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Building an “Urban Homestead”: Survival, Self- Suffi ciency, and Nature in Seattle, 1970– 1980
- University of Virginia Press
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Building an “Urban Homestead” Survival, Self-Sufficiency, and Nature in Seattle, 1970–1980 Jeffrey Craig Sanders Amidst the 1970s energy crisis, Jody Aliesan, a seasoned political activist, converted the private realm of her Seattle home to public display. As a participant in the U.S. Department of Energy’s Appropriate Technology Small Grants Program, Aliesan dubbed her home the “Urban Homestead.” Over 4,500 strangers milled around her kitchen, examined her furniture, and marveled at her vegetable gardens. In her open houses and in subsequent weekend columns she wrote for the Seattle Times, Aliesan illustrated how urbanites could live more self-sufficiently by reconnecting the city to nature. Times photographs featured her in a beekeeper suit gathering honey from rooftop hives or spreading compost in her backyard garden. Her weekly columns were a catalog of how-to’s: how to insulate a water heater and weatherstrip a house, make homemade tofu, live without a car, recycle cans and bottles, even how to save urine for the compost pile. Her home modeled ef- ficiency and conservation.¹ Visitors to the homestead responded with hundreds of reply cards and thank-you letters that expressed an overwhelmingly positive response to the spectacle of Aliesan’s work. Many wrote of being “inspired” and “amazed” that an “ordinary-looking household could conserve energy.” Most pledged to improve their own homes. Wrote one visitor, “We are going total compost/ recycling . . . [and] we’re going to build a retrofit passive solar system this spring.” Another said that Aliesan lived “in about as much harmony with the Earth as is possible in an urban setting.” Aliesan launched her homestead experiment at a moment when Americans were forced to seriously contemplate scarcity for the first time since the Great Depression. Aliesan’s Seattle neighbors welcomed the idea of exposing connections between personal 182 | Jeffrey Craig Sanders domestic consumption and the seemingly distant hinterland of natural resources . In the process, she popularized counterculture ideas of “wholeearth ecology” for everyday urbanites. Indeed, her home appeared to perfectly harmonize the challenge of city living with nature. Her columns and the example of her model home combined a potent American mythology—a resonant image of frontier living and self-sufficiency—with a radically new version of what home could mean in the evolving postindustrial city.² I open with this brief story of Aliesan because I think her example crystallized an emerging urban environmental ethos in the late 1960s in places like Seattle. Despite our long-standing romance with wild places and the association of wilderness with environmental activism, the modern environmental movement in the United States was very much an urban-focused phenomenon. Many activists, like Aliesan, self-consciously linked their concerns about the city’s social conditions to their emerging understanding of the idea of ecology, hoping to bring nature into the city in less obvious ways. Despite the dominant image of 1970s “white flight” from cities, or even the narrative of counterculture retreat to communes, many politically engaged and environmentally active Americans by the 1970s committed themselves to remaking urban spaces, and in the process they laid the foundation for contemporary movements such as new urbanism and the green building movement. Places like Seattle were early hothouses for such activity.³ The urban home stood at the center of this new political ethos, and domestic urban space in the 1970s was the place where activists connected political concerns as seemingly discrete as gender, the environment, and poverty. Urban consumption served as a fulcrum for these concerns, and the urban house as artifact, as well as a set of daily practices, played an important but ambivalent role in social change. As private lives and public politics merged, many Americans began to stretch and reimagine the idea, and even the physical shape and boundaries, of home. Aliesan for example, a committed feminist and antipoverty activist, struggled to transform and model a domestic realm that encompassed her ideas of personal liberation, social justice, and environmental balance.⁴ These new politics could be unstable at the same time. Urban environmental activists often walked a perilous line between advocating a radical reconception of society and a more conservative and libertarian conception of social and environmental change. This essay describes the national and local contexts that converged in Seattle during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and shows, with the example of one neighborhood, how counterculture Seattleites attempted to connect their city and their politics with nature, sometimes with unintended consequences. [3.238.161.165] Project...