In This Essay I Analyze the Evolution of Going Back-To-The-Land Through Three Iterations of the Back-To-The-Land Movement

Title: Tracing the Social Idea of Going “Back-to-the-Land”

Author: Jessica M. Prody

Abstract In this essay I analyze the evolution of going back-to-the-land through three iterations of the back-to-the-land movement. Analysis of Ten Acres Enough, Living the Good Life, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle illustrates that back-to- the-land movements were comprised of individuals seeking to escape social stressors and driven by broad political objectives. Going back-to-the-land is a product of particular moments in time, and while some themes have remained attached to the trope (such as self-sufficiency and the virtues taught by labor), the underlying social anxiety, tone, politics, and scope of movement practices that the term connotes are distinct in each period of its use.

Going “back-to-the-land” may be the most American of social movements. Founding father

Thomas Jefferson (1785) saw an agrarian ethic as central to a working democracy, arguing that farmers were the “most valuable citizens” (n.p.). Farming, he contended, taught self-sufficiency and produced investment in one’s place that encouraged patriotism and democratic participation. The prominence of agrarian ethics has ebbed and flowed throughout U.S. history, gaining significance in eras in which individuals returned to the land to find virtues urban and suburban society lacked. What individuals sought from the land has changed throughout time, but no other movement has emerged and reemerged as often as the back-to-the-land movement.

In spite of its frequent presence, the movement has received little direct attention from scholars.

Brown’s (2011) historical tracing of going back-to-the-land is one of the few academic studies of the movement’s evolution. Most studies mention the back-to-the-land movement in larger contexts, writing about back-to-the-landers in the context of 1960s and 1970s hippies’ communes (Miller, 1999) or as part of broader agricultural transformations (Conkin, 2008). The back-to-the-land movement is worthy of more extensive rhetorical study. Back-to-the-landers have produced a multitude of memoirs, letters, newsletters, periodicals, and how-to-guides that reflect the historical eras of their time and have shaped social thought regarding food, community, economy, agriculture, and environment.

Within this movement everyday acts become political statements, and individuals construct lives outside the bounds of traditional social institutions.

Part of the reason this movement has not been given much attention is because it is not traditionally political. Back-to-the-landers cannot be tied to a singular position on the political spectrum (Brown, 2011, p. 30); nor do they spend their time petitioning or protesting existing political structures (Jacob, 1997, p. 5). In lieu of shared political or structure, back-to-the-landers have been united by practices—most central to these practices, arguably, is being able to feed oneself and family from what one can produce working the land.

Relying on the approach of Wrage, who advocated exploring the social history of ideas in rhetoric, I analyze the evolution of going back-to-the-land through three texts of three different movement eras: Ten Acres Enough (from the early 20th century), Living the Good Life (prominent in the

1960s and 1970s), and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (representative of the contemporary era). I argue the iterations of going back-to-the-land were products of their time, and while some themes have carried through the eras of the movement (such as self-sufficiency and the virtues taught by labor), the underlying social anxiety, tone, politics, and scope of movement practices are distinct. Going back-to- the-land has evolved from signaling a desire for self-reliance and control over one’s place, to one that denoted a counter-culture, to one reclaimed of local food culture and built of community.

Tracing “Back-to-the-Land” as a Social Idea

In his 1947 essay, “Public Address: A Study in Social and Intellectual History,” Wrage encouraged scholars of public address to tudy the text and the role of rhetoric in the evolution of social thought. Wrage encouraged students of public address to “contribute in substantial ways to the history of ideas” (p. 453). For Wrage, studying rhetoric involved the study of “transmission.” He was concerned with exploring “[t]he reach of an idea, its viability within a setting of time and place, and its modifications […] expressed in a vast quantity of documentary sources” (p. 452). Because, Wrage argued, rhetoric is created with the explicit intention of appealing to particular audiences, and audiences are made up of society’s members, rhetoric is uniquely positioned to give a sense of the social mindset of audiences and their eras. Wrage encouraged scholars to identify the social patterns of ideas that the text taps into, how it uses those ideas, how it alters them, and/or how it speaks against them.

Rosteck’s (1998) argued that Wrage offered a way to “read together text and history” (472-473).

Wrage’s complex definition of “ideas” allowed a critic to read culture as text. One can learn about the culture in which the text is produced, the culture in a particular historical moment in which the text has

Presented at Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 11-14, 2015 https://theieca.org/coce2015 Page 4 of 24 resonance, and/or the culture that develops in part because of the text’s influence. Ideas, it would appear, are culture “realized—materialized—in practice” (p. 477). From this perspective, analyzing rhetoric allows one to “read” how ideas circulate within a culture and across history—how rhetoric shapes cultural thought, how social evolution shapes social ideas, how rhetorical themes emerge and reemerge at different points in history, and how new ideas get attached to existing tropes.

This study engages Wrage’s approach as read by Rosteck, assuming that texts written and heavily circulated during particular historical eras can tell us something about the social thought in particular moments in time and throughout history. The questions I ask include: (1) how have the ideas of going back-to-the-land changed; (2) what has remained consistent; and (3) what in the rhetoric has been lost and rediscovered? The three memoirs in this analysis are examined as rhetorical texts that are representations of social thought in particular eras of the movement. Memoirs were, and continue to be, the primary way through which back-to-the-landers justified their actions, detailed their new lives, lauded the virtues of their lifestyle, and presented themselves as models for others to follow.

Tracing the movement through memoirs allows me to analyze the evolution of going back-to-the-land and understand how it has shaped and been shaped by culture.

The texts I have chosen to analyze are: Ten Acres Enough by Edmund Morris, Living the Good

Life by Helen and Scott Nearing, and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver. They are representative of back-to-the-land rhetoric in particular eras, as demonstrated by republications, circulation and citations in other back-to-the-land sources. In addition, historians have identified them as influential texts. Brown (2011) identified Ten Acres Enough as the “prototype” of early back-to-the- land books. Originally published in 1864, “it had gone through twenty-five editions by the 1880s and was reprinted thereafter in 1890, 1905, 1912, 1916, and 1928,” and had additional reprints in 1996,

2004, and 2008 (p. 13). Living the Good Life has had similar longevity and influence to that of Ten

Acres Enough. It was first published in 1954 and then again in the 1970s. Agnew (2004) explained the book “reigned as the bible of the back-to-the-land movement” in the 1960s and 1970s (p. 12). Ten

Acres Enough and Living the Good Life have been kept alive by contemporary back-to-the-landers who have looked to these texts, and the authors that wrote them, for guidance and encouragement.

Ten Acres Enough was cited by the Nearings, had sections reprinted in Mother Earth News, and is still reviewed by contemporary readers on amazon.com (Brown, 2011, p. 13). Living the Good Life also continues to resonate with contemporary readers, who write reviews on amazon.com lauding its advice as “timeless” and full of “good lessons we would do well to heed today.”

Although Kingsolver’s text has yet to achieve the iconic status the earlier back-to-the-land texts have, Brown (2011) cited the best selling text as a notable example of the new back-to-the-land memoirs making their way to book shelves today (p. 231). As one of the early texts of this new wave of the movement, with its folksy, how-to style, and with Kingsolver’s mass appeal as a popular contemporary fiction and non-fiction author, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle has the potential to achieve the status the Morris’s and Nearings’ texts have in the past. Collectively, analyzing these texts provides snapshots into particular eras of the back-to-the-land movement and the specific rhetoric of those times, but this analysis also allows for a more complete picture of back to the land rhetoric to emerge, as one can see how ideas moved through the eras, remaining present, ebbing and flowing, or developing anew as back-to-the-landers shaped their movement and their rhetoric in response to particular social contexts.

Ten Acres Enough

Morris originally published Ten Acres Enough in 1864, after leaving Philadelphia to farm ten acres of New Jersey farmland in 1856. The move was a decision he and his wife came to after weathering the financial panic of 1837. Land, they concluded, was a more stable investment than business, and farming a more recession proof occupation than publishing (Morris, 1916, p. 22). The

“boom-bust cycle of industrial capitalism” was the primary stimulus for individuals of this era to leave the city for rural life, as they sought economic stability from the land (Brown, 2011, p. 27). Morris’s

Presented at Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 11-14, 2015 https://theieca.org/coce2015 Page 6 of 24 self-reliance, and message of living more securely in an insecure world is the rhetoric of the early back-to-the-land movement that found broad appeal throughout its historical circulation.

Finding Security by Going Back-to-the-Land

Morris’s writing mirrors the themes found in back-to-the-land rhetoric of the era. Brown (2011) explained, “The common ground that supported all these variations on the back-to-the-land agenda was a ‘producerist’ vision linking self-sufficient households, autonomous work, and personal independence.” Early back-to-the-landers believed “[s]elf-sufficient households on the land could fulfill the dream of an independent competence, in a time when it seemed increasingly that nothing else could” (p. 51). As a printer, Morris had to rely on customers to pay their debts, and often had to borrow money to keep the business going. Doing so put his economic security in question and made him susceptible to the fluctuations of the larger economy. By paying cash, eating what one produced, selling the excess, and making smart decisions about what to grow for market (in his case berries and peaches), Morris was able to escape the wage system that had threatened to put him in debt and left him constantly concerned with having enough inflow of money to cover expenses.

Morris’s rhetoric is reflective of the Protestant work ethic that marked the Industrial era

(Rodgers, 1978; Weber 1958). Unlike later back-to-the-landers, Morris’s life was not about subsistence; he set out to use labor to create a successful business that fed his family and made a reasonable profit. Morris (1916) believed in God’s Providence and that rural living allowed man to achieve the life God had determined for him. He wrote, “It takes mankind a great while to learn the ways of Providence, and to understand that things are better contrived for him than he can contrive them for himself” (p. 150). Rural living was the way in which God intended people to live, and returning to it allowed one to find his determined life path. It encouraged a life of contentedness and happiness,

“indulging in no feverish longings for what we have not, but satisfied and thankful for what we have” (p.

48). By going back-to-the-land Morris and his family found security and virtue by focusing on what they needed, not on the consumerism of urban living that focused on what they wanted.

His return to the land was a reclaiming of a particular type of masculinity only possible with land ownership and agricultural work, a masculinity marked by control (of self and land), self- sufficiency, and hard-work. Farming was a profession, not a hobby (Brown, 1916, p. 249). The farm was his domain, and going back-to-the-land was an opportunity to reclaim the self-sufficient masculinity the dependent labor of industrial capitalism had stripped from him. In Glenn’s (2002) words, Morris was reclaiming the identity of “worker citizen,” which was built on the notion that groups who had the “intellectual and emotional ability” to participate in free labor “were similar to notions of which groups had the rational capacity required for citizenship” (p. 2). Historically, white men were the group thought most capable of playing these roles, but as industrial capitalism put more and more men in the position of working for others, masculine notions of citizenship were threatened. One way of looking at Morris’s return to the land is to view it as an attempt to reclaim the ideal identity of citizen expected in a liberal system of citizenship.

Reclaiming Space

Ten Acres Enough is representative of a genre of writing with which back-to-the-landers at the turn of the 20th century were familiar. Titles detailing the number of acres a writer worked, as well as the structure that explained what each of those acres was used for was common in early back-to-the- land writing. The structure of Morris’s text gave a sense of the cultural anxieties that led people back- to-the-land and how these individuals viewed the relationship between rural and urban living. Ten

Acres Enough was broken into twenty-five chapters, and began with five chapters that detailed why

Morris decided to leave the city for rural life and how he decided which farm to buy. Following these five chapters were seven chapters that each focused on an element of the farm, such as the orchard, the berry patch, the garden, or the livestock. These chapters introduce the spatial structure of the farm to readers, while also allowing Morris to provide useful advice on making decisions about what to plant, how to manage produce, how much manure to apply, and what livestock to purchase.

The focus on space in Ten Acres Enough represents an anxiety over space that was evident in the historical moment in which it was written. Jacob (1997) explains that Americans return to the land in times of turmoil, particularly economic turmoil, because American identity and its ethics are rooted in a particular agricultural lifestyle and Protestant work ethic that emphasized self-sufficiency, hard- work, and independence (p. 7). In Morris’s era, the economic turmoil was paired with urbanization, which stemmed from the Industrial Revolution, which had drawn many people from the open-spaces of rural living to the closed-quarters of urban dwelling. At the turn of the 20th century, awareness of the consequences of close-quarter, urban living was increasing. Jacob Riis’s (1890) How the Other Half

Lives used photojournalism to illustrate the reality of urban tenement living to upper and middle-class urban dwellers. At this same time Jane Addams began a public crusade in Chicago to clean trash, debris, and vermin from the streets, to increase the potential for personal cleanliness of the lower class and lessen the spread of disease (Merchant, 2007, p. 117). For many, especially those of lower economic means, living in a city meant living in dirty, unhealthy conditions, with little control or ownership over one’s space. Even for those in the middle-class who might have a more enjoyable city life, economic turmoil of the era made the possibility of living in such conditions one financial loss away.

De Certeau (2011) wrote, “Space is a practiced place” (p. 117). A particular place derives meaning from the activities that happen there and the stories we tell about them. Morris’s structuring of much of his book around his land illustrated the intimate knowledge of the place needed to verbally map it and to be able to discuss what was needed to manage it. The labor he puts into its management, and his ability to tell the story of the place, turns his land into his space, making it his own. This ability to construct a place into space was something many lacked in urban living, where responsibility for managing and making meaning of a place was taken away from individuals, many whom, with industrial jobs, would not have had the time to manage the space anyway.

Even as Morris used the early portion of the book to tell the narrative of transforming a place into his space, he does not completely divorce the space he created from the urban space he escaped. Chapter thirteen marks the second half of the book, which focused on comparing rural and city life, detailed Morris’s profits, and discussed how to make a successful attempt at farming. Morris

(1916) encouraged other back-to-the-landers to settle in “close proximity to the great cities” (p. 267).

He settled on a farm within a few miles of Philadelphia, with easy access to the railroad, so he would be able to transport and sell his produce in the markets of New York and Philadelphia. For Morris, urban markets allowed back-to-the-landers to make a livelihood, and rural farming fed urban dwellers.

When discussing how land achieved it value, Morris explained, “The truth is, that it is the population that gives value to the land,—population either on or around it,—to convert it into lots covered with buildings, or to consume whatever it may produce” (p. 269). Morris recognized that his version of rural living was only possible as long as others lived an urban lifestyle, and urban living was only possible as long as people like Morris were willing to farm.

Going back-to-the-land in this early era involved individuals returning to a lifestyle that encouraged practices of self-sufficiency and moderation that could not be undertaken in urban settings. He created a life of labor and well-earned leisure, one of virtue and security, and one that was clearly filled with considerable joy. This early back-to-the-land approach peaked right before

World War I, and declined as the war put many men to work and brought economic prosperity to the

U.S. economy. A second back-to-the-land movement emerged during the Great Depression. I have not chosen to analyze an additional Depression Era text. Brown (2011) distinguished the Depression

Era as a new wave of the back-to-the-land movement, and its institutionalization as part of the New

Deal does set it apart (pp. 147-154), but its rhetoric so closely mirrors that of the rhetoric of the late-

19th and early 20th century back-to-the-landers that rhetorically separating the two is not necessary (p.

144). For this reason, I do not treat that wave of the movement as separate from the earlier one that had relied on Morris’s text, and move instead to the back-to-the-land rhetoric of the 1960s and 1970s.

Living the Good Life

Agnew’s (2007) account of 1960s and 1970s back-to-the landers included a description from

Margaret Doyle who explains that back-to-the-landers wanted to create “an alternative lifestyle that we were convinced would serve as laboratories of the next civilization that would supplant the existing discredited American civilization” (p. 7). Helen and Scott Nearing became the model for many of these idealistic young back-to-the-landers. A believer in “centralized global socialism” (Brown, 2011, p. 218), pacifism, vegetarianism, and collectivism (Nearing & Nearing, 1970, p. xv), the Nearings held political beliefs that would be marked as nothing less than radical, but the Nearings’ followers “did not usually perceive Helen and Scott Nearing in these ideological terms […] often they seemed to be viewed simply as older and more experienced versions of their fans” (Brown, p. 218).

The Nearings moved to the Green Mountains of Vermont from New York City in 1932, during the Great Depression. They were approaching their fifties when they undertook rural life and did not throw themselves fully into rural living immediately; rather they began as “summer folk,” but after commuting 216 miles back-and-forth from New York for a couple of years, they decided to become

“all-year-rounders” (Nearing & Nearing, 1970, pp. 11-13). The Nearing legacy has been questioned.

Authors have discovered that their lifestyle was made possible in part by trust funds, speaking fees, and salaries paid by affiliated organizations (Brown, 2011, p. 224). Their life-style was not solely sustained by sustenance farming; but at the height of their popularity, the Nearings provided a model of living after which many people tried to model their own homesteading attempts. Their rhetoric, then, provides an understanding of what going back-to-the-land meant in the 1960s and 1970s.

Creating Counter-Culture by Going Back-to-the-Land

The Nearings (1970) explained that their choice to go back-to-the-land was made with a desire to educate others that another form of society was possible. They wrote:

We might have followed the example of many of our compatriots, moved to Paris, Mexico, or

Paraguay, and allowed the United States to go its chosen way to destruction. We could not

accept this alternative because our sense of responsibility as teachers, and as members of the

human race, compelled us to do what we could (1) to help our fellow citizens understand the

complex and rapidly maturing situation; (2) to assist in building up a psychological and political

resistance to the plutocratic military oligarchy that was sweeping into power in North America;

(3) to share in salvaging what was still usable from the wreckage of the decaying social order in

North America and western Europe; (4) to have a part in formulating the principles and

practices of an alternative social system, while meanwhile (5) demonstrating one possibility of

living sanely in a troubled world. (p. xvi)

The Nearings set out to create a counter-culture. In contrast to the symbiotic rural/urban relationship

Morris identifies, the Nearings built a life that removed them from society’s dominant structures

(particularly economic and political structures). They were determined to remove themselves as much as possible from the “price-profit economy” (p. 22). They set out to create a cooperative living situation in which all contributed and all benefitted and fed themselves from their own garden twelve months out of the year (p. 97).

Although the Nearings carried forward Morris’s concern with the wage system and industrial capitalism, many other political projects were wrapped up in the Nearings’ version of going back-to- the-land. Environmental damages, abuses of political power, and excess materialism were symptoms of a broad loss of social virtue. Going back-to-the-land and living an austere life was an attempt to reclaim virtue and provide a new social model for others to follow. The historical context of the

Nearings is complicated, because it requires looking at what may have motivated them to return to the land in the 1930s and why their rhetoric resonated so strongly with those in the 1960s and 1970s. The

Nearings went back to the land following the Great Depression, after the financial crisis left them unable to survive professionally. In addition, the Nearings lived through the first Red Scare, during the

World War I era, when anarchists and left-wing political activists engaged in labor protests and battled the entrenched political and economic system. The Nearings’ politics would have been targeted, and they would have been witness to many individuals facing trials for sharing their beliefs. It is no wonder the Nearings sought to build a way of life in which their ideology could exist without persecution. The environmental consciousness, anti-war sentiments, and civil rights activism of the 1960s combined with the overrun urban centers of political organizing created a context in which the Nearings writing resonated, and “rural communities suddenly loomed as an inviting alternative” (Miller, 1999, p. 68).

The Nearings became trailblazers, perhaps even prophets, for those seeking a life based on the land.

Militant Lists

The most striking structural element of the Nearings’ writing was its lists. The lists began with an identification of their three aims. The first was affirmation that living their version of the good life was possible. For them, the good life included “simplicity, freedom from anxiety or tension, and opportunity to be useful and to live harmoniously.” The second goal was to find joy and self-respect in labor. Their third aim was to work to achieve “leisure during a considerable portion of each day, month or year” (Nearing and Nearing, 1970, pp. 6-7). The Nearings found freedom in structuring their days, a structure in contrast to that imposed upon them by the demands of urban capitalism. The Nearings began their project with rules (the farm’s Constitution) and a plan, and worked to prove to themselves another social model was possible. This text continued in a regimented fashion, including twelve points of their ten-year plan, which contained rules to ensure very limited participation in the cash- based economy, rules that prohibited animals on the farm, and rules about building on the land. All of these rules provided order (Nearings, 1970, p. 35). Whether dividing the types of work that happened on the farm (household, homestead, cash crop labor) (p. 42), discussing the “seven procedures that maximize the stability and security of livelihood” (p. 144), or detailing why their way of living was justified (p. 184), the structure in their writing was about very explicit order.

The Nearings’ reliance on lists throughout their writing mirrors the regimented style of their living. Each day they “earned four hours of leisure by [their] four hours of labor” (p. 43). They also placed significant constraints on the life pleasures they were allowed to enjoy. The Nearings thrived on self-deprivation, forbidding themselves from buying “candy, pastries, meats, soft drinks, alcohol, tea, coffee, or tobacco” and lighting their home with kerosene and candles (p. 147). They were vegetarians, and rejected refined flour and processed sugar. They also avoided alcohol, tobacco, and recreational drugs. They admitted that most readers would find this way of living difficult, perhaps even see it as “deliberate self punishment” (p. 147), but ironically, this rigidity provided the Nearings a sense of freedom from the rigid expectations on one’s time and labor found in capitalism’s wage system.

The Nearings’ writing contained a militant tone that lacked the joy and humor that pervaded

Ten Acres Enough. This militancy was perhaps due in part to the responsibility the Nearings placed on themselves to model a society capable of replacing the one they believed was heading toward destruction. The Nearings’ (1970) militancy produced a model of going back-to-the-land that created community only with others able to follow the austere life the Nearings encouraged (p. 159). The

Nearings did not set out to convert. They were individuals committed to a political project of modeling a counter-culture, a culture they believed was needed for society to move forward. Their prophetic voice provided instructions for others already committed to, or at least drawn to, the austere way of life the Nearings believed would save the world. Their prophetic ethos, in the words of Darsey (1988), established the Nearings as “ethical presences” in the lives of back-to-the-landers, who returned to the Nearings writings time and again, allowing the Nearings and their rigid lists of rules and principles

“continuing influence” in shaping the movement (p. 435). While few could achieve the austerity the

Nearings modeled, many found inspiration in their way of life. The pattern emerging between the two eras of the movement examined here is that going back-to-the-land happens when members of society feel a loss of control. Tending the land, growing one’s food, scheduling one’s day, and building

Presented at Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 11-14, 2015 https://theieca.org/coce2015 Page 14 of 24 one’s home allows participants to reclaim a sense of control over their lives, and, in the eyes of the

Nearings, a sense of self-respect not possible in a world in which one’s life is controlled by political and economic demands.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Barbara Kingsolver has become one of the voices of the contemporary back-to-the-land movement. When Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was published in 2007, she was one of a number of authors at this time who encouraged readers to reconsider what they were eating and consider altering life practices to produce their own food or at least know those who were feeding them. Animal,

Vegetable, Miracle detailed a year of her family’s experiment of eating an almost solely local diet, after moving from New Mexico to Virginia. Kingsolver’s book ranked in the top ten of the New York Times hardcover nonfiction best-seller list and was ranked by Time magazine’s Lev Grossman as one of

2007’s top ten nonfiction books.

Kingsolver’s text is representative of current back-to-the-land discourse in approach, structure, and tone. The contemporary movement differs considerably from that which was seen in the 1960s and 1970s, and from the self-reliance demonstrated in Ten Acres Enough. This is in part due to the fact that contemporary authors focus on food and food politics (Brown, 2011, p. 230). Contemporary authors make broad social critiques, as we saw in the Nearings’ work, by discussing society’s relationship with food, but unlike the 1960s and 1970s, contemporary movement members are not creating a counter-culture; rather, they suggest that by altering how we consume food and what food we consume, there is potential to alter society to make it more sustainable and fulfilling. As Brown noted, “There is a new twist here. The focus on local eating has made self-sufficiency as much a community goal as an individual one” (p. 233). For contemporary back-to-the-landers, the goal is building a community capable of making better choices, ones healthier for people and the planet.

Reclaiming Culture by Going Back-to-the-Land

Kingsolver (2007) explained the family’s decision to move to Virginia, stating they “wanted to live in a place that could feed [them]” (p. 3). Food, for the family, was political. It was wrapped up in environmental, economic, health, and social justice issues. By critiquing government subsidies of giant agribusiness that grows more corn and soybeans than fruits and vegetables (pp. 18-19), detailing the amount of oil used to support the current food system (p. 5), pointing to poor water management required by the current system (p. 6), advocating fair trade policies (pp. 262-263), and detailing the loss of human connection that stems from a lack of food culture, Kingsolver was overtly political in a way neither Morris nor the Nearings were. As Kingsolver noted, “cooking is good citizenship” (p. 130).

The family’s decision to commit to a local food culture made the most personal of acts (feeding one’s self) political. Blauvelt’s (2003) reading of de Certeau explained how “routine practices, or the ‘arts of doing,’” such as cooking, contained “an element of creative resistance” available to “ordinary people”

(p. 20). Kingsolver’s turn to food production, consumption, and preparation as forms of political action illustrated how everyday acts allowed individuals creative ways to reclaim their spaces and resist dominant cultural ideologies.

Kingsolver (2007) realized the family was engaged in a resistance to cultural practices that discouraged community (p. 123). In an era of what McKibben (2007) calls “hyperindividualism” (p. 98) the primary reason for going back to the land was to find a community in which one belonged and could make difference. Hyperindividualism denotes that people are driven by personal interest to the degree that concern for community and others becomes practically obsolete. Individuals ignore how their actions impact others and how we are dependent on others for our existence. Going back-to- the-land in this era challenges hyperindividualism, but it does so in a way that is accessible to those living in a hyperindividualized world. To enter this community, one takes individual actions bout how to feed one’s self and family. In doing so, one gradually becomes part of a community. Food culture,

Kingsolver explained, “arises out of a place, a soil, a climate, a history, a temperament, a collective

Presented at Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 11-14, 2015 https://theieca.org/coce2015 Page 16 of 24 sense of belonging” (p. 17). This food culture and the belonging that comes with it is the greatest benefit of going back-to-the-land in the contemporary era.

Reacquainting with Natural Time and Tradition

The structure of Kingsolver’s text is similar to that used by many contemporary back-to-the- land authors, in which the writer documents a year in one’s life of living locally. Writing in this structure allows Kingsolver guide her readers in learning with them, as they document the research needed, surprises encountered, mistakes overcome, and successes achieved of their year of living off the land.

Kingsolver began her book with a chapter discussing how and why they made the decision to leave desert, allowing readers to begin the process with her, and consider what their own reasoning might be to undertake such a project. She then discussed what her family did to prepare the land to feed them. Beginning in March with the arrival of asparagus, the reader followed along on the family’s adventure. The remainder of the text went in chronological order, tracing out the arrival of new foods and the completion of farm practices from season to season.

Kingsolver’s structure suggested a desire to return to a natural sense of time. Kingsolver’s

(2007) structure demonstrated an attempt to break from a typical cultural attitude toward time, in which any second “saved” is valuable. She wrote:

All that hurry can blur the truth that life is a zero-sum equation. Every minute I save will get

used on something else, possibly no more sublime than staring at the newel post trying to

remember what I just ran upstairs for. On the other hand, attending to the task in front of me—

even a quotidian chore—might make it into part of a good day, rather than just a rock in the

road to someplace else. (p. 125)

The structuring of the text around seasonal time, reflected this stated desire to throw off the “religion of time-saving” for a form of time keeping that was more fluid, determined less by the clock and more by what needs to be accomplished for livelihood and happiness.

The writing was collaborative. Kingsolver was the primary author of the text, but her husband,

Steven Hopp contributed text boxes that explained the political and economic aspects of their actions.

In addition, Kingsolver’s oldest daughter, Camille Kingsolver, concluded each chapter with a reflection and compilation of recipes used during that time of the year. Writing in this collaborative fashion visually demonstrated that the family’s year of eating locally was a collective effort. Each writer offered his or her own perspective on the experience, and their merging voices demonstrated a way of life centered on building community and family. The rhetoric of the contemporary era, then, is marked by deliberative and collaborative practices not at the forefront of earlier traditions.

Food was a way to connect to others around them and build community. Kingsolver hosted canning parties and had conversations with farmers at the farmers’ markets. She used the year as an opportunity to teach her youngest daughter business sense, making her in charge of raising the chickens and selling their eggs. The family created a routine that brought them closer together and helped them belong to a place and its people. Kingsolver (2007) likened their experience to

“something like a religion,” with tradition, vows, and an oath of loyalty (pp. 34 & 38-39). Their approach was not a militant religion, as one might classify the Nearings, but it was also more rigid than Morris’s early back-to-the-land rhetoric. Being loyal to the food of one’s place was a strict requirement to participating in Kingsolver’s back-to-the-land movement. This loyalty produced joy in food, the place that provided nourishment, and the relationships created by eating in that way. Like religion, the practices detailed in Kingsolver’s text, provided participants with a sense of belonging and a set of virtues to guide one’s practices. The seasons and the staggered arrivals of the produce called forth the rituals believers in this life undertook. Hours of labor spent picking, weeding, canning, freezing, drying, and slaughtering are required to continue practicing traditions year round. Charland’s

(1987) work on constitutive rhetoric points to the importance individuals participating in practices that reaffirm one’s identity in a community. For contemporary back-to-the-landers, these actions are rituals one enacts to reinforces one’s belonging to one’s place and to others who hold the same beliefs.

The practices also connected the family to the past and to the present. Food was a way of remembering people. Meals became an opportunity to, in Kingsolver’s (2007) words, “welcome them back,” to take moments to appreciate the knowledge and traditions they gave us (p. 141). She wrote of Steven’s grandmother:

I suppose she'd have loved to see us on a summer Saturday making mozzarella together:

daughter, grandson, great-granddaughters, and me, all of us laughing, stretching the golden

rope as far as we could pull it. Three more generations answering hunger with the oldest art we

know, and carrying on. (p. 141)

There was nostalgia in Kingsolver’s writing. But it is not nostalgia for back-to-the-landers who have written before her. For Kingsolver, this was a personal search to live better, eat better, connect more with others, and build a life that allowed traditions to move forward.

Though not completely inclusive (Prody, 2013), her approach created space for those who wanted to explore the joy of going-back-to-the-land without making a complete commitment to homesteading. She explained that some of these practices could be implemented in urban and suburban settings (pp. 180-181). Going back-to-the-land was about contributing and participating in the local food economy, not making a full commitment to a particular way of living. Even in the family’s commitment, there was room for non-local eating. Kingsolver explained, "We're converts in progress, not preachers" (p. 282). Lacking the Nearings’ militancy, Kingsolver advocated strongly for tradition and ritual without prescribing a singular correct mode of behavior. Rather, she wrote in a way that encouraged others to rediscover the joy in their food, by becoming more knowledgeable about where it was grown, who grew it, how it was processed, its history, and how to use it. Certainly, the earlier manifestations of the movement included individuals who committed to only some of the back-to-the- land practices that homesteaders practiced in full, but such perspectives were absent in the writings of Morris and the Nearings. The fluidity of Kingsolver’s approach, in which people determine what going back-to-the-land might look like in one’s place, constructed a movement open to local

Presented at Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 11-14, 2015 https://theieca.org/coce2015 Page 19 of 24 deliberation that may be able to better account for questions of access back-to-the-landers have not fully wrestled with in their history.

The Evolution of Going Back-to-the-Land (use Style>Heading 1)

The analysis offered here maps the evolution of going back-to-the-land through three distinct eras of the movement. The rhetoric of movement memoirs showed how the initial movement, based on self-sufficiency and a desire to control one’s labor and space shifted to a movement driven by desire to form a counter-culture. Kingsolver’s rhetoric illustrated that the contemporary movement has borrowed the jovial nature and commitment to doing-it-yourself represented in Morris’s writing, and paired it with the political elements of the Nearing’s militant rhetoric. Kingsolver’s rhetoric also presented going back-to-the-land as something that could be done to varying degrees. The contemporary movement has added a focus on community building within society, rather than outside of it. One still does things oneself, but she does so amidst others participating in the same practices within the places they live.

One aim of this study was to identify back-to-the-land rhetoric as worthy of rhetorical study. I have only scratched the surface by examining these three memoirs, and encourage scholars to explore the rhetoric of other first-hand accounts, periodicals, diaries, and even commune meeting notes. One weakness in this study is that it extrapolates claims about movement eras from a single representative text from each period. Further analyses of back-to-the-land texts will give a more complete picture of the history and rhetoric of the various waves of the movement.

Further study might also provide more insight into how our cultural relationship with food has changed. In the early back-to-the-land movements, food was practical. It was needed for sustenance and, in Morris’s case, profit. The Nearings viewed most food as off-limits, a luxury that violated their rigid standards. They also reflected growing concerns about the way in which food was produced in the United States, commenting on the unhealthy nature of processed foods and raising concerns over

Presented at Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 11-14, 2015 https://theieca.org/coce2015 Page 20 of 24 chemical use in agricultural practices. As people like the Nearings continued to raise these questions, food became politicized, eventually becoming the center of modern back-to-the-landers’ practices. As food has become politicized, its cultural relevance has also been recognized, and its role in bringing together community (and connecting us to the past) is being emphasized. Where the rhetoric around food politics goes in the future is uncertain, but Kingsolver’s writing suggests food has the potential to be a starting point for breaking down entrenched ideological divisions, as people engage in food practices that build community and recognize the importance of food systems that can provide healthy and culturally relevant sustenance.

One element missing from each of the narratives analyzed here is the acknowledgment of help these homesteaders received along the way. At a forum on place, art, and creativity I attended in the

North Country of New York (a popular destination for homesteaders in the 1970s), one former homesteader commented on the fact that nearly all of the back-to-the-landers that moved to the North

Country would have failed without the help of those already part of the community. Farmers taught people how to grow food, community members taught them how to preserve that food, neighbors helped people build houses that were livable, and everyone shared stories of how to survive the winter.

Back-to-the-landers in every era owe gratitude and acknowledgement to those who have preserved the traditions back-to-the-landers set out to reclaim; yet these stories or voices rarely find their way into the memoirs of the movement.

The contemporary movement’s turn toward community provides more space for these types of narratives to be included. Back-to-the-landers are not setting out to prove their self-sufficiency in the way that earlier movement members did. Instead, there is space to recognize those who teach others how to find their way back-to-the-land. The emphasis on what McEntee (2011) called, “traditional localism” (e.g., canning, gardening, hunting, etc.), opens space for those who have maintained these traditions to be elevated as knowledge producers in their communities. Many who have maintained these practices through generations have done so out of necessity, and are not typically at the top of

Presented at Bridging Divides: Spaces of Scholarship and Practice in Environmental Communication The Conference on Communication and Environment, Boulder, Colorado, June 11-14, 2015 https://theieca.org/coce2015 Page 21 of 24 social power structures within communities. As contemporary back-to-the-landers continue to build communities through their practices, they would do well to help the back-to-the-land trope evolve in such a way that it makes nod to those who have gone back-to-the-land in the past and privileges the knowledge of those who never left. Doing so has the potential to create an inclusive movement with a rich history capable of bringing people together in their places to work toward addressing the economic, environmental, and social justice issues that have brought people back-to-the-land time and time again.

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