national
divorce rate.

When a marriage failed, one partner usually had to quit the land and
go back to civilization. And the partner remaining on the land often
found someone else who wasn't enamored of the homestead lifestyle. Or
didn't find anyone, and couldn't cope with all the work on their own.

Commune failures

Meanwhile, people who went back to the land via communes were
returning as well. Agnew lists these reasons for commune failures:
lack of clear goals and structures, aggravations of shared space,
irritating personal habits, not liking each other once acquainted,
exasperating interpersonal relationships, etc. Factions developed and
people divided over all sorts of things - religion, pacifism versus
self-defense, politics, etc. There were individual resentments
between people, and just one out-of-sync person could rattle the whole
group.

Children could be a problem - they were good at manipulating all of
the adults to try to get stuff they wanted, causing all the grown-ups
to fight among each other, and out-of-control kids added to irritation
levels.

The "unanimous consent" nature of decisions also caused problems -
either there was a hung jury or underground resistance. Mutual
consent favors the verbally aggressive and quiet people lose out, but
giving in all the time soon made the silent ones resentful and feeling
degraded.

New people threw communes off balance too. Initially a group tended
to be young and single, but as people paired up and brought new
partners to the farm, some of them didn't fit in with the group, and
that caused conflict.

Probably the most important factor that broke communes up was the
resentment the hard workers felt for slackers. People disagreed about
work contributions, money making efforts. People who worked hard
didn't want to share money with people who didn't work at all or hard
enough. The workers tried to get shirkers to work four hours, to do
assigned tasks, or contribute their fair share of money, but there was
no way to enforce it, so these measures failed.

And in the end, who owned the property became a matter of huge
importance and caused many ruptures as this issue was sorted out among
commune members.

There are many in the Peak Oil community who believe that times will
get so hard that individual homesteaders will be vulnerable to roving
country gangs and urban dwellers fleeing the city in search of food.
They also believe that lone families don't have enough skills to
maintain a separate existence as infrastructure declines and people
are truly on their own.

If they're right, then it's especially important to understand why
past communities ended.
Hine's "California Utopian Colonies" delves into why these communes
failed:

* Fountain Grove, Santa Rosa, 1875. Rich members backed out with
$90,000. Newspaper sensationalism in the San Francisco papers
suggested that there was a great deal of sexual license and immorality
going on.
* Point Loma, 1897. The Los Angeles times accused them of being a
"fanatical cult" protected by armed men under the hypnotic influence
of founder Mrs. Tingley, and women and children were starving. There
were also financial problems, which increased during the Great
Depression, and the demands for housing were so great in WWII that the
land was sold off.
* Icaria Speranza Commune, near Cloverdale. The Great Depression,
lack of a dynamic leader, financial problems, and a lack of presses to
make wine with.
* Kaweah near Visalia. Lost their land claim because the timber
interests and government were hostile to them. They spent too much
time building a road to the Sequoias rather than farming, had an
overly complicated form of government, constant internal bickering,
schisms, factional divisions, lazy members, and the leader had an
argumentative and undependable personality. Plus they didn't screen
new members well enough.
* Altruria, Sonoma valley, 1894. Mainly economic. New members
didn't bring in enough financial capital, the goods produced weren't
always the best choices, and what was produced wasn't done in a
coordinated fashion.
* Llano del Rio, Antelope valley. Politics and fighting among the
members (too much democracy). Fraud. Not enough water caused them to
sell and move to Louisiana, but these Socialists did not fit in with
the greater community, which was very conservative. The great
Depression caused a lot of free loaders to join.

Albert Bates, at The Farm in Tennessee, believes that if people want
to join a commune, they should go to one that already exists - it's
very hard to make them work.

The Malthusian Die-off didn't happen

Back-to-the-landers hoped to escape the famine, overpopulation, war,
and chaos that threatened to result from energy shortages and
ecological destruction. But life went on, and friends and family on
the outside were having it much easier, having more fun, and leading
far more interesting and intellectual lives in cities. In the city
you could make a social contribution, live in a warm home, go back to
school, and attend cultural events.

Fatigue

The novelty and idealism of hauling cold clean spring water in heavy
buckets over rough ground, endlessly chopping wood and getting up in
the middle of the night to feed fires, running to outhouses in
freezing weather, getting headaches from kerosene lamp fumes and other
hardships grew thin.

Agnew writes "We had grown tired. We now understood why our
pioneering ancestors hand only lived to be 35 or 40... The sheer
physical discomfort alone was enough to change most of our minds".

Bacl to the Land Conclusion

Nearly everyone Agnew interviewed has very fond memories of their
experiences and would do it all over again.

But few succeeded. According to Jeffrey Jacob's research on the
success rate of back-to-the-landers, only 3% subsisted on a
combination of cash crops and bartering, only 2% through "intensive
cultivation of cash crops". The others all found themselves
preoccupied with money:
44% worked full-time away from homesteads
18% had pensions and investments
17% survived on part-time or seasonal work
15% got their income from businesses they could run from home

Peak Oil (water, topsoil), why aren't people going back to the land now?

Of the very few people going back to the land now, many are motivated
by the same Malthusian fears of their predecessors, especially since
this time energy shortages are going to be real, and resource
shortages "Limits to Growth" predicted are evident.

Most young people are aware they're being handed a crummy planet, but
they have a vague sense of unease, not a fine-tuned understanding of
the situation, because the vast majority don't read -- they spend most
of their time on computers with facebook and computer games, watching
TV, and so on.

Those in the younger generation who are fully aware of the situation
and taking Permaculture and bio-intensive workshops can't afford to go
back to the land - farm land prices have skyrocketed. Many find the
work too hard and pursue other careers.

Yet people need to go back to the land - the fossil fuels that made it
possible for one farmer to feed 100 people will not last much longer.
Worse yet, one of the ways we were able to grow from 100 million to
300 million people in the United States was to shift from oxen and
horses, who did the most difficult and brutal farm labor, to tractors.
Farm animals also provided transportation, but we shifted to cars and
trucks. Not having to feed oxen and horses for farm labor and
transportation freed up a lot of land which was then used to grow food
for people and build suburbia on instead.

When we return to the land, we won't have enough land to feed oxen and
horses for farm labor and transportation. There isn't enough land to
sustain both people and animals any more.

Since what we face is a convergence of resource shortages, resulting
in ecological collapse, I believe western civilization will go down
hard and fast. You can't compare previous civilizations to this one -
there has never been a society so dependent on a non-renewable
resource that makes every single aspect of survival possible: food,
heat, air-conditioning, transportation, homes, clothes, health care,
and so on. Before the fossil fuel age, societies collapsed from
climate change, wars, and so on. But the "technology" and
infrastructure didn't need to change for people to survive - they
could just move back to the country and continue to use animal muscle
power as they always had to farm and for transportation. Most
people's work and skills were directly related to survival already,
even if they weren't farmers, they made bricks, did iron smithing, or
some other job related to food, shelter, protective clothing and
footwear, etc.

To make the transition back to a mainly agricultural society, urban
dwellers will need to spend a lot more money on food. The only time
most farmers ever made a decent living was after World War I, and city
dwellers screamed bloody murder at having to pay so much, and used
their greater political power to throw farmers back into poverty again.

The organic, local, and slow food movements are gaining momentum,
especially among wealthier people who can afford to pay more for food.
But it's likely that once energy shocks hit, there'll be massive
unemployment and inflation, deflation, or stagflation, and many people
will be hard-pressed to afford food.

We also need more organic, sustainable agriculture departments in
universities to shift agriculture to a sustainable mode as fast as
possible, but entrenched petrochemically funded departments make that
shift very difficult.

Pest management will be difficult too. Migrating to IPM (Integrated
Pest Management) and getting rid of all those agrichemicals requires a
great deal of education to a massive, non-existent, new cadre of
students, since it requires understanding of many different fields to
make it work, such as entomology, soil science, botany, plant
diseases, irrigation, and so on.

But the huge number of agricultural students we need isn't enrolling
at universities. In "Agriculture schools Sprucing up their image",
the Los Angeles Times has an article about how agricultural schools
are seeking students because large numbers of agricultural workers are
nearing retirement, but few are applying.

So, if you can talk any young people you know into taking their offer
up, they will probably be grateful one day - since their expertise
will be essential. And there will come a time when food prices are so
high and so many people are unemployed that people will band together
to jointly buy land, especially if the alternative is to be a poorly
paid laborer on someone else's farm. The expertise of those who've
gotten IPM and other agricultural knowledge at universities will make
it much more likely these enterprises will succeed.

This time around, the model to follow for a group endeavor is already
here - Community Supported Agriculture. Lazy members who don't farm
their tract will earn far less than hard-working members. And the
pooling of resources will have a huge advantage over individual farms,
if the members can learn to get along and cooperate (and find a good
leader).

These CSA's should be forming now, because it can take ten years to
learn the necessary skills. But there's no central place for people
to find each other like in the `70s, when Mother Earth ads helped
people find one another to pool money to buy land with.

Given how little time is left before disruptions in energy start to
make life unpleasant, there is a chance that at some point, if there's
not chaos, local or state governments will have to put citizens on
large collective farms, and this will likely lead to a feudalist or
fascist form of government. It will be hard to avoid this no matter
what, because land ownership is concentrated in so few hands.

However the future unfolds, less and less energy will mean that
eventually up to eight or nine in ten survivors will find themselves
going back-to-the-land. The people who don't make it to the
agricultural level will have died from starvation, succumbing to
pandemics, fighting abroad or here for a slice of the declining pie.

It would be better if people chose this future with hope and courage.
For this to work though, the birth rate and immigration would need
to fall drastically.

Farming can be an immensely satisfying and rewarding lifestyle. It
would be best for democracy and preserving topsoil, water, and forests
if Americans could embrace reality and take appropriate
back-to-the-land action.







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