For many young people, the threat of climate change looms large in our collective consciousness. Questions that used to characterize young adulthood, like career choice, moving out, and the decision to have children have taken on a surreal quality to them, as many young adults believe that we won’t have a future, economically or biologically. Some choose to address this despair with standard fair nihilism, some by channeling their energy towards social causes and some respond by posting videos of themselves making bread on TikTok.
Figuring out what do do in response to ecological collapse, overconsumption, economic hardship and disconnection from the land is seemingly part of every young person’s psyche these days, manifesting in the cottagecore aesthetics, frenzy around foraging, and the rise of homemaking and farming media that gain millions of views on social media. And of course, a call to return to the land, to live in agrarian communities, close to neighbors, in harmony with the earth.
Many young people about to enter the job market joke about moving to the countryside with friends and herding goats, or vegetable farming or any wide variety of agrarian pursuits. We laugh and chuckle. “God, I want that so bad.” “I’m sick of online. I want to disconnect, unplug.” It becomes the kind of joke one tells to alleviate longing. We joke, but we also dream of agrarian utopia, of hard labor, and rightness with nature.
Whatever TikTok and other social media may imply, our generation is not the first to ever think of this radical movement away from the hustle and bustle of modern life. The idea of an agrarian utopia is a common thread throughout the history of the United States. Thomas Jefferson’s idea of a yeoman nation of small farmers lie at the heart of much historical republican thought. Amish and Mennonite communities in the U.S. offer a religious version of the same dream.
More recently in the 1970s, swaths of people moved to rural areas and started co-ops, communes, and intentional communities in what is referred to as the Back to the Land movement. The Back to the Land movement was a part of the social upheaval of the 70s, along with the literature from the Beat Generation, protests against the Vietnam War and second wave feminism. Gary Snyder and other famous thinkers wrote inspiring manifestos about a return to agrarian ideals, local communities, the commune model, and self sufficiency. Importantly, this wasn’t a movement of farming communities reaffirming their livelihood, but people, usually from cities, choosing a separate more ecologically driven lifestyle.
The dream of the return to nature, back to the land, agrarian utopia is often a far cry from the reality of disconnecting from our modern systems of consumption. There is a reason most of us in the United States think of the Back to the Land movement as failing. Some of these communities still exist, with Maypole Dances, Garlic Festivals and CSAs, but the farmers are aging out of their work, and their children are either not able or interested in continuing their parents’ ideologically driven lifestyle.
Newcomers to these communities often stay for a few years and then when the stresses of either the work or the chafing of a close community become too difficult to manage, they leave. Agrarian communities that have persisted prior to and after the Back to the Land movement are communities like the Amish, which impose a strict, often religiously backed social code of conduct. The liberal, secular, self-sustaining communities of like minded people that were hoped for in the Back to the Land movement have not remained vibrant. Financial troubles and mass exodus of jobs meant that most communities founded as part of this movement have since been abandoned, farms sold and families departed.
Given this history, it seems that this recent resurgence of back to the land thought and images of agrarian utopia online are destined either for failure or religious orthodoxy. In light of the climate crisis and the economic fears that hang over this generation, it is worth exploring what it is that caused these previous movements to fall so far from their idealistic beginnings. If we can learn from the past, perhaps we can avoid some of the pitfalls that those before us struggled with. The goal of this project is to explore the rise, success and fall of so-called Back to the Land movements, and unpack both the missteps and virtues of the new online discourse of agrarian utopia.