In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Epilogue Home, Land, Security Another boom, another bust. In the Reagan era, in spite of increasing inequality , high unemployment, and an eroding middle class, the gospel of wealth attracted more followers than the gospel of simplicity. During the 1980s, Countryside Magazine’s subscriptions fell from forty thousand to four thousand. (They were able to survive, as editor J. D. Belanger recalled, only by grace of a new word processing machine quaintly named “Macintosh,” which cut their costs enough to save them to fight another day.)1 Mother Earth News struggled to find new readers, replacing its gritty stories of living in the backwoods on next to nothing with instructions for backyard do-it-yourself projects. (Even today, letters appear in other magazines deploring the “selling out” of Mother.) Still, as in the 1920s, a careful observer would find a lot beneath the surface. In 1981, a new “simple life” book appeared that would eventually be followed by many of its kind: Duane Elgin’s Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life That Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich. Topics that in the 1970s were closely associated with back-to-the-land projects—alternative energy, owner-built housing, organic food—were still attracting plenty of attention. Organic Gardening magazine floundered a bit in the 1980s, but its parent company Rodale Press continued to publish books on subjects from solar energy to herbal medicine. Gene Logsdon, who had published Two-Acre Eden (1971) and Homesteading: How to Find New Independence on the Land (1973) with Rodale, took the change in stride. Logsdon went on writing books that taught homesteading skills—Wildlife in Your Garden (1983), Practical Skills: A Revival of Forgotten Crafts (1985), The Low-Maintenance 227 House (1987)—but the titles avoided back-to-the-land rhetoric. Like Bolton Hall’s radical colleagues in the 1920s, for a few years the whole project became “less conspicuous.” In 1984, however, Don Mitchell published the first of his books about going back to the land in Vermont: Moving Upcountry: A Yankee Way of Knowledge. (This subtitle was a pun on Carlos Castañeda’s tale of peyote-inspired enlightenment , The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yacqui Way of Knowledge.) And in the same year, Ian and Margo Baldwin left New York City—also for Vermont, where they founded Chelsea Green Press. That press would eventually become very “conspicuous” indeed, evolving into a latter-day (although much smaller-scale) equivalent of the back-to-the-land publishing powerhouse of Doubleday, Page nearly a century earlier. In an account reminiscent of William Ellsworth Smythe’s 1921 description of his own readers, who used to “send for seed catalogues—and dream,” Ian Baldwin explained to a New York Times reporter in 1999 that Chelsea Green’s readers were not all back-to-the-landers; many of them, too, simply “like[d] to dream.’’2 By the 1990s, books were pouring from the press to inspire those dreams: of wind power and solar heat, straw bale houses and composting toilets, permaculture and community gardens. Eliot Coleman, who for many years had worked closely with Helen and Scott Nearing, published his pioneering gardening guides New Organic Grower (1989) and FourSeason Harvest (1992). Shepherd Ogden, grandson of the Vermont back-to-theland author Samuel Ogden, published Straight-Ahead Organic (1999). And Gene Logsdon returned to his old outspoken ways: in The Contrary Farmer (1993), he proposed a widespread return to small-scale self-sufficient homesteads, now calling them “cottage farms.” Judging from history, only one thing more was needed to trigger another full-scale back-to-the-land movement: a depression, perhaps, or some other kind of social crisis. As it happened, there would be no shortage of such disasters in the next few years. At the turn of the millennium, a false crisis—the anticipated “Y2K” collapse in the year 2000—was followed by a real one, in the wake of the 2001 attacks on New York and Washington. Two drawn-out and costly American wars ensued, and even these were often overshadowed by other calamities. Energy prices rose and fell with alarming volatility, and a series of hurricanes, floods, and droughts seemed to portend catastrophic climate change. When in 2007 a housing bubble burst, triggering a bank panic and a stock market crash, Americans were suddenly confronting nearly every kind of crisis that had threatened and inspired back-to-the-landers over the previous hundred years. 228 Epilogue E [3.139.82.23] Project MUSE (2024-04-26...

Share