The Great Escape

			Reflections on two back-to-the-land manuals: One Acre and Security: How to Live Off the Earth Without Ruining It by Bradford Angier and Homesteading: How to Find New Independence on the Land by Gene Logsdon
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Review by JEREMIAH McNICHOLS

Although it was still years before Wendell Berry and others clearly articulated how modern agribusiness had laid waste, economically and culturally, to the family farm, the back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and '70s was the first in American history that lacked a "land" to go to. Ironically, new land, much of it once farmland, was opening up in the Northeast as "modern" agriculture shifted its weight further west and south to the flat, open prairies that best accomodated massive-scale agriculture, but land values were soaring, and its would-be farmers found themselves beginning to compete for good land with bedroom communities, shopping centers and investors. The movement's members would be dispersed, scattered, filling in the cracks between hog farms and pleasure ranches, sprawling cities and interstates, national parks and strip mines. They communicated through books and magazines and encountered far more suspicious stares than they did like-minded individuals.

These conditions combined with a reaction against the democratic, urban and politically-engaged outlook of the 1960s youth movements to forge a homesteading identity that blended a stubborn, Thoreau-like independence of spirit with a modern environmental ethic. Neighborly wisdom and rural relationships were valued, even idealized, as a new source of privileged wisdom. It was a new kind of challenge for a generation searching for experience, expertise, control over their surroundings and a measure of independence from all that their culture lacked. (My own favorite is Bill Kaysing's hippie version, The Ex-Urbanite's Complete and Illustrated First Time Farmers' Guide: A Useful Book, published in 1971 by San Francisco's Straight Arrow Books and reprinted in paperback two years later. Its advice runs the gamut from no-till agriculture to converting a 1960s Suzuki motorcycle into a "mechanical horse" for the garden.) The total lifestyle equation – doing everything possible for one's self, from raising food to reviving a strained ecosystem, and all through the application of one's energy and talents to personal, individual, and visible work – was a breath of fresh air for many who had caught more than a whiff of failure in the increasingly abstruse codices of radical politics as they migrated from the streets and community centers and returned, hardened, to academia. These were the folks who were tired of talking about the importance of a clean environment, man's abuse of the natural order, and the need for social change. They were ready to put their money – and their muscle – where their mouths were, and they were looking for guidance. But what did it take to be a trusted source of information?

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