be receptive to the good earth

“Be Receptive to the Good Earth”: Health,Nature, and Labor in CounterculturalBack-to-the-Land Settlements

RYAN H. EDGINGTON

Modern environmental activists unified behind calls for a change in howhumans understood their relationships with nature. Yet they approachedtheir concerns through a variety of historical lenses. Countering argumentsthat suggest environmentalism had its deepest roots in outdoor leisure, thecountercultural back-to-the-land movement turned to a markedly Americanpractice of pastoral mythmaking that held rural life and labor as counter tothe urban-industrial condition. Counterculturalists relied specifically on no-tions of simple work in rural collective endeavors as the means to producinga healthy body and environment. Yet the individuals who went back-to-the-land often failed to remedy conflicts that arose as they attempted to abandonAmerican consumer practices and take up a “primitive” and down-to-earthpastoral existence. Contact with rural nature time and again translated tophysical maladies, impoverishment, and community clashes in many ruralcountercultural communes. As the back-to-the-land encounter faded, thegreater movement’s ethos did not disappear. Counterculturalists used theconsumption of nature through rural labor as a fundamental idea in agrowing cooperative food movement. The back-to-the-land belief in theconnection between healthy bodies, environments, and a collective identityhelped to expand a new form of consumer environmentalism.

Cultivators of the earth are the most virtuous and independent citi-zens.

—Thomas Jefferson, 1787

RYAN EDGINGTON is a PhD candidate in history at Temple University. His disserta-tion, “Lines in the Sand: An Environmental History of the Cold War Tularosa Basin,1945–1995,” explores the relationship between militarization and the desert environmentin South-Central New Mexico.

© the Agricultural History Society, 2008DOI: 10.3098/ah.2008.82.3.279

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The open land of the US has become a vast lodestone for droves ofyoung people, who sense within themselves today a renaissance in thevalue of simplicity and earthly virtues.

—William Hedgepeth, 19711

DURING THE 1960S AND EARLY 1970S a zealous countercultural back-to-the-land movement emerged in North America. As environmental con-cerns captured the interests of more and more Americans, the counter-culturalists who ventured back to the land identified with traditionalenvironmental activists and their concurrent efforts to preserve andprotect the natural world. In reality, their turn to pastoral mythos andpractices revealed the complicated nature of postwar environmentalthought. Those who voluntarily went back to the land created a recip-rocal relationship with the natural world, where living a self-reliant ruralexistence might have as much of an influence on the naturally attunedindividual as the sole environmental activist could on preserving andprotecting nature.

While environmental activists held common ground in rethinking hu-man interactions with the natural world, the growing American envi-ronmental consciousness approached those concerns through a varietyof historical lenses. The back-to-the-land movement turned to a dis-tinctly American process of pastoral mythmaking that held the simpleand virtuous rural farmer as the antithesis to the metropolitan-industrialorder. For back-to-the-landers, a deep-rooted pastoral ideal, often re-cast in popular forms, legitimized the conception of rural life as contraryto the modern urban existence. Importantly, austere labor within coun-tercultural communes became a tool to cleanse the body of the physicaland mental woes found in the economic and cultural routines of a citylivelihood.

The back-to-the-land movement’s turn to pastoral encounters withnature mirrored an enduring belief in bucolic environments as uncor-rupted by the human hand and therefore capable of healing the physicaland mental maladies caused by congestion, pollution, and the stresses ofeveryday urban life. While many environmentalists sought to protectpristine rural landscapes for consumption through leisure practices, theconcept of virtuous rural work shaped a countercultural environmentalmovement. Yet, in practice, the individuals who went back to the land

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struggled to rectify tensions that emerged between the prevailing culturethey sought to leave behind and the practical values of their labor inmaking a healthy life for the individual and the community. Intimateand “primitive” interactions with rural nature too often translated intodisease, poverty, and structural conflict in many rural counterculturalcommunes.

Despite a lack of real organization or clear archival record, scholarshave analyzed the 1960s and 1970s era rural communal and collectiveencounter as cultural phenomenon. Yet it remains at the periphery ofrecent historiography as a distinct environmental movement. In particu-lar, despite the clear importance concepts of nature, body, health, andpastoral labor played in motivating and structuring the physical andsocial arrangements of back-to-the-land settlements, historians of ruralspaces and the North American environment have yet to examine theback-to-the-land encounter as a part of the greater environmental con-sciousness that emerged in the post-World War II years.3

Historians have investigated the entangled cultural, economic, andecological factors that motivated Americans to form or join environ-mental groups. Nonetheless they have given less consideration to thecomplicated cultural markers that informed the organizational structureand ideology of a diverse environmental movement. By focusing on howenvironmentalists used deeply embedded historical reference points increating a response to environmental change, historians can better un-derstand the trajectories of environmental movements after World WarII. The appearance of the back-to-the-land encounter offers an oppor-tunity to explore how a young and predominately white cross-section ofAmerican society rethought widely held ideas about nature and work inan effort to create alternatives to mass consumerism in North America.4

Although counterculturalists established and joined rural communesand collective farms for many reasons, most saw going back to the landas a method to utilize their own productive capacity to procure thehealthy physical and psychological benefits of nature. For communards,the wellbeing of the human body was contingent upon an intimate con-sumption of healthy natural environments. Deep-seated American yeo-man ideology, indigenous cultural imagery, and the North Americanrural utopian legacy emerged as significant reference points, as coun-tercultural communards modeled their communities on idyllic pastoral

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life and “primitive” rural labor. Yet, growing physical, economic, andenvironmental hardship within back-to-the-land settlements under-mined collective notions of health, nature, and work formed by partici-pants of the movement. Their failure to deal with the difficult realities ofrural life and the arduous nature of communal labor facilitated struc-tural breakdown in most countercultural communal ventures.

As the back-to-the-land movement waned, counterculturalists recastthe consumption of nature through rural labor to fit within an expandingcooperative food movement. Using the economic and promotional toolsprovided by a powerful modern consumer culture, rather than forsakethe system altogether, counterculturalists used the simple and virtuousback-to-the-land ideal to fit within a growing cooperative natural foodsculture. Back-to-the-land notions of collective work and healthy spaceshelped to advance a movement in need of stable membership and col-lective identity. Rather than grow out of the communal urge, consumerenvironmentalism found similar ideological grounding in the consump-tion of wholesome products cultivated by virtuous rural work. In turn, apervasive back-to-the-land ideal helped propel the budding environ-mental consumer movement that simultaneously promoted good workin sustainable and organic agricultural ventures, while continuing tooffer a consumer’s alternative to supermarket America.5

In the years after World War II, rural communes and collective farmsemerged across North America as alternatives to metropolitan life. Be-tween 1960 and 1965 several rural living experiments, including theColony in California, Cedar Grove in New Mexico, Drop City in Col-orado, and Mohegan Colony in New York, offered inspiration for thecountercultural back-to-the-land boom that surfaced during the yearsthat followed. Between 1965 and 1970 Twin Oaks in Virginia, the Farmin Tennessee, Wheeler’s Ranch in California, and New Buffalo in NewMexico emerged alongside hundreds of others. These rural settlementsoffered like-minded countercultural escapists an opportunity to experi-ment with nature, religion, sexuality, and collective living in rural andoften isolated spaces. No true census exists, but written and visual evi-dence suggests that, much like the larger countercultural movementduring the period, white, middle-class Americans made up the majorityof those who went back to the land. While most were under the age of


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thirty, back-to-the-land settlements generally opened their doors to anyperson who accepted the ideological framework of their community.6

Rarely the founders of countercultural rural settlements, most back-to-the-landers discovered the movement through the enormous public-ity it received from both underground and popular media. Mainstreamnewspapers and periodicals, including Look, Newsweek, and the NewYork Times, and countercultural publications, including Good Times inSan Francisco, Astral Projection in Albuquerque, and East Village Otherin New York City, offered everything from short blurbs to article-lengthpieces on the roots and founding ideals of back-to-the-land settlements.Moreover, back-to-the-land travel journals, including WilliamHedgepeth’s The Alternative and Robert Houriet’s Getting Back To-gether, reinforced the communal lifestyle as a new way to leave behindmainstream American culture and embrace a simple pastoral existence.7

Most back-to-the-landers came of age during the period of rapidsuburbanization in America. While no formulated philosophy emergedfor the movement, many of them explained that a uniform consumerand “technocratic” society had disconnected or “divorced” them fromthe natural world. A contemporary observer explained, “it’s as if theywalked out onto a city street one day and realized not only that theywere lost but that they were culturally unassimilated in a nation ofendless congestion and incredibly corroded approaches to life.” TheAmericans who joined and “crashed” in rural communes or establishedcollective farming ventures frequently described their natural and pas-toral urge as emancipation from the homogenous patterns of work,living, and consumption found in an urban and suburban life. Theysuggested that consumer culture, the growing conflict in Vietnam, andomnipresent Cold War tensions had negatively influenced their adoles-cent and teenage years.8

This thinking is reflected in the thoughts and writings of individuals.For example, Pam Hanna of Morningstar in California later recalledthat when her husband questioned whether he “really wanted to sell[his] soul just to earn money,” the family made the decision to join arural countercultural settlement. Another former back-to-the-lander re-called, “the commune (ecovillage) was a way to share [an] appreciationof nature and offer a lifestyle and ethic more in harmony with nature.”Such sentiment was echoed throughout the movement. A Maine com-


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munard remembered seeing rural nature as a “pure place, a place thatwas fresh, green, wholesome, and beautiful, [a landscape] unsullied bythe dirtiness of civilization.” A poem in Leaves of Twin Oaks, written bya resident of the community, reiterated that yearning for a pastoralsetting. Entitled “Left Behind,” the poem called for an exchange of“sweltering far roads for gravel and dirt; Carefully weeded lawns fordandelions, wild; Gone is the smog’s burning hurt; Here are misty fogmornings so mild, here is good rich soil in which my hands toil, here ismy heart’s story free from its past worry.” The opportunity to experi-ence nature unadulterated, suggested the author, released her from theanxieties of a uniform culture symbolized by endless paved roads andwell-groomed lawns.9

Like contemporary environmentalists, back-to-the-landers held fastto the belief that North America’s rural spaces existed as the last un-corrupted haven. Yet, rather than simply protect perceived pristinelandscapes, they hoped to colonize rural areas: to work and live withnature. The discourses that came out of these settlements suggest thatmost rural communards believed that living a low impact, simple, pas-toral existence was the countervailing experience to the mass consumerlifestyle. Hedgepeth explained that many new rural settlers believed,“man ha[d] become alienated from his natural habitat.” In an editorialin the Green Revolution, Heathcote member Roger Wilks wonderedwhether or not “[city] people who, because of their life style are essen-tially divorced from the land and from direct production of even a smallpart of their own food, really understand ecology?” Through his expe-rience, Wilks had “held in my hands and looked at soil full of the myriadorganisms that make it fertile and gloried at the wonder of being part ofsuch a complex thing as spaceship Earth.” Perceived as an inherentalternative to pervasive patterns of work and consumption, back-to-the-landers reacted by seeking out new natural experiences in the one placewhere they believed they could most easily find them: rural America.10

The countercultural impulse to forsake the city for life in the coun-tryside was hardly a novel idea. As the historian David Shi has written,“since the colonial days, Americans have greatly admired, variouslydefined, and occasionally practiced some version of a simple life.” So-called “anti-urbanism” created a legacy for the 1960s era back-to-the-land movement. Thus, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s early nineteenth-


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century notion that “the advantage of which country-life possesses for apowerful mind, over the artificial and curtailed life of the cities” actedboth as a direct influence on the counterculture and also an expressionof the more pervasive Arcadian trope that had long resonated throughAmerican thought.11

As Shi also points out, scholars should take the back-to-the-landers asserious in their “quest for a more meaningful life that transcended ma-terialism.” Importantly, communards employed the urban-rural di-chotomy in rationalizing the formation of country communes as sites ofcontact with the natural world. Like the writer Wendell Berry, who haslooked to the agricultural “margins” (including the Amish and horse-powered farms) as exemplars of sustainable and naturally conscioussmall-scale farming, back-to-the-landers found their influences in thecomplicated iconography of a mythic rural past. As Robert Hourietwrote in Getting Back Together, “at their onset, communes looked asthough they were simply repeating the past, returning to the secure,natural comfort of a bygone era, escaping upstream to the clean, clearheadwaters of the American pioneer experience.” In fact, the pastoralencounter in back-to-the-land settlements hinged on a hybridization ofrural mythos, popular bucolic imagery, and American Indian iconogra-phy.12

As the historian Timothy Miller has shown, back-to-the-land notionsof postwar metropolitan and mass consumer America as corruptivemoral and physical influences undoubtedly reflected the anti-industrialand anti-modern ideals found in nineteenth-century rural utopian ex-periments, including Oneida and Brook Farm. In A. Bronson Alcott’sFruitlands, and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden Pond, the movement’sfounders discovered philosophies that connected health and rural na-ture. At the same time, back-to-the-land ideas of pastoral labor as lib-eration from the tribulations of a modern urban livelihood reflectedattempts by turn-of-the-century urban boosters to “save the city byredeeming the countryside.” As Richard White has suggested, land pro-grams in the West and Midwest aspired to resettle poor urban immi-grants in rural areas as a panacea for the social troubles of the city. Yet,rather than understand the environmental hardships that resettled urbanimmigrants encountered, the countercultural back-to-the-land move-ment echoed the pastoral ideas espoused by privileged boosters who


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held rural America as salvation from the problems of the growingAmerican city.13

As suggested by countercultural community names such as Oneida IIand Walden House, many founders of back-to-the-land communes rec-ognized their nineteenth-century utopian roots. Yet popular iconogra-phy and imagery of frontier agrarian and pastoral life during the ColdWar years often masked the hardships faced by resettled urban immi-grants and other independent farmers during the nineteenth century.Through television, literature, and film, an imagined rural life seepedinto the American psyche during the postwar years.

During the Cold War period, bucolic mythos reflected cultural dis-quietude due to nuclear anxieties. Meaningful in its appeal to broadaudiences, popular rural iconography had a particular impact on Ameri-can youth. Cinema Studies scholar Douglas Brode has suggested thatWalt Disney had a great deal of influence on countercultural concep-tions of pastoral simplicity. For example, in films including SummerMagic and Swiss Family Robinson, postwar youth found notions of col-lective “back to the basics” ideas and modern families “living in har-mony with nature.” By 1953 the children’s book Little House on thePrairie had sold more than two million copies. Eleanor Agnew, wholived as a member of the Middle Earth commune in Vermont, suggeststhat American culture’s “glorification of the pastoral, through song,poetry, literature, and myth, fed our growing desire for the land.” As isevident in the moniker “Middle Earth,” the bucolic imagery of J. R. R.Tolkien’s literary works The Lord of the Rings and the The Hobbit, alsoinfluenced their conceptions of rural life.14

Popular representations of the back-to-the-land communes reaf-firmed the movement’s ideological turn to a simple pastoral lifestyle.Rick Klein said that the 1969 movie Easy Rider (which included a com-munal scene modeled after New Buffalo) “stoked the flame” in northernNew Mexico. The cover of William Hedgepeth and Dennis Stock’s TheAlternative, included a couple standing in front of a scarecrow crudelymimicking Grant Wood’s famous painting “American Gothic.” In Harp-er’s Magazine a similar image appeared with Bill Wheeler of WheelerRanch and his wife Gay standing in front of their barn. The second issueof Mother Earth News entitled “How to Get Out of the City and Back-to-the-land” offered an illustrated version of the iconic painting. Back-


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to-the-land settlements also adopted names to reflect their pastoral andagrarian ethos. Examples included Beaver Run Farm, Black BearRanch, Country Women, Earth Cycle Farm, Magic Forest Farm, SpringHollow Farm, Table Mountain Ranch, and Rivendale (another refer-ence to Lord of the Rings), among others.15

Using popular rural representations and innate Arcadian ideals, themovement reinvented the idealistic self-sufficient Jeffersonian yeomanfarmer and “pioneer” figure as a collective endeavor. As it sought todefine itself, it exploited rural language, including ideas of freedom,independence, and self-reliance, which harkened back to FrederickJackson Turner’s agrarian frontier and industrious American farmer.Explained one contemporary observer, “the hippies are pioneers notrevolutionaries. They are not trying to destroy civilization as we know it.They are trying hard to create an alternative.” A commentator who hadvisited several back-to-the-land settlements explained, “a major techno-logical problem confronting the communes was how to retrieve knowl-edge of the almost-forgotten arts of self-sufficiency now dying with olderfarmers.” At Libre in Colorado, farming, raising goats, and tendingother livestock offered Roberta Price Perkins a feeling of “indepen-dence,” and at least one onlooker who visited the commune recognizeda “do-your-own-thing” attitude amongst its residents. At Heathcote,Robert Wilks suggested that Americans could not “expect a free societyuntil the majority of people are more fully self-sufficient.” For manyback-to-the-land settlers, simplicity and self-sufficiency not only repre-sented their new “pioneering” experiments, but also reflected a whole-sale rejection of supermarket America.16

At the same time, often ignoring the historical relationships betweenAmerican agricultural expansion and Indian removal, some back-to-the-landers turned to idealistic conceptions of American Indian cultures asunpolluted by mass consumer culture. In referring to their movement asthe “retribalization” of rural America, they married a perceived Indiannatural sensitivity with a concept of indigenous cultures as inherentlyrural. For example, by naming their community after the buffalo, NewBuffalo’s residents linked the bison’s significance in sustaining PlainsIndians during the nineteenth century to the role of the land in shapingtheir experience. As the historian Philip Deloria suggests, at least oneresident of the commune referred to their eating habits as part of a


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Farmer at New Buffalo Commune, New Mexico, ca. 1970.

Courtesy ©Dennis Stock/Magnum Photos.


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“Navaho diet” even though their subsistence and agricultural patternsmore closely resembled that of Taos Pueblo. Many back-to-the-landsettlers and counterculturalists in general, adopted loincloths, head-bands, and moccasins in a vain attempt to ape a perceived down-to-earthphilosophy amongst the Indians of North America. In the process, theyoften confused diverse Indian cultures.17

As one measure to recast their relationship with the natural world,some commune members turned to an amalgamation of American In-dian rituals in an effort to produce crops, bring on rain, or to reach a newconsciousness. For example, at New Buffalo residents consulted neigh-boring Taos Pueblo for instruction as to how to perform a proper corndance. Others crudely mimicked traditional Indian rain dances. A rainceremony at Earthworks resulted in a “whacking old Vermont thunder-shower.” Some communards turned to “traditional” Indian peyote cer-emonies. Beyond the drug itself (a form of cactus indigenous to thesouthwestern United States), ceremonies included a mix of concoctednatural scents and wildlife apparitions. For a participant at New Buffalo,the next morning brought the beauty of the sun rising over the moun-tains. He sobbed and “like the others knelt toward the sun, whichburned gigantic crosses across the sky.”18

Importantly, the countercultural use of pastoral myth and AmericanIndian idealism informed a self-proclaimed philosophy of “voluntaryprimitivism.” Connecting their physical interaction with the land tophysical and mental wellbeing, they conceived a salubrious “total envi-ronment” to include simple labor in the making of a healthy humanbody. As Roman Sender, founder of Morningstar, suggested “voluntaryprimitivism [was] the natural way to ease off.” Appealing to the modernurbanite he queried, “have you ever breathed into your lungs the earlydawn air of a garden or a grove? You can feel the oxygen tinglingthrough every cell, your pores seem to breathe in energies so fine, sopure, that they penetrate to the very source of your being.”19

While tractors and other mechanized equipment appeared in somerural settlements, their use frequently created a point of contentionbetween notions of primitivism and communal self-sufficiency. Long-term sustainability became a critical issue for some members of ruralcommunes and collective farms. Yet, most back-to-the-landers desiredto work the land unadulterated by modern machinery. Thus they turned


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to simple hand tools, including hoes, rakes, thrashers, shovels, buckets,ladles, and axes to carry out communal work. Just as frequently they gotdown on all fours and used their hands. A photograph of a plainlyclothed communard preparing the seedbed with seeds in her pocket anddirt on her hands emerged as the essence of the back-to-the-land expe-rience. Work was vital for creating a healthy body.20

With educational handbooks and do-it-yourself manuals and alma-nacs as ubiquitous guides, back-to-the-landers set out to know naturethrough work. As a contemporary observer noted, “earth lore aboundson rural communes. . . . What trees burn best for warmth, how a com-post pile is made, how vegetables are canned, when cows first go out-doors in spring, how a maple tree is tapped, when soil is the right texturefor planting: all these are practical questions with high priority.” TheWhole Earth Catalog, which sold over a million copies in 1971 and theMother Earth News, which reached three million readers by 1979, of-

Homesteaders Kent and Ellie, Middle Earth Homestead, Troy,Maine, ca. 1975.

Courtesy of Eleanor Agnew. Photo taken by Kent Thurston, Private Collection.


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fered new rural settlers tips on planting and harvesting crops, plans forthe construction of eco-friendly housing, and advertisements that toutedthe necessary instruments for a successful back-to-the-land experience.With simple tools and informative manuals, back-to-the-landers set outto find the physical and psychological benefits of the natural world.21

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the back-to-the-land move-ment surfaced within a larger countercultural urge to search out morenatural and organic lifestyles. Natural childbirth, healing herbs, hempclothing, and organic backyard gardens reflected a burgeoning move-ment towards an alternative environmental consciousness that sought toconflate the health of the body with that of the nonhuman naturallandscape. While the counterculture understood the urge to preservenature for future generations to enjoy, its members hoped to procure thehealthy benefits of nature by consuming natural foods, using chemical-free body products, and through physical encounters with the environ-ment. In using rural work to seek out the salubrious elements of non-human nature, the back-to-the-land movement ideal surfaced as themost radical manifestation of the countercultural environmental move-ment.

Within rural communes and collective farms, the counterculture re-lied on a host of experiences to reconnect the body and mind with thenatural world. New forms of housing, spirituality, natural and chemicaldrug use, and festival gatherings in wilderness areas often played centralroles in the back-to-the-land encounter. Yet, laboring on the land incollective farming, gardening, and small pastoral living endeavorsemerged as the most commonly cited practice for a realization of health-fulness for both landscape and the body. Unlike other environmentallyconscious Americans who conflated environmental protection with lei-sure, back-to-the-landers found salvation in working the soil, choppingwood, and clearing roads. A contemporary observer suggested that com-munal life and labor emerged as an “effort to forge a oneness, a semi-mystical new rapport with air and soil and other souls.” The everydayresponsibilities of life in rural spaces not only meant a home and healthyfood for the community, but translated to a cross-movement discoursethat suggested good, environmentally conscious work as a powerful toolfor shaping healthy livelihoods lost to a culture of consumer conve-nience and overabundance. As former communard Arthur Kopecky


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later recalled, “working with nature was indeed integral to my experi-ence.”22

Back-to-the-land settlements established various natural farming and“organic” small-plot gardening ventures in an effort to cultivate healthyfoods for the personal and communal body. With over fifteen acres, NewBuffalo’s residents planted corn, tomatoes, barley, soybeans, beans, andsquash. A visitor to the commune explained the significance: “a lot of

A homesteader guts a pig, Middle Earth Homestead,Troy, Maine, ca. 1975.

Courtesy of Eleanor Agnew. Photo taken by Kent Thurston, Private Collection.


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effort, thought and discussion go into the preparation of food, not onlybecause it’s a common need, like clothes or housing, but also becausefood can be a direct vital expression of man’s relationship to the wholelife cycle.” The first harvest for the Farm in Tennessee included sweetpotatoes, cucumbers, and cabbage. Vermont-based Earthworks pro-duced maple syrup from a number of trees on communal land. Manyalso kept livestock. In addition to its gardens with various fruits andvegetables, the Libre commune maintained livestock for meat andchickens for eggs, and Country Women in California kept a herd ofgoats for milk.23

Through agricultural projects, back-to-the-landers sought to feel theeffects of nature directly on their bodies. Images from New Buffalo andLorien in New Mexico show men and women carefully working theirhands through the soil preparing to plant the seedbed, removing rocksfrom recently cleared fields, using bucket and ladle to water the com-munity’s planted crops, and cutting wood to use in open-pit and wood-burning stoves. Remarkably, during the warmer months of the year,many communards worked fields and gardens shoeless, shirtless, andoften without work gloves. With their feet in the soil and the sun on theirback, they described an experience where hands touched the earth,muscles responded to arduous work, and the senses reacted to the posi-tive influences of the natural world. Richard Fairfield, who had traveledthe country visiting different countercultural rural communes, at-tempted to capture a sense of the simple, natural living approach inback-to-the-land communities, “next time you’re outdoors in the coun-try, reach down and take up a handful of earth or grass. Feel it, expe-rience it, touch it to your face; open yourself up to it completely.”24

The stories that emerged from within rural communes and collectivefarms emphasized that two levels of bodily health were expected fromworking with nature. First commune inhabitants intimated a notion ofpsychological release as part of the back-to-the-land experience. Oftenconsidered a “natural high,” many back-to-the-landers believed thattheir pastoral encounters could reverse the human emotional and non-human natural maladies caused by a decadent and polluted city exis-tence. At New Buffalo, a member lived “completely in harmony with theopen countryside, comfortable away from all the seedy, urbanized ha-rangue of his previous existence.” Roman Sender encouraged Ameri-


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cans to “listen to your body. It tells you how it likes to live. And minetells me that to be healthy and happy I must have around me the sun,pure air, growing things, and silence.” Placing air, fire, water, and earthin harmony with the self, god, and love, the community symbol at Morn-ingstar encouraged residents to realign the personal identity with thenatural world. A resident of Lower Farm in Placitas, New Mexico, ech-oed those sentiments by challenging urban society to turn away fromhomogenous, sterile American culture, to “be receptive to the goodearth” and to “tune in to natural vibrations.”25

On a second interconnected level, the wellbeing of the body played acentral role in how back-to-the-landers interpreted their experience. Fora Maine communard it seemed “far healthier to chop wood, haul water,plant seeds, than to sit at a desk all day.” Huw Williams, founder ofFreedom Farm, suggested that a more direct relationship with nature

Back-to-the-Landers Lynette and Tom Biesanz with their threekids in the family’s organic garden, nd.

Courtesy of Michael William Doyle, Private Collection.


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materialized by taking out the supermarket middleman and placing thebody in direct contact with soil, wood, and water. His newfound unionwith nature through labor, he said, offered spiritual rewards in everydaytasks such as sawing wood.26

In an effort to create environmentally virtuous work, back-to-the-landers attempted to place the body in equilibrium with the naturalworld by measuring everyday life against the cadence of the land. Anobserver noted the pattern as she followed the day-by-day tasks of acommunard in Vermont. Throughout the day’s labor, including trans-ferring tomato seedlings, working in the herb garden, and gatheringwood for the dinner fire, the commune seemed to keep “pace with therhythm of the earth.” Peter Coyote, who lived at Olema in Californiaand Turkey Ridge, Pennsylvania, explained the importance of makingwork follow the tempo of the earth. As Turkey Ridge came togetherwith men and women sharing house and field duties, it seemed as though“the world was right in its orbit.”27

While individualism could mark the construction of new relationshipswith nature, collective identity drove agricultural practices in back-to-the-land settlements. Yet many communards often found their commu-nities inadvertently reaffirming common cultural constructions of fe-male versus male work. The desire to relive a presumably traditionalyeoman farmer’s lifestyle helped to reify those patterns of thinking. Asa visitor to northern New Mexico suggested, “at first, the work wasdivided traditionally into men’s and women’s. None of the women thatfirst year wanted to be liberated, the nineteenth-century image ofaproned, long-skirted womanhood appealed to them.” A woman mem-ber who chose to shape bricks found herself ignored by the men andeventually encouraged to return to the kitchen by other women. In anattempt to suggest that women also gendered labor, a visitor to NewBuffalo explained that a “hip cowboy,” who sat at the table choppingcarrots, was asked to leave the kitchen by the women of New Buffalo.28

The degree to which similar attitudes seeped into other communesremains hard to identify. Yet, many recognized the contradictions be-tween a truly egalitarian back-to-the-land lifestyle and the relationshipsbetween men and women. As Peter Coyote recalled of Turkey Ridge,“all of our ‘appreciation’ of the women and their work did not extend tovaluing that work as dearly as our own. With hindsight, our division of


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labor seems archaic, particularly for a visionary community.” However,as the community evolved, men and women increasingly shared a vari-ety of tasks. For example, as women moved out into the fields, men didmore housework. For Coyote, “it was a wrenching awakening, to say theleast, and for the first time, the men experienced the never-ending,distracting, and maddening demands of simultaneous children andhousework, the fragmenting of every thought and task into small, child-ruled increments.”29

In an effort to gain the healthy benefits of a hands-on interaction withnature, women took the initiative to move beyond any gendered notionsof labor. Roberta Price recalled that she and another woman had hauledmanure for fertilizer. At Country Women, a former magazine editorfrom Los Angeles explained that the rural communal lifestyle offeredher space where “both green things and I could grow.” She learnedorganic gardening as a principal part of her natural encounter. Anothermember described working the land as physically invigorating. “I wantto use my muscles and feel my strength grow,” she said. “I rely on myselffor my physical needs.”30

Not all back-to-the-land settlements were heterosexual establish-ments. Importantly, lesbian communities complicated the idea of aMother Earth by, according to historian Catherine Kleiner, gendering“nature as a woman, becoming nature’s lovers (both figuratively andliterally) and moving beyond both deep ecology or ecofeminism.” Bydesign, lesbian land communities remained decidedly similar to thosefound elsewhere. They existed as communal and family endeavors,where nature played a central role in everyday life. Yet through uniquecollective and personal encounters, lesbian land communes shaped newconceptions of good relationships that connected the physical body withrural nature.31

Thus, gay or straight, back-to-the-landers bartered their own energyin the form of rough pastoral work for the collective benefits of thenatural world. Yet, by not always anticipating the inherent tension be-tween their pastoral ideals and the financial and physiological burdensof a rural life, they missed part of the equation. Bad weather, meagerfood, disease, and the reality that “primitive” pastoral work was diffi-cult, plagued the greater back-to-the-land movement. As a result indi-viduals within countercultural communes and collective farms struggled


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to resolve the pervasive conflicts between notions of pastoral labor as ahealthy retreat from metropolitan America and the unexpected physicaland psychological burdens shaped by an unpredictable natural world.

Weather conditions, particularly in cold winter states, counteractedconceptions of the natural world as a last bastion of health. A residentof an Oregon commune recalled voluntarily living in a teepee heated bya woodstove as “really miserable.” Similarly, the LNS-farm in NewEngland “bore witness to old cars that refused to start, frozen waterpipes, chimney fires, and running noses, [and] colds that wouldn’t quit.”At a homestead in Maine, a couple “kept a temperature chart just to seewhat the scope of [their] suffering was.” Another commune memberlater recalled passing a “cozy-looking house” in the dead of winterthinking how nice it would have been to not have to worry about herfinancial or physical burdens as a communard.32

For Rainbow Farm residents in Oregon, winter weather had a pro-found influence on the social make-up of their settlement. As one mem-ber explained, “snow closed around the house, driving the people to-gether into the only two warm rooms. Life began to exist around thekitchen table, or in the new blue-lit sauna room.” Winter conditionsacted both to bring residents together, so that they could learn moreabout one another, and also pulled them apart, as close quarters led toa clash of personalities. “Less able to deal with each other in emotionalways,” male members of the commune quarreled most frequently. Bythe end of the winter season, the Rainbow Farm consisted almost en-tirely of women.33

Cold weather had a similar influence at Turkey Ridge; with the tem-perature hovering “between zero and ten degrees, it was punishing to beoutside.” Thus, most of the commune’s members spent days and nightsindoors. Increased tensions, usually diffused by outdoor work during thewarmer months of the year, materialized from stagnation and povertyduring bitter winter months. Long-time residents of New Buffalo usedsimilar conditions to encourage non-committed individuals to leave thecommunity. At one point “old-timers deliberately let the woodpile runout—to drive off those too lazy to chop their share.” The result, theyhoped, would be less people eating communal food rations and sharingthe often-cramped main compound.34

Those who stayed on in back-to-the-land communities through the


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cold months of the year often looked forward to the spring, despite theubiquitous burdens of planting difficulties and meager returns from theiragricultural labor. A lack of reliable water sources, springtime frosts,and insect damage to crops burdened several back-to-the-land settle-ments. Due to a lack of rainfall, LNS-farm resorted to transportingwater from nearby streams for their crops. At New Buffalo communardsconstantly battled Mexican Bean beetles that destroyed their harvest.Not wanting to contaminate their crops with insecticides, they eradi-cated the insects by smashing them between their fingers.35

During Twin Oaks’s early years, the commune also struggled for atime with low yields and pests (including Japanese beetles and Squashbugs). Yet they often had enough to eat (due in part to their dependenceon outside jobs and the success of a burgeoning hammock business). Avisitor to the commune during 1970 explained that dinner consisted ofcorn, spinach, turkey casserole, and milk or Kool-Aid. However, in theface of failed harvests and a lack of steady income many other settle-ments expecting a return on their labor frequently had lackluster meals.Steve Gaskin recalled that before it found agricultural success, the Farmexperienced “rough times.” A visitor at New Buffalo explained that“dinner was meager—rice, lentils, squash and, if you were first in line, afew tortillas.” A slaughtered cow or a deer killed by a communal hunteroffered an occasional treat for residents who did not practice vegetari-anism.36

Lack of knowledge about sanitation and disease also plagued themovement. A need for clean water, sanitary living quarters, and ad-equate clothing emerged as major problems in many settlements. TheFarm experienced an outbreak of dysentery when residents drank con-taminated stream water. Morningstar did not have proper bathrooms orouthouses. Instead, members frequently defecated in the woods sur-rounding the community. Since neither visitors nor residents regularlyburied their feces, concerns that the commune had become a breedingground for disease alarmed many long-time residents. Among ruralsettlements in New Mexico, back-to-the-landers contracted a myriad ofillnesses. By 1973 at least five residents of New Buffalo had contractedhepatitis. Another communard in Taos County came down with tuber-culosis. In back-to-the-land settlements near Albuquerque, health work-ers reported two cases of the bubonic plague. An article in the Astral


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Projection encouraged communards to maintain sanitary conditions as,“the threat of plague is ever present in sylvatic (wooded) areas since thedisease, transmitted by infected fleas, is harbored by wild rodents andsmall animals, including rabbits.”37

Environmental hardship complicated structural and social problemsthat often emerged as back-to-the-land communities dealt with a lack ofcapital and the rise of social conflict. Those trends emerged from whatStuart Brand had called the “Commune Lie”: the failure of the ruralhippie movement to reach the utopian goals set forth by the moderncollective living ideal. From their inception, most countercultural com-munes and collective farming ventures could not preserve a steady,committed population for work or income. During 1967 the average stayfor new members at Twin Oaks hovered around three months. WhileTwin Oaks’s turnover slowed between 1970 and 1972, continued arrivalof new members and departure of others complicated life in the com-munity. An uncommitted workforce and lack of money compelled mem-bers to take jobs outside their settlement. “We expected to live off theland as much as possible,” explained one resident, “but even then wesaid to each other, ‘if worst comes to worst, we can always get jobs.’Worst came to worst in March of 1968 eight short months after thecommunity’s inception.” New Buffalo had a similar problem. Two yearsafter its creation, the community could not support its population fromits farming ventures. Rick Klein, a founder, recalled that “a flux ofvisitors” complicated an already difficult agricultural situation. As of1970, at least one member voiced concern about the scarcity of food andthe need to actually reduce the number of people at the commune fromfifty to twenty-five. By spring of the same year, New Buffalo’s residentsrelied on food stamps for two-thirds of their provisions.38

Of course not all back-to-the-land settlements failed. While ruralcommunes that achieved long-term success relied on the fruits of theirlabor in farming and gardening ventures, they generally also recognizedthe importance of other industries in sustaining their communities. By1981, Twin Oaks found community permanence behind a six-hundred-thousand-dollar hammock business. Categorized as nonprofit by the late1970s, the Farm produced capital from construction and agriculturalcrews as well as its book-publishing ventures. A visitor to the communitysuggested that as a nonprofit, “the Farm is determined to compete for a


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good balance of payments with the outside capitalist economy.” ForSteve Gaskin and his compatriots, rather than abandon modern Ameri-can society, maintaining a long-term back-to-the-land existence requiredestablishing equilibrium between profitable external ventures and thecollective ideals of the community.39

Despite the few long-term success stories that emerged from themovement, the back-to-the-land pursuit of the benefits of naturethrough labor ultimately declined. While some back-to-the-landers em-phasized that the “temptations” of a pervasive American culture ofconvenience pulled communes apart, the movement’s natural consumerethos acted as part of a growing countercultural environmental con-sciousness that succeeded through independent cooperative markets. Byoffering prepackaged, easily consumable all-natural products, food co-operatives and health food stores emerged as an alternative pathway tothe physical and psychological benefits of nature, while simultaneouslypromoting good work through organic and natural farming. Like ruralcommunes and collective farms, they challenged traditional market-consumer relationships by encouraging cooperative ownership, hostingworkshops, and offering discussion groups on organic produce, homegardening, and physical and mental health and healing. Work alsoplayed a role as many cooperatives required monthly shifts in the storeas a caveat of membership. Countercultural cooperative food marketssurvived not by abandoning the modern American mass consumer so-ciety, but by using it to promote alternative forms of consumption thatwedded the health of nature with that of the human body.40

The tremendous underground and mainstream interest in back-to-the-land communes offered fodder for the growing environmental con-sumer movement. In some cases, back-to-the-land communities rantheir own ventures. For example, the California-based Brotherhood ofthe Sun ran health food stores, a restaurant, and organic farmers’ market(which eventually became a three-million-dollar business). After yearsof subsistence farming, New Buffalo existed for a time as a small dairy.Whether the product of a commune or not, like the back-to-the-landmovement, cooperative food markets trumpeted the consumption ofgood nature as a means to find personal wellbeing. Yet, rather thanemphasize work with nature, the flourishing trade in all-natural goodsencouraged good consumerism as a measure to a healthy body and


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environment. Laboring in nature did not disappear (many countercul-turalists grew gardens with seedlings purchased at local markets), butconsumer environmentalism allowed individuals to find the benefits ofthe back-to-the-land experience at the swipe of a credit card.41

As communes increasingly vanished, hundreds of local independentnatural food stores opened across the nation. By 1980 many hip com-munities demanded environmentally friendly, pesticide-free fruits andvegetables, natural body products, vitamins, herbal supplements, andfree-range poultry and meats. Even in name they reflected the bucolicimagery of the back-to-the-land movement. Earth’s Bounty in Wood-bury, New Jersey, Down to Earth Produce in Boulder, and La Monta-nita Co-op in Albuquerque, amongst hundreds of others, catered to theunique dietary and environmentally conscious lifestyle desired by agrowing number of natural consumers. As Pam Hanna later suggested,like other health and environmentally conscious Americans she had“learned how to buy grains and beans and avoid packaged food.”42

During 1981 independent health food stores did a collective two bil-lion dollars in business. Preservative-free Tom’s of Maine toothpastewent from a five-thousand-dollar mom-and-pop business in 1970 togrossing more than three million dollars in 1982. Celestial Seasoningsherbal teas, whose founder first picked the herbs and stitched the bagsby hand, grossed fifteen million dollars by 1981. If one desired to find it,the bodily advantages of rural nature could be found without going backto the land.43

As early as 1971, corporate America recognized that the producers ofnatural foods and products (and the independent stores that sold them)stood to profit immensely from the boom in natural consumerism. Chaingrocery stores, including Ralph’s and Skaggs, offered aisles devoted tohealth foods and natural products. In 1972 a former General Mills em-ployee created Heartland Natural Cereal, or as Rolling Stone called it,“the first corporate granola.” Following Heartland’s success, QuakerOats, General Mills, Kellogg’s, amongst others, produced their owngranola cereals.44

The most telling evidence of this shift lay with the success of one-timesmall-scale natural food stores that expanded to meet the demands of anincreasingly health-oriented cross-section of the American public. By1993 Whole Foods Market, established as a small natural food store in


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Austin, Texas, thirteen years earlier, became a stock-sharing corpora-tion that boasted twenty locations and title as leading seller of naturalfoods and hygiene products across the United States. Chain stores in-cluding Wild Oats, its sister store Alfalfa’s, and Trader Joe’s soon joinedthe market as primary competitors to Whole Foods. While environmen-tal concerns stood as core to the mission of these stores, their reputa-tions as spaces with goods healthy for the body increasingly trivializedcountercultural environmental consumerism and the relationship be-tween simple work, healthy bodies, and environmental consciousness.45

In contrast, for the back-to-the-landers who fled American cities,simple rural work with healthy natural environments acted as an escapefrom common American consumption and the average urban existence.Motivated by a legacy of pastoral thought popularized in literature, film,and television, communards believed that only in leaving the city for thecountryside could one find wellbeing for both the body and environ-

Volunteer clerks at the Famine Foods Co-op, Winona,Minnesota, ca. 1976.

Courtesy of Michael William Doyle, Private Collection.


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ment. Yet most found that rural life and labor was difficult and unfor-giving. Interactions with nature could lead to disease, while facilitatingboth poverty and communal conflict. Yet in their collective movementback to the land, communards offered not merely a radical reconceptu-alization of postwar life, but an environmental ethos that used work toconsume the bodily benefits of nature while simultaneously seeking toreduce the human impact on the nonhuman natural environment. Byproclaiming virtuous rural work as central to their consciousness, thecountercultural back-to-the-land urge created a modern environmentalmovement unique in ideological roots and practice.

NOTES

1. The author would like to thank Beth Bailey, David Farber, Andrew Isenberg,Eleanor Agnew, Timothy Miller, Michael William Doyle, and three anonymous readersfor their guidance and support in completing this project.

Thomas Jefferson, “Notes on the State of Virginia,” in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed.Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 300–301;William Hedgepeth, “Maybe It’ll Be Different Here,” Look 23 (Mar. 1971): 66.

2. On the connections between work, landscape, and nature, see, Steven Stoll, Lardingthe Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill andWang, 2002); Conevery Bolton Valencius, The Health of the Country: How AmericanSettlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic Books, 2002). On therelationship between the environmental movement and notions of work, see, RichardWhite, “Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?” in UncommonGround: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. William Cronon (New York: W. W.Norton and Company, 1996), 171–85.

3. For surveys of the movement, see, Hal Rothman, The Greening of A Nation?:Environmentalism in the United States Since 1945 (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1997);Kirkpatrick Sale, The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement, 1962–1992 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993). For historiographic concerns, see, Adam Rome,“‘Give Earth a Chance’: The Environmental Movement and the Sixties,” Journal ofAmerican History 90 (Sept. 2003): 525–54. The best sources for the history of the coun-terculture and communes comes from Beth Bailey and David Farber’s countercultureseries. For example, Arthur Kopecky, New Buffalo: Journals from a Taos Commune(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004) and Kopecky, Leaving New BuffaloCommune (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006). See, also, Peter Braun-stein and Michael William Doyle, Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the1960s and 70s (New York: Routledge, 2002).

On communal life, see, Timothy Miller, The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond(Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999); Miller, The Quest for Utopia in Twentieth-Century America (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998); Miller, The Hippies andAmerican Values (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991); Lois Palken Rudnick,


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Utopian Vistas: The Mabel Dodge Luhan House and the American Counterculture (Albu-querque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996). Most work done on communal life hasbeen done by social scientists. See, for example, Robert C. Schehr, Dynamic Utopia:Establishing Intentional Communities as a New Social Movement (London: Bergin andGarvey, 1997); Berger Bennett, The Survival of the Counterculture: Ideological Work andEveryday Life Among Rural Communards (Berkeley: University of California Press,1981); David and Elena French, Working Communally: Patterns and Possibilities (NewYork: Russell Sage Foundation, 1975).

4. For an analysis of the postwar rise of environmental thought, see, Samuel Hays,“From Conservation to Environment: Environmental Politics in the United States sinceWorld War II,” Environmental Review 6 (Fall 1982): 14–41; Hays, Beauty, Health, andPermanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955–1985 (New York: Cam-bridge University Press, 1987).

5. On consumer activism, see, Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics ofMass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003). For the countercultureand the food industry, see, Warren J. Belasco, Appetite for Change: How the Countercul-ture Took on the Food Industry (1989; repr., Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007).

6. Estimates on the number of back-to-the-land settlements, their populations, anddemographics vary. Miller suggests over one thousand 1960s era communes with perhapshundreds of thousands of members. He also offers an exhaustive list of communes andcollectives founded between 1960–1965 and 1965–1970. See, 60s Communes, xviii–xx,250–85. The closest census of back-to-the-land settlements can be found in, Jeffery Jacob,New Pioneers: The Back-to-the-Land Movement and a Search for a Sustainable Future(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). His research spans from 1981to 1996 and explores primarily family farms. Yet it offers demographic and ideologicaltrends similar to those found in the countercultural back-to-the-land movement.

7. See, for example, Hedgepeth, “Maybe It’ll Be Different Here,” 66; “Year of theCommune,” Newsweek 73 (Aug. 1969): 89; William Hedgepeth and Dennis Stock, TheAlternative: The Communal Life in New America (New York: Macmillan, 1970); RobertHouriet, Getting Back Together (New York: Coward, McCann and Geoghegan, 1971);Richard Fairfield, Communes USA: A Personal Tour (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1972);“Coast Religious Sect’s Life is Tested by Prosperity,” New York Times, Apr. 6, 1975, 51.

8. Eleanor Agnew, Back From the Land: How Young Americans Went to Nature in the1970s and Why They Came Back (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004), 6–11; Hedgepeth, “MaybeIt’ll Be Different Here,” 66. For more on the notion of technocracy, see, TheodoreRoszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and itsYouthful Opposition (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1969).

9. Pam Hanna, interview by author, Apr. 28, 2005; Eleanor Agnew, interview byauthor, July 17, 2006; Arthur Kopecky, interview by author, July 20, 2006; “Left Behind,”Leaves of Twin Oaks (Mar. 1973): 2.

10. Fairfield, Communes USA, 364; Roger Wilks, “Ecology and Plastic People,” TheGreen Revolution (Jan. 1970): 4; Miller, The Hippies and American Values, 109.

11. David Shi, The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture(Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007), 3. Morton and Lucia White show that fromthe Early Republic to the first decades of the twentieth century, intellectuals often dis-dained cities while trumpeting country and rural life. Such trends continued well into the


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century. See, Morton and Lucia White, The Intellectual Versus the City: From ThomasJefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962), 1, 3, 29.

12. Shi, The Simple Life, 259; Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America: Culture andAgriculture (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977), 143, 171–223; Robert Houriet, Get-ting Back Together, xiii.

13. Miller, 60s Communes, 7–8; Timothy Miller, American Communes, 1860–1960: ABibliography (New York: Garland, 1990); Berger, The Survival of a Counterculture, 96–112; Richard White, Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of IslandCounty, Washington (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1980), 113–41. For more onnineteenth-century conceptions of health, nature, and pastoralism, see, Stephen Nissen-baum, Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980).

14. Douglas Brode, From Walt to Woodstock: How Disney Created the Counterculture(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004), 35, 39–41, 86–87, 214, 219; Agnew, Back Fromthe Land, 9–10, 11, 13.

15. Rick Klein, 60s Communes Project Interview, Aug. 6, 1996. All 60s CommunesProject Interviews used in this essay are in the possession of Timothy Miller at the Uni-versity of Kansas. Hedgepeth and Stock, The Alternative; Sara Davidson, “Open Land:Getting Back to The Communal Garden,” Harper’s Magazine 240 (June 1970): 91. Thesecond addition of Mother Earth News is dedicated to the back-to-the-land experience andthe iconic image is on the cover. See, Mother Earth News 2 (Mar. 1970). For the names of1960s era communes and collectives, see, Miller, 60s Communes, 253–85; Michael Allen,“‘I Just Want to be a Cosmic Cowboy’: Hippies, Cowboy Code, and the Culture of aCounterculture,” Western Historical Quarterly 36 (Autumn 2005): 278–79.

16. For examples of communards calling themselves pioneers, see, “The Story ofHippie Hillbillies,” Seers Rio Grande Weekly, Oct. 4–17, 1975, 1, 23; Rick Seymour, “TheOther Side of the Hippie Story,” in The Morningstar Scrapbook: ’n the Pursuit of Hap-piness, Unohoo, Coyote, Rick, and the Mighty Avengers (Occidental, Calif.: Friends ofMorningstar, 1973), 56. For more on the counterculture and the pastoral myth, see, Berger,The Survival of the Counterculture, 93–112; Houriet, Getting Back Together, 219; RobertaPrice Perkins, “Libre Rising,” Ms. 3 (Aug. 1974): 96; Wilks, “Ecology and Plastic People,”4; Steve Gaskin, 60s Communes Project Interview, Oct. 19, 1995.

17. Houriet, Getting Back Together, 140–41, 147, 164–65, 170–71; Kopecky, New Buf-falo; Philip Deloria, “Counterculture Indians and the New Age,” in Imagine Nation,160–64. Shepard Krech examines the conception of the “Ecological Indian.” See, Krech,The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1999).Philip Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 154–59.

18. Houriet, Getting Back Together, 138, 140, 187–93, 194; Martha Hanna Towle, AHistory of Franklin: Past and Present, Fact or Fancy, Legend or Folksay, 1789–1989(Franklin, Vt.: Franklin Historical Society, 1989) quoted in Miller, 60s Communes, 214–16;Peter Coyote, Sleeping Where I Fall (Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 1998), 253–62.

19. Unohoo et al., The Morningstar Scrapbook, 159.20. For more on farm equipment, see, Fairfield, Communes USA, 193; “The Farm

Report,” Lifestyle 1 (Oct. 1972): 24. Many communes also turned to alternative technolo-gies such as solar heating and low-impact pesticides. For more on those uses, see, AndrewKirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism


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(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2007); “‘Machines of Loving Grace’: AlternativeTechnology, Environment, and the Counterculture,” in Imagine Nation, 353–78.

21. Rosabeth Moss Kantor, “Communes for All Reasons,” Ms. 3 (Aug. 1974): 63–64;“A Brand New Earth,” Newsweek 75 (June 1970): 60; Sue M. Halpern, “Private Jets andRoad Kills,” Nation 231 (Dec. 1980): 713; John Shuttleworth, “A Report To Mother’sReaders,” Mother Earth News 60 (Nov.–Dec. 1979): 45; Miller, 60s Communes, xvii. Ro-man Sender and Alicia Bay Laurel also produced back-to-the-land almanacs. See, RomanSender and Alicia Bay Laurel, Being of the Sun (New York: Harper and Row, 1973) andLaurel, Living on Earth: Celebrations, Storm Warnings, Formulas, Recipes, Rumors, &Country Dances Harvested (New York: Vantage Books, 1971).

22. Hedgepeth, “Maybe It’ll Be Different Here,” 66; White, “Are You an Environ-mentalist or Do You Work For a Living?” 171–72, 178; Arthur Kopecky, interview byauthor, July 20, 2006.

23. Houriet, Getting Back Together, 140–41, 147, 164–65, 170–71; Kopecky, New Buf-falo, 141. The degree to which back-to-the-landers held fast to organic and natural farmingpractices is not documented in great detail. However, it is clear that some turned tochemical fertilizers when needed. See, Kathleen Kinkade, A Walden Two Experiment: TheFirst Five Years of Twin Oaks Community (New York: William Morrow and Company,Inc., 1973), 61; “The Meadowcreek Project,” Mother Earth News 74 (Mar.–Apr. 1982): 79;“The Farm Report,” Lifestyle (Oct. 1972): 24; Miller, 60s Communes, 209; Price, “LibreRising,” 96. Similar experiences occurred at Tolstoy Farm in Washington. See, also, Hou-riet, Getting Back Together, 36, 72–74; Merilee Dannemann, “New Buffalo, 10 Years Old,Still Follows Vision,” Taos News, July 7, 1977, sec. B, 5; Jeane Westin, “Barn-Building,Fence-Mending, Goat-Raising, Well-Digging Women,” Ms. 3 (Aug. 1974): 22.

24. Dennis Stock’s images in Hedgepeth, The Alternative, offer the most salient ex-amples of those agricultural practices. See, Stock and Hedgepeth, The Alternative, 35,38–39, 42–45, 56, 57, 58–59; Miller, 60s Communes, 197–98; Fairfield, Communes USA,364.

25. Stock and Hedgepeth, The Alternative, 75; Hedgepeth, “Maybe It’ll Be DifferentHere,” 66; Unohoo et al., The Morningstar Scrapbook, 159; Houriet, Getting Back To-gether, 122; Fairfield, Communes USA, 169.

26. Hanna interview; Agnew interview; Davidson, “Open Land,” 100.27. Kantor, “Communes for All Reasons,” 64; Coyote, Sleeping Where I Fall, 287–89.28. Houriet, Getting Back Together, 141.29. Coyote, Sleeping Where I Fall, 288–89.30. Roberta Price, Huerfano: A Memoir of Life in the Counterculture (Amherst: Uni-

versity of Massachusetts, 2004), 166; Westin, “Barn-Building, Fence-Mending, Goat-Raising, Well-Digging Women,” 22. Timothy Miller comments on the tension surroundinggendered work and the role of women in back-to-the-land communities, see, Miller, 60sCommunes, 212–14.

31. Catherine Kleiner, “Nature’s Lovers: The Erotics of Lesbian Land Communities inOregon, 1974–1984,” in Seeing Nature Through Gender, ed. Virginia Scharff (Lawrence:University Press of Kansas, 2003), 252–55.

32. Klein interview; Stephen Diamond, What The Trees Said: Life on a New Age Farm(New York: Delta Books, 1971), 66, quoted in Agnew, Back From the Land, 40; Agnewinterview.


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33. “Rainbow Farm,” Ramparts (Dec. 1971): 60.

34. Coyote, Sleeping Where I Fall, 299; Dannemann, “New Buffalo, 10 Years Old,” 5.

35. Diamond, What the Trees Said, 117; Houriet, Getting Back Together, 166.

36. “Organic Gardening,” Leaves of Twin Oaks (Feb. 1972): 4; Twin Oaks eventuallyhad success with many crops including beans and corn. See, Kinkade, A Walden TwoExperiment, 65–67; Miller, 60s Communes, 200; Houriet, Getting Back Together, 144–45,285.

37. Miller, 60s Communes, 200; Steve Gaskin, Hey Beatnik! This is the Farm Book(Summertown, Tenn.: Book Publishing Co., 1974); Fairfield, Communes USA, 246; Ko-pecky, New Buffalo, 107; “Coming to Nuevo Mexico? Read this First,” AlbuquerqueAstral Projection, June 18, 1970, 13.

38. Kirk, Counterculture Green, 54–55; Richard Todd, “‘Walden Two’: Three? MaybeMore?” New York Times Magazine 119 (Mar. 17, 1970): 229; “Membership Turnover,”Leaves of Twin Oaks (Feb. 1972): 5; “Outside Jobs,” Leaves of Twin Oaks (Oct. 1970): 4;Rick Klein, 60s Communes Project Interview, Aug. 6, 1996; Houriet, Getting Back To-gether, 148–49, 159–61; “Heck of a Mecca,” Albuquerque Astral Projection, Aug.–Sept.1969, 35.

39. Sandra Boodman, “Commune Inc.: Twin Oaks Owes Success to Capitalism, Com-promise,” Washington Post, May 3, 1981, A1, A14; Kate Wenner, “How They Keep ThemDown on the Farm,” New York Times, May 8, 1977, sec. 6, 74, 80, 81.

40. Belasco, Appetite for Change, 1–10, 29–42, 68–108; Feinstein quoted in Fairfield,Communes USA, 193.

41. “Coast Religious Sect’s Life is Tested by Prosperity,” 51; Dannemann, “New Buf-falo, 10 Years Old,” 5; John Crewdson, “Those Who Stayed Help Taos Mellow,” NewYork Times, Aug. 24, 1977, sec. C, 7. Other communes also sought to make money fromtheir ventures. Twin Oaks experimented with tobacco as a cash crop. See, Kinkade, AWalden Two Experiment, 59–61; “The Tobacco Crop,” Leaves of Twin Oaks (Sept. 1967):23; “The Farm,” Leaves of Twin Oaks (Oct. 1970): 88; “The Orchard,” Leaves of TwinOaks (Apr. 1971): 97; “Watermelons,” Leaves of Twin Oaks (Sept. 1967): 24; “Cattle andPigs,” Leaves of Twin Oaks (Sept. 1967): 24; “Organic Gardening,” Leaves of Twin Oaks(Feb. 1972): 4.

42. Hanna interview.

43. Little historical research has been done on the rise of cooperative organic andnatural foods stores. The best work is by Warren Belasco, see, Appetite for Change, 87–88,90, 161. The following primary sources also offer an introduction. Florence Fabricant,“Health-Food Stores Broaden Appeal,” New York Times, Jan. 18, 1981, sec. 21, 8; “Wherethe Hip Meet to Trip,” Newsweek 96 (July 1980): 69–70; Paul LaChance, “Do You Belongin a Health Food Store,” Health 14 (Aug. 1982): 27–28, 42; Debbie Prager, “Free-SpiritedShopping—Getting It Together at the Co-op,” Washington Post, Mar. 20, 1980, sec. E, 1;“The Kosher of the Counterculture,” Time 96 (Nov. 16, 1970): 59–60; “Sweet Smell ofSuccess,” Time 97 (Jan. 18, 1971): 66; Del Marth, “A Business That Was Natural,” NationsBusiness 70 (Mar. 1982): 96; “What’s Brewing at Celestial,” Business Week 2679 (Mar. 16,1981): 138; “The Great Food-Buying Conspiracy,” Mother Earth News 4 (July 1970):16–19. For a general examination of “hip consumerism,” see, Frank Thomas, The Con-quest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism (Chi-


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cago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); Marylin Bender, “How to Be Profitably Hip,”New York Times, Feb. 14, 1971, sec. F, 3.

44. “Organic Shops Move Into Big Stores,” Business Week 2184 (July 10, 1971): 76–77;Jim Frost, “Organic Goes Big Time at Whole Foods,” Chicago Sun-Times, Apr. 22, 1993,sec. Food, 1; Joe Klein, “A Social History of Granola,” Rolling Stone 259 (Feb. 23, 1978):41, 44.

45. Wendy Zellner, “Whole Foods Market: Moving Tofu Mainstream,” Business Week3267 (May 25, 1992): 94; “Acquisition Merges Largest Natural-Foods Retailers,” NewYork Times, May 13, 1993, sec. D, 4.


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be receptive to the good earth

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