At Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America (review)

“A little band of dedicated Thoreauvians,” E. B. White once remarked, “would be a sorry sight indeed.” Thoreau is an unusual figure because even his admirers find him an uncomfortable presence—a regular hairshirt of a man, White dubbed him. Thoreau is that pang in your conscience reminding you that your barn, or house, or car is far bigger than it needs to be. Yet readers of Walden often close the book wondering what, if anything, Thoreau would have us do. Are we to emulate his trek into the woods? He clearly discourages conformity. And if somehow we all followed his lead, what would become of community? Perhaps it is enough to heed, in a more tempered way, the Thoreauvian mantra, “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” Then again, Walden may not be a how-to manual at all, not even an “environmental” text, but simply one man’s chronicle of a journey inward, a quest for purity, authenticity, and self-cultivation that involved nature tangentially In At Home in Nature: Modern Homesteading and Spiritual Practice in America, Rebecca Kneale Gould offers a fascinating account of the tensions and anxieties, as well as the profound satisfactions, that modern Thoreauvians in the “Back to the Land” movement are heir to.

From the outset, Gould’s intentions are clearer than Thoreau’s: At Home in Nature is not a study of “practical ethics” but an inquiry into a particular form of meaning-making and its spiritual dimensions. Although Gould engages in “a kind of normative summing up” near the end of the book (229), her approach is mainly ethnographic and historical. Gould lived for a time on a Maine homestead that features prominently in her study, that belonging to Helen and Scott Nearing. Second only to Thoreau, the Nearings remain role models for people everywhere in search of a simpler, better, or more natural way of life. In her role as “participant-observer” and caretaker at the Nearing homestead, Gould discovers how difficult it is to live the simple life with a constant barrage of “pilgrims” at your gate, clamoring to learn the art from you.

Gould’s definition of homesteading has fluid boundaries. As a form of environmentalism, homesteading exists on a continuum with movements such as deep ecology and voluntary simplicity, as well as “bioregionalism,” which embraces and seeks to preserve local communities in their ecological and economic uniqueness. In general, homesteading means “choosing to center one’s life around home, a home consciously built with attention to a particular place in the natural world” and “being a producer more than a consumer,” particularly where one’s food is concerned (2). Homesteaders seek to unplug from the dominant culture and its pressures and values; some endeavor to live “off the grid,” partially or completely. For many, home-centered means family-centered, and homeschooling is not infrequently a feature of homesteading life. Exactly how “family values” fit into homesteading is not obvious, given that neither the Nearings nor Thoreau included offspring in their vision of the good life. Gould tells us that Walden is the “original sacred text” (3) for many in this movement, yet it is odd to think of Thoreau as home-centered. A mismatch is apparent between Gould’s homesteaders who extol the rewards of homefires lovingly tended, and Thoreau’s harsh disparagement of houses as serious impediments to enlightenment, or coffins in which the so-called civilized ultimately bury themselves. But Gould is acutely aware of such tensions in the ideology and daily experience of homesteaders. Her analyses of the deep ambivalences felt by many homesteaders—with regard to physical comforts, the company of other humans, their alternating impulses to reform or retreat from the world, and, especially, ambivalence toward nature itself—make for some of the book’s most insightful parts.

Gould does not consider Thoreau a true homesteader because his sojourn did not entail the “dramatic and permanent commitments to a new way...