To and From the Land

"Many back-to-the-land movements, seeking utopia, have cycled in and out over history, but the 1970s version, populated by postwar baby boomers who had come of age during one of the periods of greatest economic prosperity, represented one of the largest.” 


We are all vaguely familiar with the the story of the back-to-the-land movement of the 1970s but what we know very little about is what happened after all of these twenty-somethings moved "out into the country." What did their lives look like and did they stay? Eleanor Agnew's memoir, Back From the Land: How Young Americans Went to Nature in the 1970s and Why They Came Back, explores the full circle experiences of many different back-to-the-landers. 


Exploring the initial motivations for the mass exodus out of the city, Agnew writes, "The universal mystique of the country, shared by city and suburban idealists, only added magic to the escalating back-to-the-land movement. Our culture’s idealism glorification of the pastoral, through song, poetry, literature and myth, fed our growing desire for the land...We believers, of course, had never in our lives cleaned out a barn or spent long hours weeding under a broiling sun" (2004, p. 9). 

the Back "to the land" family

In an interview with my aunt Annie, a former back-to-the-lander herself, she spoke about her own romantic notions as well as her inexperience with homesteading, "We were young, in our 20’s, and we romanticized the agrarian past without appreciating the harsh reality of daily life. I was woefully unprepared... I tried to cook over an open grate because the ‘kitchen’ was kind of outside under a tarp but one day, I had the realization that I didn’t want to be 50 years old and trudging down to the creek to collect water" (Annie, 2012).


Describing the homestead she shared for a year and a half with her boyfriend, she chuckles while recalling an anecdote, "my best friend from college came to visit us and when we showed her the one-room house, she asked if it was where we kept the goats...it was a homestead but it was not an aesthetically pleasing one, it was more like a hovel on a beautiful piece of land  outside of Ithaca, New York" (Annie, 2012). 


Annie also remembers the tension she felt between the lifestyle she was choosing to experiment with and the lives of her neighbors, "I was surrounded by a level of rural poverty that made me stop and think. I had a safety net of family, resources, and education and here I was choosing a lifestyle that many around me had no choice but to live. I lived there for about a year and a half and I didn't have children yet. I didn't sacrifice much" (Annie, 2012).


Agnew speaks about the tensions between different back-to-the-lander communities in relation to finances, "Some back-to-the-land people survived much longer because they arrived in the woods with larger cash reserves—discreetly downplayed, of course, since having too much money broke the implicit rules of the counterculture...on a low budget the continued discomforts of outhouses, lanterns, or water hauling attenuated many people’s initial passion for the principles. On the other hand, back-to-the-landers who had the money to buy composting toilets or solar paneling could continue their mission to preserve the environment and hold true to the values with much less personal inconvenience" (2004, p. 121).


Annie expresses a keen interest in the resurgence of the back-to-the-land ideology, "I'm fascinated by it, I think that the movement of the 1970s planted some seeds for today's focus on sustainable living but I also think that today's homesteaders know what they're doing and are more prepared" (Annie, 2012).

Goin' to the Country