title: "Be receptive to the good earth": health, nature, and labor in countercultural back-to-the-land settlements.
abstract: 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.
authors.forename: Ryan H
authors.initials: RH
authors.lastname: Edgington
mesh_terms: D000383:Agriculture / Q000191:economics / Q000193:education / Q000266:history / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence; D019058:Community Networks / Q000191:economics / Q000266:history / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence; D003256:Community Participation / Q000191:economics / Q000266:history / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence / Q000523:psychology; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources / Q000191:economics / Q000266:history / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence; D003255:Consumer Organizations / Q000191:economics / Q000266:history / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D018556:Crops, Agricultural / Q000191:economics / Q000266:history / Q000502:physiology; D004651:Employment / Q000191:economics / Q000266:history / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence / Q000523:psychology; D004777:Environment; D005502:Food / Q000191:economics / Q000266:history; D005523:Food Supply / Q000191:economics / Q000266:history / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence; D049673:History, 20th Century; D010067:Ownership / Q000191:economics / Q000266:history / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence; D011057:Politics; D011203:Poverty / Q000191:economics / Q000208:ethnology / Q000266:history / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence / Q000523:psychology; D011634:Public Health / Q000191:economics / Q000193:education / Q000266:history / Q000331:legislation & jurisprudence; D011639:Public Opinion; D012959:Socioeconomic Factors; D014481:United States / Q000208:ethnology; D014947:Wounds and Injuries / Q000191:economics / Q000208:ethnology / Q000266:history / Q000523:psychology