Back-to-the-land movement

The Back-To-The-Land movement is a term covering a number of agrarian movements across different historical periods. The common thread is a call for people to take up smallholding and to grow food from the land on a small-scale basis, whether for themselves or for others. There have been a variety of motives behind such movements, such as social reform, land redistribution, and civilian war efforts. Groups involved have included political reformers, counter-culture hippies, and religious separatists.

The concept was popularized in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century by activist Bolton Hall, who set up vacant lot farming in New York City and wrote many books on the subject. The practice, however, was strong in Europe even before that time.

During World War II, when Great Britain faced a blockade by Nazi U-boats, a "Dig for Victory" campaign urged civilians to fight food shortages by growing vegetables on any available patch of land. In the USA between the mid-1960s and mid-1970s there was a revived back-to-the-land movement, with substantial numbers migrating from cities to rural areas.

The back-to-the-land movement has ideological links to distributism, a 1920s and 1930s attempt to find a "Third Way" between capitalism and socialism.

The American social commentator and poet Gary Snyder has related that there have been back-to-the-land population movements throughout the centuries, and throughout the world, largely due to the occurrence of severe urban problems and people's felt need to live a better life, often simply to survive.

The historian and philosopher of urbanism Jane Jacobs remarked in an interview with Stewart Brand that with the Fall of Rome city dwellers re-inhabited the rural areas of the region.

From another point of departure, Yi-Fu Tuan takes a view that such trends have often been privileged and motivated by sentiment. "Awareness of the past is an important element in the love of place," he writes, in his 1974 book Topophilia. Tuan writes that an appreciation of nature springs from wealth, privilege, and the antithetical values of cities. He argues that literature about land (and, subsequently, about going back to the land) is largely sentimental; "little," he writes, "is known about the farmer's attitudes to nature..." Tuan finds historical instances of the desire of the civilized to escape civilization in the Hellenistic, Roman, Augustan, and Romantic eras, and, from one of the earliest recorded myths, the Epic of Gilgamesh.

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