New Pioneers: The Back-to-the-Land Movement and the Search for a Sustainable Future

Jeffrey Jacob offers a definitive study of the modern back-to-the-land movement in the United States and Canada, showing that the “simple life” was (and is) far from simple. The movement emerged out of the counterculture dialogue of the 1960s, but its roots lie in the agrarian ideology made familiar by writers like Thomas Jefferson, Henry David Thoreau, Theodore Roosevelt, Aldo Leopold, and Rexford Tugwell. Today’s practitioners employ a broad range of strategies for balancing these ideals against the realities of global capitalism. Jacob based his study primarily on questionnaires and dozens of personal interviews with exurbanite small landowners, a diverse group united by their preoccupation with personal freedom, “soft” technology, and the quest for a sustainable future.

New Pioneers begins with a series of family profiles revealing the subtle iconoclasm that allows back-to-the-landers to pursue their individualistic aspirations while fitting unobtrusively into rural community life. Few are zealots. Indeed, statistics based on several hundred responses reveal the average back-to-the-lander to be quite average: educated, middle-aged, and middle class. Some 38 percent own computers.

Having revealed the human face of the movement, Jacob describes its “central dilemma” as finding time for the laborious tasks of low-tech farming while scraping together enough outside income to fill the gap between subsistence and necessity. He distinguishes several classes of small holders based on how they manage this money/time dilemma. Purists devote the bulk of their time to subsistence production, paring down their needs through a kind of monastic simplicity. Others devote their time to cash crops, mostly for upscale urban markets. In between are commuter-farmers, country crafts people, weekenders, pensioners, and “urban pioneers” who glean subsistence from their suburban backyards. Each exists somewhere on a continuum between total self-sufficiency and the convenience of the supermarket. Interestingly, members of the same family do not always occupy the same point on this continuum.

Included in this mix of commitment and compromise is a range of technological options tending toward the organic, the scaled-down, the closed loop. Toads, birds, goats, and geese contribute to an integrated pest-management system; trees offer shade, shelter, fuel, compost, and fruit; and at the more expensive end of the spectrum, composting toilets, windmills, and solar panels make their contribution to sustainable living.

Having identified these “new pioneers,” Jacob analyzes their potential for changing rural society. Certainly they provide models for sustainable agriculture, and in many cases back-to-the-land activists have spearheaded resistance to corporate rape of the countryside. Back-to-the-landers maintain a high rate of membership in environmental organizations, and 93 percent are sympathetic to social-justice causes. But almost by definition most are isolationists, averse to the organizational entanglements so much a part of the struggle for a better world. Jacob concludes, moreover, that achieving a sustainable economy will require a level of collective action not found in the movement today. Such an economy would necessitate a political agenda favoring tax breaks for “soft” technology, low-interest loans, subsidies, and, on a more ambitious scale, “full-cost” commodity pricing that would force capital-intensive farmers to bear the burden of their own “externalities”—environmental degradation, topsoil loss, aquifer depletion, groundwater contamination, interstate highway maintenance. The political prospects, given the individualism manifest among small landholders, are dim.

While his political outlook is downbeat, Jacob tells an elevating tale of day-to-day commitment and idealism. He provides insight into a fascinating world of low-tech microfarming and traces an important contemporary manifestation of our historic veneration of “country life.” Although sympathetic to the new pioneers, Jacob avoids being preachy. His thoughtful combination of personal vignette and sociological analysis provides perspective on a historic drama unfolding in isolated corners of the continent. The book offers grist for scholars interested in rural history, technology...