Back to Back-to-the-Land?
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A cousin of mine, who happens to be an economist, is concerned about
his daughter's job prospects. She's 24, fresh out of graduate school,
smart as a whip, and can't find a job in her field. She hopes to teach
English, but the best gig she's found so far is as a camp counselor, and
that will soon end. She's looking into working abroad. That made me
wonder: Would such capable young people, if shut out of the job market
for long enough, take matters into their own hands and build their own
alternative economies, as some of their parents did in the
back-to-the-land movement of the 1960s and 1970s?
As it happens, I
had lunch this afternoon with a builder friend who is a veteran of that
movement. He pointed out that the original back-to-the-landers were
reacting against consumerism and alienation from nature; in a time of
perceived excess, they opted for a kind of voluntary poverty. Could a
poverty of options in the mainstream economy turn another generation
back to the land? My friend and I agreed that, if we were young again
and faced with unemployment or a lousy job, an alternative path of
subsistence farming, communal living, and cottage industry might look
pretty attractive.
In know, I know: The communes imploded,
everyone involved ended up moving back to town and getting jobs, and the
whole thing became a TV sit-com joke. But I also know a lot of builders
and architects whose career choices and professional sensibilities were
profoundly influenced by their back-to-the-land experience. What we now
call green building was incubated out there on the hippie fringe. If we
are stuck for a long time in a slow-growing economy, I'll be surprised
if we don't see smart, capable, underemployed young people exploring
such alternative arrangements of living and working. Given the
contributions of former back-the-landers, that might be one of the best
possible responses to a bad situation. --B.D.S.
