Be Receptive to the Good Earth
Health, Nature, and Labor in Countercultural Back-to-the-Land Settlements
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8078224 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ryan Edgington (corresponding author), Ryan H Edgington |
| Year | 2008 |
| Volume | 82 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 279-308 |
| Publication date | 2008-07-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Agricultural History (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-1482 • E-ISSN: 1533-8290 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.3098/ah.2008.82.3.279 |
| PMID | 19260160 |
| OpenAlex | W2076095065 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 8 |
| References cited | 1 |
Modern environmental activists unified behind calls for a change in how humans understood their relationships with nature. Yet they approached their concerns through a variety of historical lenses. Countering arguments that suggest environmentalism had its deepest roots in outdoor leisure, the countercultural back-to-the-land movement turned to a markedly American practice of pastoral mythmaking that held rural life and labor as counter to the urban-industrial condition. Counterculturalists relied specifically on notions of simple work in rural collective endeavors as the means to producing a healthy body and environment. Yet the individuals who went back-to-the-land often failed to remedy conflicts that arose as they attempted to abandon American consumer practices and take up a "primitive" and down-to-early pastoral existence. Contact with rural nature time and again translated to physical maladies, impoverishment, and community clashes in many rural countercultural communes. As the back-to-the-land encounter faded, the greater movement's ethos did not disappear. Counterculturalists used the consumption of nature through rural labor as a fundamental idea in a growing cooperative food movement. The back-to-the-land belief in the connection between healthy bodies, environments, and a collective identity helped to expand a new form of consumer environmentalism
Collective identity · Consumption (sociology · Environmental ethics · Environmentalism · Ethos · Human settlement · Industrialisation · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · American Environmental and Regional History · Geographies of human-animal interactions · History · Law
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| Citations per year | 0.47 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2009 - 2023 (15) |
| Highly cited | No |