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From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism by Fred Turner

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Bill Atkinson, bioinformatics, Biosphere 2, book value, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Californian Ideology, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, distributed generation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Dynabook, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Gilder, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, new economy, Norbert Wiener, peer-to-peer, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Richard Stallman, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, the strength of weak ties, theory of mind, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Yom Kippur War

Drawing on the systems rhetoric of cybernetics and on models of entrepreneurship borrowed from both the research and the countercultural worlds, Brand established a series of meetings, publications, and digital networks within which members of multiple communities could meet and collaborate and imagine themselves as members of a single community. These forums in turn generated new social networks, new cultural categories, and new turns of phrase. In 1968 Brand founded the Whole Earth Catalog in order to help those heading back to the land find the tools they would need to build their new communities. These items included the fringed deerskin jackets and geodesic domes favored by the communards, but they also included the cybernetic musings of Norbert Wiener and the latest calculators from Hewlett-Packard. In later editions, alongside discussions of such supplies, Brand published letters from high-technology researchers next to firsthand reports from rural hippies.

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of a cybernetic ecology where we are free of our labors and joined back to nature, returned to our mammal brothers and sisters, and all watched over by machines of loving grace. As Brautigan’s poem suggests, by the end of the 1960s, some elements of the counterculture, and particularly that segment of it that headed back to the land, had begun to explicitly embrace the systems visions circulating in the research world of the cold war. But how did those two worlds come together? How did a social movement devoted to critiquing the technological bureaucracy of the cold war come to celebrate the socio-technical visions that animated that bureaucracy?

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A comprehensive survey of the Whole Earth Catalog’s contents and contributors from its founding in 1968 through 1971 reveals that it featured contributions from four somewhat overlapping social groups: the world of university-, government-, and industry-based science and technology; the New York and San Francisco art scenes; the Bay area psychedelic community; and the communes that sprang up across America in the late 1960s. When these groups met in its pages, the Catalog became the single most visible publication in which the technological and intellectual output of industry and high science met the Eastern religion, acid mysticism, and communal social theory of the back-to-the-land movement. It also became the home and emblem of a new, geographically distributed community. As they flipped through and wrote in to its several editions, contributors and readers peered across the social and intellectual fences of their home communities. Like the collaborative researchers of World War II, they became interdisciplinarians, cobbling together new understandings of the ways in which information and technology might reshape social life.

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next by Andrew McAfee

back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, DeepMind, degrowth, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, humanitarian revolution, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Landlord’s Game, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, precision agriculture, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Veblen good, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, World Values Survey

As former representative Paul Rogers recalled in 1990, “During the House floor debate on the amendments [to the Clean Air Act], one of my colleagues quoted a small-town mayor, who [in expressing the previous conventional wisdom that environmental protection and economic growth were not compatible] is reported to have said, ‘If you want this town to grow, it has got to stink.’ ” The public quickly grew intolerant of foul places, though, and in 1980 Congress created a “superfund” to clean up America’s most polluted sites. Back to the Land The last of the four main strategies for avoiding environmental and societal devastation—the B in CRIB—was for individuals, families, and communities to turn away from the Industrial Era, and to go back to the land. Advocates of this approach appeared to be taking Jevons’s arguments seriously: if technological progress leads to greater overall resource use, then ignoring this progress and instead using traditional technologies and methods could mean using fewer resources and treading more lightly on the planet. Most members of the back-to-the-land movement, which gained momentum in the 1960s and ’70s, were comparatively affluent and well educated.

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But recycling, whatever its merits, is not part of the dematerialization story. It’s a different story. Back to the Land Is Bad for the Land The back-to-the-land movement is a fascinating chapter in the history of American environmentalism, but a largely insignificant one. There were simply never enough homesteaders and others who turned away from modern, technologically sophisticated life to make much of a difference. Which is a good thing for the environment. As Jeffrey Jacob documents in his book New Pioneers, the back-to-the-land movement in the United States began in the mid-1960s and continued into the next decade.

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First, though, I want to give a short explanation of what the causes are not. In particular, I want to show that the CRIB strategies born around Earth Day and promoted since then for reducing our planetary footprint—consume less, recycle, impose limits, and go back to the land—have not been important contributors to the dematerialization we’ve seen. Since Earth Day, we have demonstrably not consumed much less or gone back to the land in large numbers. We have recycled a lot, but this fact is irrelevant because recycling is a separate phenomenon from dematerialization. Much more relevant than recycling are the limits we’ve imposed in a couple of areas.

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

(Alpert taught at Stanford and lived for a while in the Los Altos Hills south of the university, and Brand would occasionally pitch his tepee and live in his backyard.) Brand would be with them when they first discovered the property in New Mexico. He erected his tepee on the site where the commune was being built and lived off the land for several weeks. It was the first structure on what would become one of the defining communes of the back-to-the-land movement. Alpert, the LSD guru who became Ram Dass that year, would write his bestselling Be Here Now in a collaboration with Durkee, who designed the original graphics and typography for the book. Brand contributed photographs to the first edition. Ironically, though in a few years the Whole Earth Catalog would play a key role in the commune movement, Brand never embraced the idea of rural life.

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Revenue would be generated by taxing cultural events. Population would be controlled by “disadvantaging” families with more than two children. Innovation in community activities such as games would be expected, but how things might be set up to encourage entrepreneurship was a question left hanging in his journal. Perhaps better than going back to the land completely, he decided, would be a backcountry retreat to get away from the urban world occasionally. He proposed the idea of having a “back forty” to Lou Gottlieb, who had been the bassist for a folk-music group called the Limeliters. Gottlieb happened to have some land he had purchased in Sonoma County.

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Albrecht had a clear vision of taking computers—at the time viewed by most people as cold, controlling machines—and liberating them so they could be used by anyone. It was a pure sixties vision: he became the Pied Piper of personal computing, intent on bringing the power of computing to the people. That world was just over the horizon when Brand wandered into the institute in the summer of 1967. His friends were still heading back to the land, but Brand was one step ahead, looking toward a different future. Not long beforehand Raymond had met Michael Phillips, the San Francisco banker who had helped sell tickets at the Trips Festival. Phillips had organized an Educational Innovations Faire that had taken place on the San Francisco State campus as an early effort to explore the intersection of education and technology.

Meat: A Benign Extravagance by Simon Fairlie

agricultural Revolution, air gap, Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Community Supported Agriculture, deindustrialization, en.wikipedia.org, food miles, Food sovereignty, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Haber-Bosch Process, household responsibility system, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Just-in-time delivery, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, megacity, military-industrial complex, Northern Rock, Panamax, peak oil, precautionary principle, refrigerator car, rewilding, scientific mainstream, sexual politics, stem cell, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

In the UK, some of this sludge is landfilled or incinerated, but since dumping at sea has been banned, the majority is now put back to the land – though not where the nutrients are most needed (since its use is not permitted for organic agriculture), nor in the correct proportions. A further problem is that, en route, the sludge tends to lose nitrogen, which is volatile and leaks into the atmosphere (from what I can decipher less than 20 per cent of the N gets back to the land).82 However it not only retains most of the phosphorus we excrete, but also gains as much again from the addition of detergents and other industrial effluents.83 The result is that ‘the ratio of P to N in the sludge is significantly higher than that required by plants.

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A 1998 US study of Chinese agriculture noted: ‘With the dissolution of many collective farms and the institution of the Household Responsibility System in the early 1980s, backyard [pork] production increased to 92.9 per cent by 1982.’24 The advantage of decentralizing pig production is that it is easy to find waste food locally, easy to dispose of waste, and easy to ensure that nutrients cascade back to the land in the form of manure. A pig in every backyard is like a living dustbin in every backyard. Another US study of small-scale pig production in China observed: Hogs in China frequently consume large amounts of green roughage such as water plants, vegetable leaves, tubers, carrots, pumpkins, and various crop stalks … green feeds account for 18 per cent of total feed consumption in backyard hog operations.

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Tristram Stuart visited a firm in Japan which sterilizes food waste by pasteurizing it at 90 degrees for just five minutes, and then inoculates it with a Lactobacillus, that ferments the swill much as if it were yoghurt. The product keeps for two weeks, is cheaper than other feed and conforms with Japanese recycling laws.32 Local pigs are also necessary if we are to get the nutrients back to the land. Peter Brooks’ paper on ‘Rediscovering the Environmentally Friendly Pig’ remained unpublished because the pigs which he urged should be fed with recycled waste were to be kept on large scale, industrial farms, where manure accumulates in a heap that causes pollution and disposal problems.33 If we are to have industrial-scale food processing at all, then its waste nutrients need to be cascaded back to mixed farms and smallholdings across the expanse of our land, and the most viable way to do this is through pig-food.

The Locavore's Dilemma by Pierre Desrochers, Hiroko Shimizu

air freight, back-to-the-land, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, edge city, Edward Glaeser, food desert, food miles, Food sovereignty, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, intermodal, invention of agriculture, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, megacity, moral hazard, mortgage debt, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, profit motive, refrigerator car, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl

A brief discussion of some past American initiatives to promote increased community food reliance will now set the stage for a broader discussion of the inherent flaws of locavorism. As should be expected, the American pioneers of what could be termed the “romantic” wing of the local food movement originated from some of the wealthiest and most economically advanced regions of the country. After all, “moving back to the land” implies that you have other opportunities available, something that was obviously not the case for subsistence farmers. Best known are the New England Transcendentalists, who rejected science and objective experience as a basis for developing knowledge in favor of intuitive thought processes that transcended the physical and empirical world.

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Not surprisingly, if Brook Farm managed to last a few years, Fruitlands was abandoned after less than one.42 Similar sentiments would later be echoed by a wide range of Americans, from the so-called American Dutch Utopia painters at the turn of the 20th century who created visions of Holland that celebrated a preindustrial lifestyle,43 to the Southern Agrarian writers of the 1920s and 1930s who opposed the urbanization, industrialization, and internationalization of their country. And then there were the hippies of the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps as many as a million of them temporarily moved “back to the land” and attempted to live from it before most eventually abandoned rural bliss and returned to the trappings of civilization. There is also a long history of politically-driven attempts to promote local food production in urban settings in times of economic depression. Much like the rise of agrarian romanticism, it was a reaction—in this case to the fact that much old-fashioned urban food production had vanished.

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This particularly applies to the drying of vegetables and fruits which this year, in addition to canning, is being done by good housewives far beyond any anticipation.46 These results, he later added, were especially remarkable in light of the fact that this food was raised where none had “been produced in peacetime, with labor not engaged in agricultural work and not taken from any other industry, and in places where it made no demand upon the railroad already overwhelmed with transportation burdens.”47 Less well-remembered than wartime gardening policies are the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Administration’s promotion during the 1930s of “subsistence homesteads”—the best known being Arthurdale in West Virginia—into which impoverished laborers and coal miners could relocate and revert back to the land. From their beginnings, however, these experiments proved to be money-losing propositions that only lasted as long as their government funding.48 Sophisticated critiques of the modern food supply chain and proposals remarkably similar to those now put forward by locavores also have a long history.

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter

back-to-the-land, crack epidemic, David Attenborough, dumpster diving, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, haute cuisine, hobby farmer, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Mason jar, McMansion, New Urbanism, Port of Oakland, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rewilding, Silicon Valley, urban decay, urban renewal, Whole Earth Catalog

His legs peeked out from underneath our dilapidated Mercedes as he rolled around amid the street’s numerous Swisher Sweet cigar butts. I had warned him about my meat-bird purchase, and he had been excited about the prospect of homegrown meat, but now that he saw the baby birds—fragile, tiny—he seemed a bit skeptical. Tommy grew to be an enormous size, my mom said, and as back-to-the-land hippies, she and my dad had been very pleased. They didn’t encounter any predator problems that year, and butchering him was a cinch. But disaster did hit: the smokehouse burned to the ground while they were smoking the turkey. “Oh, no,” I groaned. “Life was like that,” she said glumly. I felt sorry for her.

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My mom’s friend Lowell had been a beekeeper in Idaho. I distinctly remember a trip to his farm, a land of rolling gold hills dotted with dark pine trees and white painted boxes, which my mom told me were bee houses. Lowell had wild blond hair and an unruly beard, and he had studied agriculture at Cornell before going back to the land, so he had a leg up over most of the other hapless hippies struggling to live off the land. His bees’ honey came suspended in comb. The sweet golden liquid was the best thing I ever tasted. As a child, I never thought about the details. It was simple: Lowell made honey. And the idea of becoming a beekeeper myself?

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There were four of them—two with white and brown spots, one pure white, and one solid brown—milling around the couch. “The woman I bought them from,” Nico said, offering me a homemade pickle from a murky mason jar, “lived entirely off a quarter of an acre of land.” “Really?” I said. “Eating rabbits?” I didn’t know much about rabbit tending, except that my back-to-the-land parents had once raised them for meat. Nico’s plan was grander than mere survival; she had high-end dining in her sights. Rabbit had recently been showing up on the menus of fancy restaurants, and Nico, always a dabbler looking for a new project, bought three young females and a solid brown buck named Simon with the idea that she would sell their offspring to these restaurants.

Rise of the Machines: A Cybernetic History by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, Alvin Toffler, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, connected car, domain-specific language, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, dumpster diving, Extropian, full employment, game design, global village, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, Howard Rheingold, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kubernetes, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snow Crash, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, The Hackers Conference, Timothy McVeigh, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y2K, Yom Kippur War, Zimmermann PGP

The dream about the day after the strike was harsh: “There was chaos, and then I looked around and I was the only person left alive in Rockford, Ill., a knee-high creature.”28 He wanted out, to escape the specter of nuclear annihilation. Brand is best known for founding the famous Whole Earth Catalog, a publication that itself became an emblem and icon of California’s late 1960s counterculture and back-to-the-land movement. One afternoon, probably in March 1966 in the hills of San Francisco, Brand dropped a bit of LSD and went up on a roof overlooking the city. It was a form of escape. He sat in a blanket, shivering in the cold spring air, overlooking the hills, lost in enhanced thought: And so I’m watching the buildings, looking out at San Francisco, thinking of Buckminster Fuller’s notion that people think of the earth’s resources as unlimited because they think of the earth as flat.

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He wanted it to be a communication device that connected the far-flung community he cared so much about. He wanted the catalog to be part of something that would create an equilibrium. The catalog was part of a whole system, a dynamic and self-regulating system. Brand would collect the crucial negative feedback in the supplement every few months and loop it back to the land by mail, to the readers-turned-cogs of this machine of loving grace. His publications, as he saw it, were part of an adaptive machine, not unlike the magnetic forces that governed the adaptive behavior of Ashby’s homeostat. The catalog itself, with its supplements and its community, was the learning mechanism.

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Yet so-called bulletin boards were still geeky hangouts for lone nerds and hacker types, not the online equivalent of a coffeehouse or a countercultural commune where it was fun to hang out and to meet new people. The time had come for something bigger, something more inclusive. But Brilliant also had a point. The Whole Earth approach had already proved itself in paper form, in slow motion, with people writing in by mail and e-mail, and then waiting for the supplement to ship back to the land. Brand agreed to the deal. Brilliant’s Ann Arbor company backed the agreement with what was then a significant investment: $150,000 for a VAX computer, a dishwasher-sized mainframe manufactured by DEC, a rack of half a dozen modems, and initially six telephone lines, plus another $100,000 for the primitive conferencing software, a Unix-based platform called PicoSpan.

What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry by John Markoff

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Duvall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Buckminster Fuller, California gold rush, card file, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, different worldview, digital divide, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Thorp, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, hypertext link, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Paul Terrell, popular electronics, punch-card reader, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Robert X Cringely, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Hackers Conference, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, union organizing, Vannevar Bush, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

Stewart Brand has argued in his essay “We Owe It All to the Hippies” that “the counterculture’s scorn for centralized authority provided the philosophical foundations of not only the leaderless Internet but also the entire personal-computer revolution.”1 Theodore Roszak has advanced a similar argument in From Satori to Silicon Valley (1986), a monograph that traces the rise of the personal-computer industry to countercultural values of the period. In fact, the New Left and the counterculture were then split between modern-day Luddites and technophiles. Some espoused an antitechnology, back-to-the-land philosophy. Others believed that better tools could lead to social progress. Brand’s toolcentric worldview, epitomized by one of the decade’s most popular and influential books, the Whole Earth Catalog (1968), made the case that technology could be harnessed for more democratic and decentralized uses.

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Tesler’s was the first general-purpose programming language that would do typesetting for any type of device. While PUB was finding a devoted band of users, Tesler decided he had had enough of AI research. The Whole Earth Catalog was having a growing influence on the nascent counterculture, and thousands of people in their twenties were leaving the cities and striking out to create a back-to-the-land communal existence. Tesler found a small group of like-minded friends, one of whom, Francine Slate, had been an employee of the Whole Earth Catalog, and together they decided to buy farmland. Slate and several other members of the group had been in a rather unusual upscale commune in Atherton, a town just north of Stanford that was generally known as an elite bedroom community.

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Brand ultimately began calling upon NASA to deliver a photograph of the entire surface of the planet. He created a button that read “Why Haven’t We Seen a Photograph of the Whole Earth Yet?” and immediately hitchhiked to the East Coast selling copies along the way. In 1966, caught up with Native American cultures, Fuller’s ideas, and the beginnings of an American back-to-the-land movement, Brand also came up with the notion of a mobile “truck store,” which he drove around northern California with the intent of distributing goods and information to a new wave of urban refugees who were ill equipped for their newly adopted life. The Whole Earth Truck Store came into existence in Menlo Park just a few doors away from Raymond and Albrecht’s Portola Institute, where Brand was an informal fellow-in-residence.

A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity and a Shared Earth by Chris Smaje

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, biodiversity loss, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, collaborative consumption, Corn Laws, COVID-19, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, energy transition, European colonialism, Extinction Rebellion, failed state, fake news, financial deregulation, financial independence, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, future of work, Gail Bradbrook, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, hive mind, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jevons paradox, land reform, mass immigration, megacity, middle-income trap, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, post-industrial society, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Rutger Bregman, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

Some examples relevant to the possible course of a small farm future are identified in Table 15.1. Table 15.1. Rural and urban utopias and dystopias RURAL URBAN Utopia Dystopia Utopia Dystopia Close-knit village community Caste society, serfdom ‘City air makes you free’ ‘City air makes you ill’ – the slum Back-to-the-land, rural communes Maoism ‘City upon a hill’ Garden city Eco-city The long footprint The idea of a stable, close-knit village community is a standard of ruralist thought, a ‘moral economy’ of mutually supportive face-to-face relationships in contrast to the impersonal and dysfunctional city.

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Even pro-urban analysts who’ve looked carefully at the evidence concede the depth and intractability of issues like urban poverty, underscoring the point that the violence, squalor, social breakdown and political inertia is hardly an attractive path towards human ‘development’.42 It seems even less likely to be so in the future. An alternative strand of rural utopianism proceeds from the view that a specifically modern rural life could in theory be optimal, without taking a position on the lot of traditional rural dwellers. There’ve been any number of back-to-the-land experimenters and rural intentional communities that have put this idea to the test in modern times – sometimes quite successfully, sometimes not. Often, they’ve been middle-class movements in which people have used accumulated fiscal and social capital to swim individually against the current of the mainstream economy.

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A difficulty with this tradition is that it tends to involve ripping up the existing script and starting over again with a whole new geopolitics, which is problematic when, as in New England and in most other places, there are already people in place with other ideas. More recent urban utopias like the Garden City movement found ingenious ways around this to blend the best of the urban and the rural. But, as with back-to-the-land rural utopianism, they’ve made limited headway in the face of a capitalist geopolitics unsympathetic to dispersed and self-reliant patterns of settlement. This geopolitics has been a more powerful driver of urbanism than any rural counter-utopia, given the need for a concentrated industrial or post-industrial labour force and the prevalence of rural workers without secure access to their own land.

Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia by Becky Hogge, Damien Morris, Christopher Scally

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, disintermediation, DIY culture, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, game design, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jacob Appelbaum, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, mass immigration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, peer-to-peer, Richard Stallman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Socratic dialogue, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Hackers Conference, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

At about the same time, James Lovelock was engaged in similar thinking, thinking that would eventually lead him to formulate his famous Gaia Theory. For Brand, and for the hippies who bought into his “Whole Earth” enthusiasm, the idea of the earth as a system was a powerful one. And it was also seductive: it certainly looked like a better system than the military industrial complex they had fled back to the land from. Later in 1968, back in Menlo Park, Brand began preparations for the first print run of the Whole Earth Catalog, a Sears catalogue for hippy communards that juxtaposed practical advice and tools for back-to-the-landers with intellectual stimulation in the form of reviews of books Brand and his fellow editors thought should be informing the ideals of their peers.

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You go to a place like Grindstone where you’re off the grid and you’re with your comrades and your extended political family but you’re also connected and you’ve got your tools with you and you can write.’ To see this proper tool there really kind of blew my mind and I thought, ‘Will I someday be able to sit in the hammock at Moonwatcher’s Point with a laptop on my lap?’ This just blew my mind. I just remember thinking that that would be Utopia, right? To have that, back to the land and high tech kind of in one place.” I’m about to segue into a question about Stewart Brand when Cory beats me to it, reaching up to the shelf behind him. “So I wanted to show you this before we go further. This is my collection of Whole Earth Catalogs. I stole them from the library at Grindstone.

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And when information communications technology enables motivated individuals to come together across geographic boundaries, to collaborate in building products like Linux and Wikipedia, products that each trump any equivalent the commercial world has to offer, then it would seem sensible to hope that the hegemony of the corporation, the growing dominance of an organisational model that has developed for the large part outside of our ideals of democracy and human rights, might be sent into remission. As Dr Emmett Brown once said to Marty McFly “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads”. It would seem sensible to hope all of these things. But have any of them actually happened? * * * On 21 January, around about the time I was sitting on Cory Doctorow’s sofa talking back-to-the-land tech-Utopianism, Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, delivered a lecture entitled Remarks on Internet Freedom at Washington DC’s interactive Newseum complex. Echoing Brand, Clinton started off her speech with the observation that “information has never been so free”. She went on to name and shame certain regimes for their choice to censor the internet – China, Tunisia, Uzbekistan, Vietnam – and to praise the activities of the citizens of Iran, whose protests after the disputed re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the previous year had gained a global audience via social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community by Karen T. Litfin

active transport: walking or cycling, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, collaborative consumption, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, congestion pricing, corporate social responsibility, degrowth, glass ceiling, global village, hydraulic fracturing, intentional community, megacity, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planetary scale, publish or perish, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the built environment, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, urban planning, Zipcar

Individually, these ecovillages trace their roots to diverse lineages:1 • the ideals of self-sufficiency and spiritual inquiry that have historically characterized monasteries and ashrams and, more recently, Gandhian movements; • the social movements of the 1960s and 1970s, including the environmental, peace, feminist, and alternative education movements; • in affluent countries, the “back-to-the-land” movement and, beginning in the 1990s, the co-housing movement; • in developing countries, the participatory development and appropriate technology movements. Unlike many alternative communities, ecovillages are not isolated enclaves; rather, they have a strong educational mission. Since 1995 with the formation of the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), they have joined forces in order to share and disseminate sustainable living practices among themselves and with the larger world.

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What most interested me, however, was this commune’s thirty-year commitment to income sharing. If sharing is the essence of ecovillage life, then surely full-on financial sharing deserves some attention – especially when the community is as prosperous as Svanholm. While the vast majority of the back-to-the-land communes of the 1960s and 1970s failed, this one has flourished. The key to Svanholm’s economic success seems twofold: discernment and trust. Svanholm’s lengthy membership process ensures that new members are able to support themselves, both economically and emotionally. The community rarely admits recent divorcees or single-parent families, and the norm of financial transparency is so strong that the community’s bookkeeper didn’t hesitate to show me a list with everyone’s income.

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Bø met me for lunch in the sunny south-facing dining room, still dressed in his bright orange coveralls. At 63, Bø’s weathered skin and wiry body gave the impression of one who has worked outside most of his life. As the only community member with a farming certificate, Bø turned out to be a key person at Svanholm. In the early days, most back-to-the-land communities wanted to withdraw from society, but Bø hoped to change the larger society from the bottom up. In order to educate aspiring organic farmers, he started the Farm Study Group. That group grew into a union of growers, processors, stores, and consumers who, together, created Danish standards for organic food – which were eventually used to help set European Union standards.

Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Searching for an American Utopia by Adrian Shirk

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, buy and hold, carbon footprint, company town, COVID-19, dark matter, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Haight Ashbury, index card, intentional community, Joan Didion, late capitalism, mass incarceration, McMansion, means of production, medical malpractice, neurotypical, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, transatlantic slave trade, traumatic brain injury, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

We need our cities. We can barely afford to stay in our cities. And yet, perhaps obviously, the pastoral utopian escape from cities—whether in the nineteenth-century wilds of mystical socialisms or the twentieth-century hippie commune—did not yield final answers, either. The rural fantasy of escaping back-to-the-land has been so overwhelmingly white and often available only to those who had the privilege to leave town, and anyway it aids in the further disinvestment of our urban centers, the metric of our spiritual health. So, we need new ways of having utopian dreams, and the Bronx and New Day Church appeared to me in my late twenties as places that were articulating answers simply by the strategies of their continued existence.

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We run barefoot through the dirt from attraction to attraction all day, eventually ending up in a dance party in a field under a rainbow parachute, where we find one of Maggie’s comrades from Lost Valley, who winces at us as we shout about all the different things we’ve seen that day. “Hm, well, I’ve just been letting the universe guide me,” she says, as she whirls back into the crowd of bodies. THE BIG MUDDY RANCH I grew up taking for granted that utopian visions were possible. Most of my peers and I descended, in one way or another, from the mid-century back-to-the-land, environmental conservation, and New Age movements that found their spiritual home in the Pacific Northwest and parts of California throughout the twentieth century. In elementary school, our annual fieldtrip was to the salmon ladder at the nearby Bonneville Dam, where we learned about ecological and indigenous social destruction wrought by the infrastructure, and the measures that state was taking to reverse the damage.

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The land parcels that the queer communes currently exist on were secured in the early seventies by a community of straight radicals from North Carolina who cooperatively bought the land from a retired couple. This group of hetero predecessors, Halberstadt says, was “committed to ending the war in Vietnam and to improving race relations; the group put out an underground newspaper and had spent time in Cuba. In Tennessee, they found pockets of sympathetic neighbors, back-to-the-land types who had come to the area after seeing an ad in a magazine called Mother Earth News.” That group started to fray and disband over the next few years, seeking different kinds of lives than the ones they thought they wanted at the peak of their radicalization. One remaining member, committed to keeping the property under communal ownership, eventually connected up with the Radical Faerie community by chance on a trip to New Orleans.

Future Tense: Jews, Judaism, and Israel in the Twenty-First Century by Jonathan Sacks

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Atahualpa, back-to-the-land, cognitive dissonance, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, long peace, Socratic dialogue, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, zero-sum game

Then God said, ‘Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, “Our bones are dried up, our hope is lost [Avdah tikvatenu].” Therefore prophesy and say to them: “This is what the Lord says: My people, I am going to open your graves and bring you up from them; I will bring you back to the land of Israel”’ (Ezek. 37:1–14). It was this passage that Naftali Herz Imber was alluding to in 1877 when he wrote, in the song that became Israel’s national anthem, Hatikva, the phrase od lo avdah tikvatenu, ‘our hope is not yet lost’. Little could he have known that seventy years later, one-third of the Jewish people would have become, in Auschwitz and Treblinka, a valley of dry bones.

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Who could have been blamed for saying, ‘Our bones are dried up, our hope is lost’? Yet a mere three years after standing face-to-face with the angel of death, the Jewish people, by proclaiming the state of Israel, made a momentous affirmation of life, as if it had heard across the centuries the echo of God’s words to Ezekiel: ‘I will bring you back to the land of Israel.’ And a day will come when the story of Israel in modern times will speak not just to Jews but to all who believe in the power of the human spirit as it reaches out to God, as an ever-lasting symbol of the victory of life over death, hope over despair. Israel has taken a barren land and made it bloom again.

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The religious Zionists insisted that at this historic moment there must be a reference to God. How could Jews witness the realisation, after two thousand years, of the prophetic dream, without thanking God who had brought them back to Zion as he said he would? The secularists refused on principle. For two thousand years Jews had prayed to God to bring them back to the land, and nothing had happened. Only when Jews stopped believing in God and started acting for themselves did the Zionist dream become a reality. There was a stand-off, each side refusing to back down, until a diplomatically minded rabbi, Judah Leib Maimon, proposed the phrase ‘Rock of Israel’. To the religious, it meant God.

The Descent of Woman by Elaine Morgan

back-to-the-land, Carrington event, David Attenborough, Drosophila, Fellow of the Royal Society, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Haight Ashbury, invention of writing, Norman Mailer, sexual politics, stakhanovite

Otters seem to be twice as intelligent, three times as curious, four times as friendly, and ten times as lighthearted as their land-bound relatives the weasels and the ferrets and their kind. And dolphins, if you believe the people who know them best, are the gentlest, gayest, most attractive creatures on the face of the planet. Our tragedy is that after a few million years in the water we came trooping back to the land, unconsciously carrying an assorted package of marine adaptations along with us. Homo sapiens in the twentieth century is, as the old saying has it, neither fish, flesh, nor good red herring; and this lies at the root of more of his troubles than he has yet begun to realize. Four Orgasm At this point we are approaching one of the foggiest terrains in the whole field of behavioural evolution—the problem of female sexual response.

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One great environment change—from land to sea—had given a great shake-up to his whole biology, introducing new problems, new tensions, remoulding his body, reshaping his methods of apprehending his environment and his fellows, keeping his mind alive and plastic. A second such change in an evolutionarily short time—back to the land—repeated the shake-up before he had time to become overspecialized and settle into the kind of evolutionary rut that engulfs a species too perfectly adapted for a single niche. You may have observed the pronoun has changed to ‘he’. This is because we are approaching the period when male behaviour begins to change faster than female behaviour.

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The latter respond to an outside threat with slightly more co-ordinated forms of aggression. This may well have happened to the hominid. The fact remains that this behaviour does not go back in our species to time immemorial. If we accept the aquatic theory we must conclude—since the sea was at least as safe an environment as the jungle—that it evolved after we came back to the land. It is only two or three million years old, an adaptation superimposed at a late stage on the hedonic behaviour displayed by our ancestors and still displayed by our children. It proved for a while highly adaptive, in a primitive context when speed and muscle power (which are enhanced by it) mattered more than cool reason (which is hampered by it).

White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg

A. Roger Ekirch, back-to-the-land, British Empire, California gold rush, colonial rule, Copley Medal, desegregation, Donald Trump, feminist movement, full employment, gentleman farmer, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, mass immigration, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Like the refugees from Arkansas who poured into Missouri during the Civil War, the Migs formed a modern-day caravan of vagrants and nomads. John Steinbeck and John Ford made this cross-country trek famous, Steinbeck in his bestselling 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, and Ford in his dark and disquieting 1941 Hollywood film of the same name about the Joads’ pilgrimage.16 Another chaotic migration was the “Back to the Land” movement that led to numerous rural communes. Some of these had outspoken leaders. Ralph Borsodi, who set up a subsistence homestead on the outskirts of New York City, helped to organize a cooperative village near Dayton, Ohio. Similar ventures appeared in other states. The southern journalist Charles Morrow Wilson described these folks as “American peasants,” but they are perhaps better described as the heirs of James Oglethorpe’s eighteenth-century Georgia colonists.

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The Arkies were unlike the Tulsans, many of whom were educated, willing to work collectively, and devised a plan for the future. They might be slumming as white trash and living in shanties, but when the economy improved, the city folk would return to their former lives. For them the land was a “refuge,” not a permanent source of class identity.18 The “Back to the Land” movement had a marked influence on New Deal policy. So it made sense when Milburn Lincoln Wilson, a trained social scientist and expert in agriculture, became the first director of the Subsistence Homesteads Division in 1933. The government’s goal was to give tenants and sharecroppers the resources and skills to rise up the agricultural ladder and help city folk without jobs.

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And on the importance of erosion to Roy Stryker’s photographic agenda, see Stuart Kidd, “Art, Politics and Erosion: Farm Security Administration Photographs of the Southern Land,” Revue française d’études américaines, rev. ed. (1986): 67–68; Arthur Rothstein, “Melting Snow, Utopia, Ohio,” February 1940, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC; and Peeler, Hope Among Us Yet, 148. 15. On waste, see Herbert J. Spinden, “Waters Flow, Winds Blow, Civilizations Die,” North American Review (Autumn 1937): 53–70; Russell Lord, “Behold Our Land,” North American Review (Autumn 1938): 118–32; on the chaotic groundswell, also see Russell Lord, “Back to the Land?,” Forum (February 1933): 97–103, esp. 99, 102. Spinden was an archeologist who specialized in Mayan art and was curator of American Indian art and culture at the Brooklyn Museum from 1929 to 1951. See Regna Darnell and Frederic W. Gleach, eds., Celebrating a Century of the American Anthropological Association: Presidential Portraits (New York, 2002), 73–76.

Lonely Planet Pocket San Francisco by Lonely Planet, Alison Bing

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Day of the Dead, edge city, G4S, game design, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Larry Ellison, machine readable, Mason jar, messenger bag, off-the-grid, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, stealth mode startup, Stewart Brand, transcontinental railway, Zipcar

Radicals worldwide called for revolution, and Oakland’s Black Panther Party for Self-Defense took up arms. Meanwhile, recreational drug-taking was turning into a thankless career for many and a distinct itch in the nether regions made the rounds. By the time Owsley Stanley was released from a three-year jail term in 1970, the party seemed to be over – but many idealists headed ‘back to the land’ to found California's organic farm movement. 4 Buena Vista Park Park Offline map Google map True to its name, this park – founded in 1867 – offers sweeping views of the city and the Golden Gate Bridge framed by century-old cypresses as a reward for hiking all the way up the steep hill.

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At LitQuake (www.litquake.org) in September you can score signed books and grab drinks with authors afterwards. October’s Alternative Press Expo (www.comic-con.org/ape) has comics, drawings, ’zines and crafts, plus workshops with comics artists. SF Lifestyle Gravel & Gold (Click here ) Head back to the land in style, with original hippie homesteader pottery, smock dresses and how-to manuals. Park Life (Click here ) Instant street smarts, from local artist–designed tees to original works by SF’s graffiti-art greats. Local Maker Heath Ceramics (Click here ) Pottery purveyor to star chefs since 1948.

In defense of food: an eater's manifesto by Michael Pollan

back-to-the-land, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, Gary Taubes, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, placebo effect, Upton Sinclair

Among other things, this book is an eater’s manifesto, an invitation to join the movement that is renovating our food system in the name of health—health in the very broadest sense of that word. I doubt the last third of this book could have been written forty years ago, if only because there would have been no way to eat the way I propose without going back to the land and growing all your own food. It would have been the manifesto of a crackpot. There was really only one kind of food on the national menu, and that was whatever industry and nutritionism happened to be serving. Not anymore. Eaters have real choices now, and those choices have real consequences, for our health and the health of the land and the health of our food culture—all of which, as we will see, are inextricably linked.

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If my explorations of the food chain have taught me anything, it’s that it is a food chain, and all the links in it are in fact linked: the health of the soil to the health of the plants and animals we eat to the health of the food culture in which we eat them to the health of the eater, in body as well as mind. So you will find rules here concerning not only what to eat but also how to eat it as well as how that food is produced. Food consists not just in piles of chemicals; it also comprises a set of social and ecological relationships, reaching back to the land and outward to other people. Some of these rules may strike you as having nothing whatever to do with health; in fact they do. Many of the policies will also strike you as involving more work—and in fact they do. If there is one important sense in which we do need to heed Burkitt’s call to “go backwards” or follow the Aborigines back into the bush, it is this one: In order to eat well we need to invest more time, effort, and resources in providing for our sustenance, to dust off a word, than most of us do today.

Sweetness and Light: The Mysterious History of the Honeybee by Hattie Ellis

back-to-the-land, Gregor Mendel, haute couture, New Urbanism, the scientific method, urban decay

To assist in their honey-hunting, people began to make bee boxes, with one compartment filled with comb to attract the bee, a little door to trap it, and another to release it, in order to see in which direction it flew. SUCH METHODS OF honey-hunting were later added to by Euell Gibbons, the wild food guru whose book Stalking the Wild Asparagus (1962) inspired twentieth-century Americans to go back to the land. His readers may have been motivated by an earthy form of spirituality, but Gibbons himself developed his wild-food skills for a more practical reason: to stay alive. Euell Gibbons learned about edible wild plants as a boy growing up in the Red River Valley. When his family moved to New Mexico in the impoverished 1930s, and his father was looking for work with little luck, the family pantry at one point contained only a few pinto beans and a solitary egg.

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As an expert, he is often asked to collect swarms; some people now think he should pay for “their” bees; in fact, there tends to be a charge for their removal. Times change. Stephen has seen fluctuations of interest in beekeeping over the years. There are periods—such as the present—when people take it up, like allotment gardening, to get back to the land. But there were now far fewer beekeepers in Lewes than there once were; in fact, since Patricia left to live in France, I have not found another source of town honey. Stephen’s honey, from the surrounding countryside, is sold by my local greengrocer as well as at Stephen’s own door. It is completely different from generic honeys, those blends of whatever is cheapest on the world market, which are flash-heated and micro-filtered to make them stay runny in the pot, unfortunately in the process removing some of the good taste and healthy properties.

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

It was hardly a perfect system: Some speakers droned on; others were shouted down. But it gave all of us a sense of the kinds of people that made up our community that we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere else. If the discussion was about encouraging more businesses along the coast, you’d hear from the wealthy summer vacationers who enjoyed their peace and quiet, the back-to-the-land hippies with antidevelopment sentiments, and the families who’d lived in rural poverty for generations and saw the influx as a way up and out. The conversation went back and forth, sometimes closing toward consensus, sometimes fragmenting into debate, but usually resulting in a decision about what to do next.

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Type in a few lines, or a few thousand, strike a key, and something seems to come to life on your screen—a new space unfolds, a new engine roars. If you’re clever enough, you can make and manipulate anything you can imagine. “We are as Gods,” wrote futurist Stewart Brand on the cover of his Whole Earth Catalog in 1968, “and we might as well get good at it.” Brand’s catalog, which sprang out of the back-to-the-land movement, was a favorite among California’s emerging class of programmers and computer enthusiasts. In Brand’s view, tools and technologies turned people, normally at the mercy of their environments, into gods in control of them. And the computer was a tool that could become any tool at all.

San Francisco by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, G4S, game design, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Joan Didion, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mason jar, messenger bag, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, retail therapy, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, Zipcar

Sign-up is on a first-come, first-served basis. La Cocina (www.lacocinasf.org) This nonprofit offers cooking workshops ($65 to $95) and classes on starting a food business ($25), with proceeds providing training and professional kitchens for low-income culinary entrepreneurs. Farmers Markets NorCal idealists who headed back to the land in the 1970s started the nation’s organic farming movement. Today the local bounty can be sampled in the US city with the most farmers markets per capita. Ferry Building (www.cuesa.org; Tues, Thu, Sat) The Ferry Building showcases California-grown, organic produce, artisan meats and gourmet prepared foods at moderate-to-premium prices at markets held in the morning year-round.

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But it’s worth it: artists who debuted here have gone on to success at international art fairs and Whitney Biennials. Gravel & Gold Housewares, Gifts Offline map Google map (www.gravelandgold.com; 3266 21st St; noon-7pm Tue-Sat, noon-5pm Sun; & 24th St Mission) Get in touch with your roots and back to the land, without ever leaving sight of a Mission sidewalk. Gravel and Gold celebrates the 1960s to ’70s hippie homesteader movement with every fiber of its being and its hand-dyed smocked dresses – which you can try on among psychedelic murals behind a patched curtain, of course. The proud purveyor of rare vintage artifacts like silkscreened Osborne Woods peace postcards and limited-edition books on DIY Mendocino shingle-shack architecture, Gravel and Gold also answers to a higher California calling: getting a whole new generation excited about the organic connections between art and nature.

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Meanwhile, recreational drug-taking was turning into a thankless career for many, a distinct itch in the nether regions was making the rounds, and still more busloads of teenage runaways were arriving in the ill-equipped, wigged-out Haight. The Haight Ashbury Free Clinic ( Click here ) helped with the rehabbing and the itching, but the disillusionment seemed incurable when Hell’s Angels beat protestors in Berkeley and turned on the crowd at a free Rolling Stones concert at Altamont. Many idealists headed ‘back to the land’ in the bucolic North Bay, jumpstarting California’s organic farm movement. A dark streak emerged among those who remained, including young Charles Manson, the Symbionese Liberation Army (better known post-1974 as Patty Hearst’s kidnappers) and an evangelical egomaniac named Jim Jones, who would obligate 900 followers to commit mass suicide in 1978.

Among the Bohemians: Experiments in Living 1900-1939 by Virginia Nicholson

back-to-the-land, British Empire, Easter island, Etonian, financial independence, ghettoisation, lone genius, plutocrats

Vanessa’s use of the word ‘American’ is utterly damning, conjuring up everything that the Bohemian home – for all its shortcomings, its squalor, its severity, its insanitariness – was not. The garret dweller was hors de combat in the competition to appear costly, just as his country counterpart distanced himself from the property rat-race by choosing the rural equivalent, a cottage. * Poverty among artists was widespread. The back-to-the-land movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was particularly popular among painters and poets who were losing the battle for survival in the harsh metropolis. Such free spirits rediscovered the simple life, and even if they weren’t exactly building their dwelling places in the nooks of hills, there was a quite noticeable cult of the cottage around the turn of the century.

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Glorious Apparel Two books, both with the same title, helped my understanding of the gypsy world: Jean-Paul Clébert’s highly scholarly The Gypsies, translated by Paul Duff, and Angus Fraser’s more recent account. As mentioned above, I also found Cecil Beaton’s The Glass of Fashion invaluable. Jan Marsh’s insightful study Back to the Land informs this chapter and the next. For the Neo-pagans I turned to Paul Delany’s account, The Neo-Pagans, but my mother Olivier Bell’s inside knowledge of this group was even more precise and considered. For the section on Augustus John, see above, Chapter 1. The Silent Queen by Seymour Leslie disclaims any resemblance of its fictional characters to real ones, but I am sceptical.

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., Our Homes and How to Beautify Them, Harrison & Sons, London 1902 Lancaster, Osbert, Homes Sweet Homes (illus. by the author), John Murray, London 1948 Luke, Michael, David Tennant and the Gargoyle Years, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1991 Machray, Robert, The Night Side of London, T. Werner Laurie Ltd., London 1902 Marsh, Jan, Back to the Land – The Pastoral Impulse in England, from 1880 to 1914, Quartet Books, London, Melbourne, New York 1982 Pearsall, Ronald, The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1969 Richardson, Joanna, The Bohemians – La Vie de Bohème in Paris 1830–1914, Macmillan, London 1969 Robson, Philip, Forbidden Drugs (second edition), Oxford University Press 1999 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, trans.

San Francisco by Lonely Planet

airport security, Albert Einstein, Apple II, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Burning Man, California gold rush, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Day of the Dead, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, G4S, game design, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Joan Didion, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Mason jar, messenger bag, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, retail therapy, San Francisco homelessness, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, Zipcar

Sign-up is on a first-come, first-served basis. La Cocina (www.lacocinasf.org) This nonprofit offers cooking workshops ($65 to $95) and classes on starting a food business ($25), with proceeds providing training and professional kitchens for low-income culinary entrepreneurs. Farmers Markets NorCal idealists who headed back to the land in the 1970s started the nation’s organic farming movement. Today the local bounty can be sampled in the US city with the most farmers markets per capita. Ferry Building (www.cuesa.org; Tues, Thu, Sat) The Ferry Building showcases California-grown, organic produce, artisan meats and gourmet prepared foods at moderate-to-premium prices at markets held in the morning year-round.

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But it’s worth it: artists who debuted here have gone on to success at international art fairs and Whitney Biennials. Gravel & Gold Housewares, Gifts Offline map Google map (www.gravelandgold.com; 3266 21st St; noon-7pm Tue-Sat, noon-5pm Sun; & 24th St Mission) Get in touch with your roots and back to the land, without ever leaving sight of a Mission sidewalk. Gravel and Gold celebrates the 1960s to ’70s hippie homesteader movement with every fiber of its being and its hand-dyed smocked dresses – which you can try on among psychedelic murals behind a patched curtain, of course. The proud purveyor of rare vintage artifacts like silkscreened Osborne Woods peace postcards and limited-edition books on DIY Mendocino shingle-shack architecture, Gravel and Gold also answers to a higher California calling: getting a whole new generation excited about the organic connections between art and nature.

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Meanwhile, recreational drug-taking was turning into a thankless career for many, a distinct itch in the nether regions was making the rounds, and still more busloads of teenage runaways were arriving in the ill-equipped, wigged-out Haight. The Haight Ashbury Free Clinic ( Click here ) helped with the rehabbing and the itching, but the disillusionment seemed incurable when Hell’s Angels beat protestors in Berkeley and turned on the crowd at a free Rolling Stones concert at Altamont. Many idealists headed ‘back to the land’ in the bucolic North Bay, jumpstarting California’s organic farm movement. A dark streak emerged among those who remained, including young Charles Manson, the Symbionese Liberation Army (better known post-1974 as Patty Hearst’s kidnappers) and an evangelical egomaniac named Jim Jones, who would obligate 900 followers to commit mass suicide in 1978.

From Beirut to Jerusalem by Thomas L. Friedman

Ayatollah Khomeini, back-to-the-land, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, Neil Armstrong, post-work, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, Thomas L Friedman, Unsafe at Any Speed

“The significance of the land is that it allows you to see Judaism as a way of life. Coming back to the land of Israel is a way of saying that Judaism was never meant to be just a synagogue-based framework, centered around prayer and the holidays, which is what some Haredim seem to feel. Judaism was to be a total way of life that could provide answers for how to deal with hospital strikes and with the exercise of power. In other words, for me, you come back to the land in order to implement Sinai. I came back to the land not to rebuild the synagogue Judaism of European ghettos. I came back to the land to get back to the beginning—Judaism as a total way of life, not just ritual.”

This Is Your Country on Drugs: The Secret History of Getting High in America by Ryan Grim

airport security, Alexander Shulgin, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Burning Man, crack epidemic, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, failed state, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, global supply chain, Haight Ashbury, illegal immigration, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, mandatory minimum, new economy, New Urbanism, Parents Music Resource Center, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Steve Jobs, Tipper Gore, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, women in the workforce

“We spoke two completely different languages because we were on amphetamine and they were on acid,” Warhol follower Mary Woronov told Torgoff. “They were so slow to speak, with these wide eyes—‘Oh, wow!’—so into their vibrations; we spoke in rapid-machine-gun fire about books and paintings and movies. They were into . . . the American Indian and going back to the land and trying to be some kind of true, authentic person; we could not have cared less about that. They were homophobic; we were homosexual. Their women—they were these big, round-titted girls; you would say hello to them, and they would just flop on the bed and fuck you; we liked sexual tension, S&M, not fucking.

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Reagan’s drug war did precisely the opposite, with pot as the lone exception. While the president focused on pot in California, cocaine was exploding in Florida. Miami was the perfect base for large-scale drug smuggling. As the countercultural wars petered out, hippies who didn’t drop back in or go back to the land went south to Miami. Coconut Grove was bursting with hippies by the mid-seventies, the type of smart, antiauthoritarian troublemakers that embody the perfect smugglers. Business makes strange bedfellows. The Carter administration had pulled back on the effort to overthrow or assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans by Mark Lynas

Airbus A320, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, Easter island, Eyjafjallajökull, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, ice-free Arctic, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Negawatt, New Urbanism, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, peak oil, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rewilding, Ronald Reagan, special drawing rights, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Tragedy of the Commons, two and twenty, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, We are as Gods

This does not mean that we must gloomily accept the continuing diminution of semi-wild areas and the erosion of the vital ecosystem services they provide. It does mean though that we need to challenge some orthodoxies that are no longer useful in this new era of near-total human planetary dominance. “Getting close to nature” or going “back to the land” will generally not be good for the environment, however psychologically fulfilling these objectives may be to individuals seeking escape from industrial living. Instead, we need to intensify agriculture and other human land uses in existing areas as much as possible, and encourage as an environmental boon the growth of the world’s major cities that already successfully concentrate today’s enormous human population onto only a tiny proportion of the world’s land.

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Our best hope for meeting the land use planetary boundary is therefore to encourage the trends toward rising prosperity and demographic transition in developing countries, in order to allow their forests and other important natural habitats to survive and regrow. Given the choice, most people around the world already find city life more attractive and varied than that in the countryside. Forget the “back to the land” self-indulgence of some disgruntled people in rich countries. Billions of people want to move to urban areas to achieve increasing prosperity and improve their standard of living. Let us be glad of that. They are unwitting “Greens,” whose efforts at self-improvement should be celebrated. BOUNDARY FIVE FRESHWATER We have polluted the seas and appropriated land from other competing species—but water we have not so much stolen as imprisoned, behind concrete dam walls, within dark reservoirs, and behind the high levees that hem in once-mighty free-flowing rivers like the Mississippi and the Yangtze.

The English by Jeremy Paxman

back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Etonian, game design, George Santayana, global village, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, Own Your Own Home, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Right to Buy, sensible shoes, Stephen Fry, Suez canal 1869, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

And soon it’s all just another suburb. The whole country’s just one big suburb now. If they are honest, most country people will agree with her: where the English countryside remains, it exists only as scenery. North-east of Beaminster, on Cranborne Chase, is the place where an eccentric group of back-to-the-land romantics tried to act out the idea of England as some earthy dream. On a walking tour in 1924 the composer Balfour Gardiner had come across Gore Farm, a run-down part of an old Dorset estate. Before the First World War, Gardiner had, with Percy Grainger, Norman O’Neil, Roger Quilter and Cyril Scott, been part of the ‘Frankfurt Group’ of musicians who were to do much for English music.

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But he discovered that after the war the appetite for his romantically inspired work had almost disappeared, to be replaced by a taste for something altogether more austere. As the well-off son of a London merchant, Gardiner could afford the gesture that followed, and he renounced music. It also meant he had the means to buy Gore Farm, where with his nephew, Rolf Gardiner (an ‘English patriot’ who was part Austrian-Jewish and part Scandinavian), he created a back-to-the-land community. The idea was to act out D. H. Lawrence’s incoherent urgings about escaping the horrors of industrialism (‘we’ll have to establish some spot on earth that will be the fissure into the underworld, like the oracle at Delphos’, the novelist wrote to Gardiner27). The principles of this curious group had a millennialist feel: they believed in organic farming, small communities, self-government and the beneficial power of folk-custom.

Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolutions by Paul Mason

anti-globalists, back-to-the-land, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, capitalist realism, centre right, Chekhov's gun, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, disinformation, do-ocracy, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, informal economy, land tenure, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, Occupy movement, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rising living standards, short selling, Slavoj Žižek, Stewart Brand, strikebreaker, union organizing, We are the 99%, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, young professional

So in the 1840s, as the workers’ movement became obsessed with model factory settlements set up by utopian visionaries like Robert Owen, Marx laid into the utopians. In the 1860s, when workers all over the world tried to set up cooperative shops and factories, Marx became a robust critic of cooperation. And he never ceased to pour scorn on the back-to-the-land socialists who wanted to return to rural communes and low growth. Capitalism, Marx argued, was headed in the direction of big enterprises, which the capitalists would own collectively via the stock markets. Co-ops and utopian villages were a distraction. You had to find a way to take control of this big stuff—finance, industry and agribusiness—and create enough wealth so that, when you redistributed it, it would eliminate human need.

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She’s all too conscious that the Estero de San Miguel has been condemned. The left-liberal government of Benigno ‘NoyNoy’ Aquino has decided to forcibly relocate half a million slum dwellers back to the countryside, and the Estero is at the top of the list. ‘Many of our people are no longer interested in agriculture, so we need to give them the incentives to go back to the land,’ says Celia Alba, who heads the Philippines Housing Development Corporation. ‘If we had to rehouse the slum dwellers inside Manila, in medium-rise housing, it would cost one third of the national budget.’ But the San Miguel will not go without a fight, says Mena: ‘We will barricade and we will revolt if we have to.

The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us by Diane Ackerman

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, airport security, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, carbon footprint, clean water, climate change refugee, dark matter, dematerialisation, digital divide, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Google Earth, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, Higgs boson, hindcast, Internet of things, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, Masdar, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, microbiome, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, rewilding, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, skunkworks, Skype, space junk, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the High Line, theory of mind, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Unlovely as the word “sustainability” may be, it’s sashaying through the media, taking root in schools, and hitting home in all sorts of domiciles, entering the mainstream in both hamlets and megacities. We’re undergoing a revolution in thinking that isn’t a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, nor is it a back-to-the-land movement of the sort that became popular during the Great Depression and again in the 1970s. We might sometimes resemble startled deer in the headlights as we face Earth’s dwindling resources, yet at the same time we’re opening a door to a full-scale sustainability revolution. Our fundamental ideas about house and city have begun evolving into the smarter, greener matrix of our survival.

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It’s as if Gurdon and Yamanaka had found a way to reset the body’s clock to early development, enabling it to mint wild-card cells that haven’t chosen their career yet—without using the fetal stem cells that cause so much controversy. Space may be only one of the final frontiers. The other is surely the universe of human imagination and creative prowess in genetics. “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” Stewart Brand began his 1968 classic, The Whole Earth Catalog, which helped to inspire the back-to-the-land movement. His 2009 book, Whole Earth Discipline, begins more worriedly: “We are as gods and have to get good at it.” Among the rarest of the rare, only several northern white rhinoceroses still exist in all the world. But, thanks to Gurdon and Yamanaka, geneticists can take DNA from the skin of a recently dead animal—say, a northern white rhino from forty years ago—turn it into “induced pluripotent stem cells” (IPS), add a dose of certain human genes, and conjure up white rhino sperm.

A Place of My Own: The Architecture of Daydreams by Michael Pollan

A Pattern Language, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, dematerialisation, Frank Gehry, interchangeable parts, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, off-the-grid, Peter Eisenman, place-making, Stewart Brand, telemarketer, The Great Good Place, urban renewal, zero-sum game

Jim’s family had owned the lumberyard across the street, so he’d always been around wood and carpenters as a kid, but it wasn’t until he went away to college, in Vermont, that he got serious about woodworking. One of his professors at Godard was building an authentic timber frame house, cutting his own wood off the site, milling it by hand, and framing the structure solely with hand tools—no electricity allowed. It was the seventies, remember, and Vermont was teeming with back-to-the-land types who (not unlike members of the Arts and Crafts movement) made a moral and political virtue of traditional craftsmanship and self-reliance. After college Jim moved out to California, where he heard about the restoration of a Greene and Greene house in Berkeley. “I saw right away that the architect in charge didn’t have a clue,” Jim said.

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One of these currents was of course postmodernism, which by the mid-seventies had sparked a revival of interest in the American shingle style, a homegrown domestic architecture with deep vernacular roots. Also gathering momentum during the seventies was the push for historic preservation. And then, coming from an entirely different quarter, there was the back-to-the-land movement, which had its own reasons to revive vernacular building styles and methods, such as timber framing; it also happened to share many of the values of the Arts and Crafts movement. (You remember the crafts.) Though it seldom finds its way into the architectural histories, American hippie architecture of the 1970s played an important role, chipping away at modernist ideas from below while more academic postmodernists attacked them head on.

The new village green: living light, living local, living large by Stephen Morris

Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, carbon tax, clean tech, clean water, collective bargaining, Columbine, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, computer age, cuban missile crisis, David Sedaris, deindustrialization, discovery of penicillin, distributed generation, Easter island, energy security, energy transition, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Firefox, Hacker Conference 1984, index card, Indoor air pollution, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, John Elkington, Kevin Kelly, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, McMansion, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Negawatt, off grid, off-the-grid, peak oil, precautionary principle, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

In 1952 they relocated to Harborside, Maine where they started over again, building their own house, outbuildings, and a business raising blueberries.Together, they wrote what they lived — Living the Good Life (1954) and Continuing the Good Life (1979) — and are often credited with being a major spur to the US back to the land movement that began in the late 1960s. Helen and Scott usually divided a day’s waking hours into three blocks of four hours:“bread labor” (work directed toward meeting requirements of food, shelter, clothing, needed tools, and such); civic work (doing something of value for their community); and professional pursuits or recreation (for Scott this was frequently economics research, for Helen it was often music, but they both liked to ski).They made good and regular use of the volunteer labor of young idealistic visitors who were always warmly welcomed and fed 210 chapter 8 : The Good Life a hearty meal of fresh greens, Helen’s famous soup, and Scott’s gruel — a combination of raw oats, raisins, peanut butter and honey.

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Helen Nearing provides a truth so honest some find it threatening.The Nearings stand for good food, an honest day’s work, the straight talk on child labor, civil rights, the economics of oil, wars, the use base economy, and freedom. The Nearings vision of a future in a United, confederated World eerily parallels that of Star Trek creator, Gene Rodenberry’s. It’s a future of hope. That’s why I try to “Live the Good Life” everyday. Scott and Helen Nearing were the John and Yoko of the Back to the Land movement.They teach, preach, and embrace voluntary simplicity, respect for the earth, and the brotherhood of life.They advocate ownership of your own life, and of working damn hard to keep this experiment called humankind evolving. — Dave Bonta USA Solar Stores 212 chapter 8 : The Good Life Conventional “wisdom” dictates that Festivals can’t be Green.

Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It by Kamal Ravikant

back-to-the-land, off-the-grid, Silicon Valley, Skype

You’ve just communicated the truth to yourself in a deep, visceral way. In a way the mind cannot escape. If anyone ever looked in your eyes, knowing that you loved them, this is what they saw. Give yourself the same gift. 4. One Question It’s easy to say “I love myself” while locked inside my apartment, recovering from being sick. Tougher when I’m back to the land of the living, interacting with people who have their own issues and mental loops. That is where the question came from. In dealing with others and reacting to their negative emotions with my own, I found myself asking this question: If I loved myself truly and deeply, would I let myself experience this?

San Francisco Like a Local by DK Eyewitness

back-to-the-land, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, Bottomless brunch, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, Kickstarter, Lyft, messenger bag, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, tech bro, tech worker, uber lyft, young professional

g Nearby Getaways g Contents Google Map Sonoma Valley 1-hour drive from the city; www.sonomavalley.com If Napa is traditional wine country – think expensive restaurants and swanky hotels – then Sonoma is the hipster equivalent. It’s where San Francisco’s young and restless drink non-interventionist wines under string lights at Scribe Winery, a palm-flanked hacienda. Farm town Healdsburg, an hour’s drive north, is the beating heart of the sleeve-tattooed, back-to-the-land scene, where eco-chic boutique hotel h2 tempts environment warriors, and living roof-art galleries tempt creatives from the city. Healdsburg even has a seasonal ice-cream and pie bar called Noble Folk. Try it! Forage for food Sonoma isn’t just about wine. ForageSF hosts “wild food walks” searching out seaweed, mushrooms, and more along the Sonoma coastline, with the guidance of an expert forager (www.foragesf.com).

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World by Jamie Bartlett

Andrew Keen, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, brain emulation, Californian Ideology, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, gig economy, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, life extension, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, off grid, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, QR code, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rosa Parks, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the long tail, Tragedy of the Commons

According to the Intentional Community Directory there are currently 2,255 eco-village communities around the world, spread across seventy countries and covering everything from a network of remote villages in Sri Lanka to the very popular Cristiana in Copenhagen, a self-proclaimed autonomous commune of 850 people founded by hippies, squatters and anarchists in 1971. Uncertain times often stimulate ‘back to the land’ movements like this. The seventeenth-century Diggers, with their dreams of small, independent, egalitarian agricultural communities, began during the great political and social unrest of the English Civil War.11 During the anxiety and strains that followed the Napoleonic Wars, social reformer Robert Owen imagined ‘villages of cooperation’ that would be economically and socially self-sufficient.12 The 1970s saw a surge in communal utopias (approximately 750,000 Americans lived in communes during that decade), some members of which were disappointed hippies, but many were explicitly driven by a fear of an impending apocalypse and energy meltdown, including the New Atlantis Commune and the Genesis Project.13 These are uncertain times too.

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No one here seems to suffer with nomophobia (‘no mobile phone phobia’). No one in Tamera is frantically and pathetically checking if their last tweet went viral. I envied them for that. When Monika told me that there was Wi-Fi in the bar area, I went out of my way to avoid it. Tamera combines this back-to-the-land, almost tribal, simplicity, with a more modern individualistic impulse: that we happy few can change the entire world and everyone in it from our yurt, and fulfil all our sexual desires while we’re at it. That would normally seem solipsistic, but at Tamera you don’t need to feel guilty because you’re working for world peace.

Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto by Stewart Brand

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, An Inconvenient Truth, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, back-to-the-land, biofilm, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, dark matter, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, digital divide, Easter island, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Kibera, land tenure, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, megaproject, microbiome, military-industrial complex, New Urbanism, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Calthorpe, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, rewilding, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart grid, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, We are as Gods, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, William Langewiesche, working-age population, Y2K

—Larry Brilliant, president, Skoll Urgent Threats Fund “Rethinking and recalibration are hard, and there is a lot about Whole Earth Discipline that will be argued, vehemently. Brand, a challenging but trusted thinker, is a good place to start an essential rethinking process. Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog and Coevolution Quarterly were innovative crystallizations and guides to the ‘back to the land’ movements of the late ’60s and early ’70s. . . . Reinvention: are we up for that? We’d really best get started.” —Scott Walker, Orion “Orthodoxy is the enemy of invention. Despair an insult to the imagination. In this extraordinary manifesto, Stewart Brand charts a way forward that shatters conventional thinking, and yet leaves one brimming with hope.

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Following the deep seam of romanticism through successive centuries, Herman finds it leading through Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West (1918) directly to Nazi Germany. “Hitler’s generation was the first European generation raised on cultural pessimism.” There is a troubling Green thread in the Nazi movement. I first came across it in 1977 with an article I ran in CoEvolution on the German wandervögel (wanderbirds)—young hippielike back-to-the-land romantic strivers of the late nineteenth century who were all too easily co-opted into the Hitler Youth. I learned from Herman’s book that biologist Ernst Haeckel, coiner of the word ecology (oekologie, 1866), championed eugenics and selective euthanasia to purge an imperiled Europe of “degenerates such as Jews and Negroes.”

The Fry Chronicles: An Autobiography by Stephen Fry

Alistair Cooke, back-to-the-land, Desert Island Discs, Etonian, gentrification, Isaac Newton, Live Aid, loadsamoney, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sloane Ranger, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, The Wisdom of Crowds, University of East Anglia, Winter of Discontent

.† The other two undergraduates chosen were a scientist called Barber and a lawyer called Mark Lester – no, not the child star of Oliver! but another Mark Lester altogether. We travelled north to Granadaland for the first round. It was my first visit to Manchester and my first close-up encounter with a television studio. In Norwich I had once sat in the audience for the taping of a largely forgotten Anglia TV sitcom called Backs to the Land but that was the extent of my penetration of the broadcasting world. Granada was a much more impressive outfit than dear, sweet, parochial Anglia. Their studios were the home of Coronation Street and World in Action. The corridors were lined with photographs of actors, film stars and nationally known television presenters like Brian Trueman and Michael Parkinson.

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(TV programme), 338 Arena (magazine), 299, 325 Armitage, Reginald (‘Noel Gay’), 259–61, 376 Armitage, Richard: signs up Emma Thompson, 175; signs up SF and Hugh Laurie, 193–4; and SF at Edinburgh, 197; and Ben Elton, 229; offers advances to SF, 234; entertains at Stebbing Park, 258–9; and SF’s writing book for Me and My Girl, 259–62, 264–6, 342, 349, 390; background, 261–2; arranges SF’s part in Forty Years On, 270, 274; sends SF to BBC, 295; and SF’s radio appearances, 331; and SF’s earnings, 359; and Elton’s writing Blackadder, 373; influence over BBC, 376; and Me and My Girl on Broadway, 409, 420–2, 424; see also Noel Gay Artists Arnold, Matthew, 71 Ash, Leslie, 266, 298, 338, 343 Atkinson, Rowan: as Oxford man, 71, 129; performs at Edinburgh, 126, 129; on Not the Nine O’Clock News, 180, 193, 209; Armitage sends to watch and report on SF, 193–4; announces Perrier Award to The Cellar Tapes, 198–9; visits Stebbing Park, 258; Armitage signs up, 262; celebrity, 290; SF collaborates with, 298–9; motor cars, 369; and Blackadder, 372, 374, 376, 382–3, 385–7; character, 385–6; marriage to Sunetra, 387–8 Attenborough, Richard, Baron, 354 Auden, W.H., 31 Aukin, David, 266, 268–9 Australia: SF tours with revue, 203–5; SF visits for staging of Me and My Girl, 391 Ayckbourn, Alan (Sir), 191, 240 B15 (radio programme), 328 Backs to the Land (TV sitcom), 138, 193 Baddiel, David, 121 Baker, Tom, 384–5 Barber (Queens’ College undergraduate), 138–9 Barker, Ronnie, 209 Barrault, Jean-Louis, 127 Barretts of Wimpole Street, The: parodied, 190 Barton, Anne (née Righter), 85 Barton, John, 108, 190 Bates, Alan, 44, 338, 351 Bathurst, Robert, 128 Beale, Simon Russell, 90, 163, 190, 256–8 Beaton, Alistair, 333 Beckett, Samuel, 52 Belushi, John, 60, 206 Benn, Tony, 54 Bennett, Alan: as Oxford man, 71, 129; on snobbery, 105; SF admires, 270–1; at SF’s audition, 273–5; SF introduces parents to, 338; declines to join cast of Forty Years On for spaghetti meal, 344; takes over Tempest role in Forty Years On, 346–7; writes screenplay of A Private Function, 348; and Russell Harty, 351–2; Forty Years On, 271–3, 295, 325, 335–7, 342, 344–6, 350 Bennett, J.A.W., 89 Bennett-Jones, Peter, 404–5 Berger, Sarah, 44 Bergman, Martin, 128, 197, 205, 359 Berkoff, Steven: Decadence, 202–3 Berlin, Sir Isaiah, 85 Beverly Hills Cop, 203 Bird, John, 336 Birdsall, Timothy, 336 Bit of Fry and Laurie, A (TV programme), 217, 229, 424 Blackadder (TV programme), 217, 228, 237, 372–6, 381–90, 424 Blackshaw, Ben, 153–4; Have You Seen the Yellow Book?

What Should I Do With My Life? by Po Bronson

back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, California energy crisis, clean water, cotton gin, deal flow, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, high net worth, imposter syndrome, job satisfaction, Menlo Park, microcredit, new economy, proprietary trading, rolling blackouts, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, telemarketer, traffic fines, work culture , young professional

“Well, I had some, but with a mortgage and two kids . . .” He wasn’t going to let himself hang out for months waiting for a vision. “So, of all the things you could have done, how in the world did you end up a catfish farmer? Particularly if you didn’t think it was noble, and you weren’t an outdoorsman itching to get back to the land?” “It wasn’t like I chose catfish farmer off a long list of possibilities. It was the only opportunity that presented itself.” This farm had been passed down in his wife’s family since the Depression, but her generation had run for the cities and wanted nothing to do with farming. If they couldn’t find somebody to manage the operation, the family would have to sell the land.

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He’s helping strengthen the only Native American–run university in the country, DQU, which is two hours north. DQU is an impoverished school, terribly underfunded by the state (another gross injustice!) and struggling to survive. But Deni sees these students as the future leaders of the businesses that’ll spawn on the reservations. He’ll give them a reason to go back to the land they came from. His list of projects is endless. Every time I called him, it was something else. “What are you working on today, Deni?” “Oh, we’re building an ecotourism resort in Costa Rica run by Indians.” “What are you working on today, Deni?” “Oh, a billionaire in China owns the world’s biggest sapphire, and he wants to put it on display at the Pequot casinos in Connecticut.

Who Owns England?: How We Lost Our Green and Pleasant Land, and How to Take It Back by Guy Shrubsole

Adam Curtis, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, Beeching cuts, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, congestion charging, Crossrail, deindustrialization, digital map, do-ocracy, Downton Abbey, false flag, financial deregulation, fixed income, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, Global Witness, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, housing crisis, housing justice, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, linked data, loadsamoney, Londongrad, machine readable, mega-rich, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, openstreetmap, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, rent-seeking, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, sceptred isle, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the map is not the territory, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban sprawl, web of trust, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Parliament passed Acts ‘Enclosing the land’, https://www.parliament­.uk/about/living­-heritage­/transformingsociety­/towncountry­/landscape/overview/enclosingland/ just 5.2 per cent John Aitchison, Karl Crowther, Martin Ashby & Louise Redgrave, ‘The Common Lands of England: A Biological Survey’, Rural Survey Research Unit at University of Wales, Aberystwyth, for the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions, 1997, http://bromyarddowns.co.uk­/media/1687/1997­-common­-lands­-biological­-survey.pdf, p. 10. 120 workmen Jan Marsh, Back to the Land: The pastoral impulse in Victorian England from 1880 to 1914 (Quartet Books, 1982), p. 44. 7,000 registered commons Aitchison et al., ‘The Common Lands of England’; ‘The Commons Lands of Great Britain’, http://www.foundationforcommonland.org­.uk/the-commons­-lands­-of­-great­-britain 24,000 acres of commons ‘Common land and village greens’, https://www.surreycc­.gov.uk/environment­-housing­-and­-planning­/enforcement-and-regulations/land/common-land-and-village-greens.

…

For more on the Kinder trespass, see Marion Shoard, A Right to Roam (Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 180–2. popular writer S.P.B. Mais see ‘“All the ways of life” by S.P.B. Mais’, Spectator, 15 October 1937, http://archive.spectator.co­.uk/article/15th­-october­-1937­/40­/all-the-ways-of-life-by-s-p-b-mais. On the broader inter-war ‘cult of the great outdoors’ and its various fascinating back-to-the-land movements, see Frank Trentmann, ‘Civilisation and its Discontents: English Neo-Romanticism and the Transformation of Anti-Modernism in Twentieth-Century Western Culture’, Journal of Contemporary History 29: 4 (October 1994), pp. 583–625. one of the most spectacular Shoard, A Right to Roam, pp. 189–90.

Finding Community: How to Join an Ecovillage or Intentional Community by Diana Leafe Christian

back-to-the-land, dumpster diving, en.wikipedia.org, hive mind, intentional community, Lewis Mumford, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shock, peak oil

Some urban communities are organized as housing co-ops, including student housing co-ops, elder housing co-ops, and limited equity housing co-ops. These allow students, elders, and people with limited funds, respectively, to share ownership of their housing, share resources, make decisions cooperatively, and enjoy a closer connection to their neighbors than they would simply living in apartment buildings or condos. Rural back-to-the-land homesteads offer their members the opportunity to grow much of their own food and practice rural self-reliance skills. Communities organized as conference and retreat centers, holistic healing centers, and sustainability education centers are often rural, food-growing settlements as well, offering workshops and courses to the public.

…

The 7 members of Edges community, who live on 94 acres of wooded and cleared hills near Athens, Ohio, also grow and put up much of their own food from their organic gardens. And while community members do many homesteading tasks, including gardening, ordering community Homesteading Communities Classic back-to-the-land rural homesteading communities focus on growing food and/or raising livestock, and practicing the necessary homesteading skills for living a self-reliant country life. In some homesteading communities everyone works on the land, for example, when the community has a farming or food-producing operation.

Worn: A People's History of Clothing by Sofi Thanhauser

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, big-box store, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Caribbean Basin Initiative, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, export processing zone, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, microplastics / micro fibres, moral panic, North Ronaldsay sheep, off-the-grid, operation paperclip, out of africa, QR code, Rana Plaza, Ronald Reagan, sheep dike, smart cities, special economic zone, strikebreaker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce

Goody was like many people who got into handweaving in the 1970s, when weaving kits could be purchased from the Whole Earth Catalog alongside agricultural equipment for back-to-the-land projects. In some ways, she was a hippie. Goody became a Quaker, and got involved in nonviolence and the antiwar movement. During the protests against the Vietnam War, she said, “I marched with the communists because they sang better songs.” When her friends started advocating for the political use of violence, she went back to the land. “I felt like I had to do something legitimate. The only thing I could do was farming.” She was given land by a woman who wanted to populate Cherry Valley with like-minded young people, and Goody has been there since.

The Rich and the Rest of Us by Tavis Smiley

"there is no alternative" (TINA), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, ending welfare as we know it, F. W. de Klerk, fixed income, full employment, housing crisis, Howard Zinn, income inequality, job automation, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traffic fines, trickle-down economics, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor

When folk who didn’t fit the stereotype started losing their businesses, jobs, and homes, and had to rely on government handouts, they took notice. Our fear is that this recognition of poverty is temporary. Headlines trumpeting a boost in manufacturing and exports, or an uptick in the stock market, or lower jobless rates will lull many Americans back to the land of comfortable stereotyping and demonizing the poor. Superficial snapshot indicators merely postpone a confrontation with the inevitable. America is no longer the indisputable world leader in innovation, manufacturing, and production. Worse yet, premature post-recession celebrations mean that we’ve blown another opportunity to really grapple with and solve the over-arching problem of poverty.

The Populist Explosion: How the Great Recession Transformed American and European Politics by John B. Judis

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, first-past-the-post, fixed income, full employment, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, mass immigration, means of production, neoliberal agenda, obamacare, Occupy movement, open borders, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, white flight, Winter of Discontent

He went to the same high school that Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Chuck Schumer attended, and he spent a year at Brooklyn College before transferring to the University of Chicago, where he graduated in 1964. He lived on a Kibbutz in Israel for six months, returned to New York where he worked at odd jobs, and in 1968, he and his first wife moved to Vermont as part of the New Left’s back-to-the-land movement. The Brooklyn in which Sanders grew up was a hotbed of leftwing politics and culture, and Sanders, when he came to Chicago, joined the Young People’s Socialist League, the youth wing of Norman Thomas’s Socialist Party, and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), which at the time was a militant civil rights group.

Wool Omnibus Edition by Hugh Howey

back-to-the-land, clean tech, confounding variable, hydroponic farming, invisible hand, long peace

The water in the pitchers had long evaporated out, but the purple tablecloth looked warm enough. Warmer than being naked. Juliette moved the assortment of cups, plates, and pitchers and grabbed the cloth. She wrapped it around her shoulders, but it was going to slip off when she moved, so she tried knotting the corners in front of her. Giving up on this, she ran back to the landing, out into the welcomed light, and removed the fabric completely. Grabbing the knife—the door squealing eerily shut behind her—she pushed the blade through the center of the tablecloth and cut a long gash. Her head went through this, the cloth falling past her feet in front and behind her. A few minutes with the blade and she’d cut away the excess, forming a belt out of a long strip and from another shock of fabric, enough to tie over her head and keep it warm.

…

It hissed by her ear, quite noisily, and she could feel the suit puff out around her. The overflow valve she’d screwed into the other side of the collar squealed as it opened and let out the excess pressure, preventing her suit—and her head, she suspected—from bursting. “Weights,” she said, clicking the radio. He ran back to the landing and returned with the round exercise weights. Kneeling on the last dry step, he strapped these below her knees with heavy velcro, then looked up to see what was next. Juliette struggled to lift one foot, then the other, making sure that the weights were secure. “Wire,” she said, getting the hang of working the radio.

One Less Car: Bicycling and the Politics of Automobility by Zack Furness, Zachary Mooradian Furness

active transport: walking or cycling, affirmative action, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, back-to-the-land, bike sharing, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, car-free, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critique of consumerism, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Enrique Peñalosa, European colonialism, feminist movement, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, Golden Gate Park, independent contractor, interchangeable parts, intermodal, Internet Archive, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, market fundamentalism, means of production, messenger bag, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, place-making, post scarcity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Silicon Valley, sustainable-tourism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, urban planning, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , working poor, Yom Kippur War

Health, being more at one with nature, and using our own resources were three ideals of the time, influenced by the Whole Earth Catalog. it was a time of be-ins, love-ins, smoke-ins . . . so it was natural to plan a huge Bike-in—one that would bring all groups together around a common dream.103 What is interesting about these early years of bike activism is that despite its cultural emphasis, there was also a firmly entrenched commitment to transforming bicycling and automobility through formal political channels, whether it be lobbying, hosting community events, meeting with politicians and urban planners, circulating petitions, and/or getting involved with local (and regional) governmental affairs. One of the prominent critiques of both the counterculture and appropriate technologists—who especially mingled in the pages of the Whole Earth Catalog as well as the back-to-the-land movement—is that they either advocated an individualist, escapist paradigm (“tune in, turn on, drop out”) or tried to naïvely solve complex social/political problems by simply “living differently” or by using different tools.104 Bike advocacy in the 1970s reveals the limitations and inaccuracy of this critique because cyclists were directly engaged with urban problems that are fundamentally social and political in their scope. rather than arguing for cyclists to just do their own thing, groups like Transportation alternatives, le Monde à Bicyclette, the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition (founded in 1970), the East Bay Bicycle Coalition, the Bicycle Coalition of Greater philadelphia, and the Washington area Bicyclist association (all founded in 1972), specifically worked to transform the urban milieu by addressing both the pragmatic needs of cyclists (and potential cyclists) as well as the overarching problems posed by poor urban planning and environmental pollution. like Jane Jacobs, many saw unregulated automobility as a problem requiring a positive orientation and a realistic set of goals: attrition [of automobiles], too, must operate in positive terms, as a means of supplying positive, easily understood and desired improvements, appealing to various specific and tangible city interests.

…

., 19 anti-roads program, 78 appadurai, arjun, 188 appropriate technology (aT) movement, 65–66, 191, 192–193; and counterculture, 68; critiques of, 68–69 armstrong, lance, 4–5, 119, 222n25 arnison, Matthew, 81 aronson, Sydney, 15 Arrested Development (television program), 112 articulations, 9 asheville recyclery, 149, 173 asia, railroad system in, 190 athineos, Steve “The Greek,” 125 atton, Chris, 144, 147 austin, Texas, 58 australia, 13, 172; bicycling in, 4 autobahn, 51 auto capitalism, 7 auto industry: automobile factories, forced labor in, 241n22; mass media’s shaping of, 49 automobile-industrial complex, 6 automobiles: and american dream, 7; critiques of, as cultural elitism, 7; drivers of, as victims, 129; and fatalities, 80, 135; as framing device, 88; “governors” devices in, 240n7; isolation of, 87; lack of future of, in cities, 208; love affair with, 5–6; and mobility, 45; and pedestrian fatalities, 124, 132; as automobiles (continued) replacement of citizens, 86; rise of, 48; and sales figures, 221n22; as status symbol, 6; and SUv hybrids, 288n10 automobility, 16–17, 23, 52, 54, 109–110, 204–205, 210; alienation of, 88; bad driving as aberration of, 131; and breaking of traffic laws, 132; and car accidents, 132; city as contested space of, 83; critiques of, 59; as dangerous, 131–132; and environmentalism, 60, 65; and gender, 180–181; as gendered phenomenon, 113; and Global South, 190; and gridlock, 208; as inevitable, 117; and masculinity, 114; and mobility, 213; and mutant bikes, 154–155; news media’s support of, 137; perpetuation of cultural supremacy of, 138; as political, 6, 96; protests of, 60, 62, 63–65; and public space, 83, 87, 104, 212–213; and roads, 83; system of, 6; as term, 6; and traffic deaths, 68 autopia, 60 autopolis, 52 awakening (band), 147 Ayamye (film), 283n49 Back-to-the-land movement, 68 Baker, Jimmy, 147 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 90 Balsley, Gene, 156 Bardwell, Sarah 219n7 Barnett, Gabrielle, 44–45 Barrett, Betty, 120 Baudry de Saunier, louis, 25 Baxter, Sylvester, 32, 39, 233n87 Bean-larson, Dennis, 163 Bel Geddes, norman, 50, 208 Belgian Congo, 196 Benepe, Barry, 67 Benjamin, Walter, 44 Benstock, Marcy, 63, 245n80 Berger, arthur asa, 66–67 Berkman, rivvy, 63, 67 Besse, nadine, 18, 25 Bey, Hakim (aka peter lamborn Wilson), 90–91 La Bicicleta y los Triciclos: Alternativas de Trans- porte para America Latina (navarro), 192 Bicimáquinas, 188 Bicycle action project Earn a Bike (EaB) pro gram, 171 Bicycle advisory Committees, 74 Bicycle Coalition of Greater philadelphia, 63, 68 Bicycle Commuters of new york, 268n113 Bicycle counterculture, 8 Bicycle craze, 14, 16, 196 Bicycle donation programs, 201 Bicycle Ecology, 60 Bicycle Ecology Day, 60 Bicycle education programs, 13, 71–72 Bicycle Habitat, 179 Bicycle production, 213–214, 217, 246n95; and labor practices, 216 Bicycle racing, 25 Bicycles, 217; and accidents, 132–133, 264n66, 267–268n111; advertising of, 18–19, 25; as anti-spectacular device, 89; aura of, 18; bamboo bicycles, 293n63; and bike hacking, 157; boyhood association with, 50; and centaur as metaphor, 23; and class discrimination, 32–33; classic bicycles, 260n29; collective shift to, 213; and colonialism, 196–198; compared to horses, 23–24, 232n65; and consumerism, 19, 160–161; and cyborgs, 24–25; design of, 115; as embodiment of environmentalism, 59, 246n99; as first luxury item, 17; fixed-gear bikes, 162–167; as “freedom machine,” 17; granny bikes, revival of, 167; idea of, 18; interest in custom builders of, 167–168; as metaphor for independence, 45; obsession with style and, 163; and oil embargo, 65; and “ordinaries,” 19; and pedestrian accidents, 264n66; and pedestrian fatalities, 268n117; and place making, 146; posters of, 18; in public protests, 104–105; and recycling, 154, 280n10; revival of as utilitarian, 167; and road taxes, 269n121; and rural women and girls, 190; sales of, 18, 49, 65; secondhand bikes, revival of, 167; signifying power of, 196, 198; and single-speed conversion, 153, 162, 167, 274n56; and social construction of technology (SCOT) paradigm, 226–227n2; as social revolutionizer, 32; support of as transportation, 8; as symbol of resistance, 47, 58; and telegraph messenger boys, 50; ten-speed bicycle, popularity of, 67; twenty-first-century usage of, 205–206, 218; as utility vehicles, 50; as utopian mode of transportation, 59; victory bicycles, 120, 262n47.

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins

Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrew Wiles, Arthur Eddington, back-to-the-land, Claude Shannon: information theory, correlation does not imply causation, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Danny Hillis, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Dmitri Mendeleev, domesticated silver fox, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, invisible hand, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, phenotype, precautionary principle, Thomas Malthus

Proganochelys and Palaeochersis might have evolved the shell independently. But there is another possibility: 3 Proganochelys and Palaeochersis might represent an earlier return from the water to the land. Isn’t that a startlingly exciting thought? We are already pretty confident of the remarkable fact that the turtles accomplished an evolutionary doubling back to the land: an early marque of land ‘tortoises’ went back to the watery environment of their even earlier fish ancestors, became sea turtles, then returned to the land yet again, as a new incarnation of land tortoises, the Testudinidae. That we know, or are nearly certain of. But now we are facing up to the additional suggestion that this doubling back happened twice!

…

As a parting shot, I cannot help wondering about those freshwater and brackish water forms (‘terrapins’), which are close cousins of the land tortoises. Did their ancestors move directly from the sea into brackish and then fresh water? Do they represent an intermediate stage on the way from the sea back to the land? Or is it possible that they constitute yet another doubling-back to the water from ancestors that were modern land tortoises? Have the chelonians been shuttling back and forth in evolutionary time between water and land? Could the palimpsest be even more densely over-written than I have so far suggested?

The State and the Stork: The Population Debate and Policy Making in US History by Derek S. Hoff

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, back-to-the-land, British Empire, business cycle, classic study, clean water, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, feminist movement, full employment, garden city movement, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jane Jacobs, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, New Economic Geography, new economy, old age dependency ratio, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, pensions crisis, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Simon Kuznets, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, white flight, zero-sum game

But they overlook how New Deal population redistribution also reinforced the prevailing idea that the United States was already sufficiently populated as a whole.139 Relocation policy was SPK in practice. The dream of large-scale relocation was first and foremost antipoverty policy, but it built upon Jeffersonian agrarianism as well as more recent efforts to halt migration to the cities. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, a “back to the land” campaign known as the country life movement had tried to slow the inexorable urbanization of America by encouraging migration to rural areas. In the 1920s and 1930s, a regionalist movement embracing local traditions in response to the centralizing, industrializing, and allegedly homogenizing effects of American capitalism and culture provided additional intellectual impetus for the goal of slowing migration to the cities.140 American economists had fretted since the First World War about the supposed disequilibrium between the locations of people and industry, for example, in the cut-over lands in the northern Great Lakes states.

…

Problems joined a long list of studies bemoaning the inefficient distribution of the American population. See, for example, Rupert B. Vance, Human Geography of the South: A Study in Regional Resources and Human Adequacy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1932). 139. Many histories of the New Deal emphasize the back-to-the-land and community-building aspects of resettlement programs and overlook the political economy of population. See Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., The Coming of the New Deal (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), chap. 21; Paul K. Conkin, Tomorrow a New World: The New Deal Community Program (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1959); Joseph L.

The Good, the Bad, and the Furry: Life With the World's Most Melancholy Cat by Tom Cox

back-to-the-land, lolcat

I haven’t found out if the bushy-tailed cat eats vomit, though, as he hasn’t let me close enough to ask him, and I sense he is even more unlikely to since, in an uncharacteristic territorial gesture the other evening, The Bear frightened him off with one of his best ‘gargling with lighter fluid’ noises. What with the bushy-tailed cat’s mournful meowing and Ralph loudly talking about himself in the third person, the house remains a hive of cat activity around dawn. Gemma can sleep through this stuff, but I know from experience that it’s no use for me to try to. If I get back to the land of nod after Shipley has shouldered open the bedroom door and attacked me with a machine-gun fusillade of expletives at 4.30 a.m., I’ll only wake up again half an hour later, when Alan lands heavily on the conservatory roof. Last weekend, I told Deborah about Alan’s early-hours landings, and she seemed surprised.

Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside by Xiaowei Wang

4chan, AI winter, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, cloud computing, Community Supported Agriculture, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, drop ship, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, gig economy, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, hype cycle, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, job automation, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer lending, precision agriculture, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, software is eating the world, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological solutionism, the long tail, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator, zoonotic diseases

Although centralization and consolidation seem like they might be the answer, industrialized agriculture would only displace farmers. As John points out, land in China is a precious resource, especially as China urbanizes and threatens the red line, an agricultural “defense line.” Most of all, the land allocated to farmers serves as a basic form of poverty alleviation—no matter how poor you are, you can always go back to the land and farm food for yourself and your family. Privatizing land would only reproduce social inequality, John says, and that would threaten political stability. Ultimately, food safety revolves around social trust, and John thinks that “social trust can’t scale.” When supply chains were shorter, being able to meet your farmer created this trust.

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History by Kurt Andersen

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, animal electricity, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Burning Man, California gold rush, Celebration, Florida, centre right, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, corporate governance, cotton gin, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Donner party, Downton Abbey, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, failed state, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, God and Mammon, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herman Kahn, high net worth, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, large denomination, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, McMansion, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, placebo effect, post-truth, pre–internet, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Snapchat, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, sugar pill, Ted Kaczynski, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Timothy McVeigh, trade route, transcontinental railway, urban renewal, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y2K, young professional

And in the 1970s the courts and state legislatures started deciding okay, whatever, do your own thing, Christian, hippie, it’s all good, school’s optional. Retreating to self-sufficient rural isolation, living off the grid, became a hippie thing in the 1960s before it took off as a right-wing conceit in the 1970s. The back-to-the-land movement, with the Whole Earth Catalog as its official almanac and souvenir program, floated along on dreams of agrarian utopia. (For a year or two around 1970, I was a teenage Walter Mitty with my own Whole Earth dream.) Survivalism was the same but different. Both shared a vision of themselves as clued-in self-reliant ordinary heroes escaping the urban corporate-government hive because it was decadent, corrupt, and corrupting.

…

The eleven-year-old Christians United for Israel, with 3 million members, is a primary vehicle of the American Christian Zionist movement. Its Pentecostal minister founder has preached that God sent Hitler to Earth as “a hunter” to exterminate Jews in order to herd and corral the survivors in Palestine—“to get them to come back to the land.” The Christian Zionists’ entire political focus is on lobbying for U.S. support of the hardest possible Israeli hard line—in order to be in sync, as they see it, with the Bible’s apocalyptic prophecies. These beliefs are an important source of the Republicans’ policy toward Israel, and thus of America’s, which is disturbing to me.

Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology by James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel

back-to-the-land, Columbine, dark matter, Extropian, Firefox, flag carrier, Future Shock, gravity well, haute couture, Internet Archive, Kim Stanley Robinson, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, pattern recognition, phenotype, post-industrial society, price stability, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Stephen Hawking, technological singularity, telepresence, the scientific method, Turing test, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, wage slave, Y2K, zero day

They moved from Seattle to the less pricey rural environs of Medford, Oregon, and purchased a small pear orchard with some leftover funds they had secretly squirreled away from the screamingly burned investors. They took a vow then and there to have nothing further to do with any hypothetical future digital Utopia, making a back-to-the-land commitment similar to that made by many burnt-out hippies a generation prior. Surely the repentant, simple-living Applebrooks never reckoned that their only child, young Basho, would grow up to revolutionize, unify and dominate the essential ways in which digital information was disseminated across all media.

…

He took a pedal taxi home, grateful that for once, the small wiry woman on the seat wasn’t interested in conversation as she leaned on the handlebars and pumped them through the evening crush in the streets. He couldn’t get the suit out of his head tonight. Jimi was right. The Gaiists were harmless, back-to-the-land types. The feds wanted this kid for something other than his politics, although that might be the media reason. Absently, Aman watched the woman’s muscular back as she pumped them past street vendors hawking food, toys, and legal drugs, awash in a river of strolling, eating, buying people. He didn’t ask “why” much anymore.

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

He had gotten a taste of the power of a social network at the WELL. If a company could sponsor an online community and if it could convince its customers that they were engaging in social rather than economic activity, then they could increase customer allegiance and their own profits. From this insight flowed the Global Business Network. Forget going back to the land—there was gold in preaching that Whole Earth message in the suites of the Fortune 500. The corporate conquest of the Web had started. CHAPTER FOUR The Libertarian Counterinsurgency We are in a deadly race between politics and technology. —Peter Thiel 1. George Gilder was down on his luck.

Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines by Richard Heinberg, James Howard (frw) Kunstler

Adam Curtis, addicted to oil, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, carbon tax, classic study, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, demographic transition, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Fractional reserve banking, greed is good, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, land reform, Lewis Mumford, means of production, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, the built environment, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, urban planning

It was no wonder the revolution failed: without an understanding of the energetic basis of industrialism and therefore of the modern corporate state, their rebellion could never have been more than symbolic. Where the hippie aesthetic drew on deeper philosophical and political roots (such as the back-to-the-land philosophy of Scott and Helen Nearing), it persisted, as it still does to this day. Perhaps the most durable and intelligent product of the era was the design philosophy known as Permaculture, developed in Australia by ecologists Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. A practical — rather than an aesthetic — design system for producing food, energy, and shelter, Permaculture was conceived in prescient expectation of the looming era of limits, and it is endlessly adaptable to differing climates and cultures.

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

Theodore Roszak wrote about the technocratic evils of Wonder Bread: “Not only do they provide bread aplenty, but the bread is as soft as floss; it takes no effort to chew, and yet it is vitamin-enriched.” If you wanted to pick an object worthy of rebellion, an avatar of alienation, food wasn’t a bad place to begin. The hippies shoved all the store-bought crap from the plate and replaced it with a vision of goodness. Communes, with their back-to-the-land faith in self-sufficiency, cultivated gardens and raised livestock. Bohemian neighborhoods across the country opened nonprofit cooperatives with aisles of ethically produced food. Vegetarianism—once the relatively esoteric practice of Seventh-Day Adventists, Hindus, and assorted freethinkers—found a large following among the Woodstock set.

The Butcher's Guide to Well-Raised Meat: How to Buy, Cut, and Cook Great Beef, Lamb, Pork, Poultry, and More by Joshua Applestone, Jessica Applestone, Alexandra Zissu

back-to-the-land, carbon footprint, Community Supported Agriculture, gentleman farmer, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, mass immigration, McMansion, refrigerator car, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration

To make ends meet, they have to work day jobs and tend to the animals in the morning and at night. The ctional Farmer John and Mrs. John taking care of the homestead was just that— ction. We also thought we would nd farmers who were reading the same books Jess was dog-earing, the sort of people you might meet in a farmers’ market who left a city to get back to the land. And we did—and some were great farmers—but many were in the same position we were: at the bottom of a very steep learning curve. Real farmers for the most part—and I’m overgeneralizing here but bear with me—don’t have dog-eared copies of Michael Pollan’s books on their bedside tables. They’re not sending in contributions to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Attempting Normal by Marc Maron

back-to-the-land, desegregation, medical malpractice, planned obsolescence, San Francisco homelessness, Saturday Night Live

But it’s not all breeze-triggered hard-ons and monster orgasms. There’s a dark side to Viagra and it’s this: The drug makes your dick a liar. Taking it and not copping to it makes you a liar. So you are a lying dick with a lying dick and that has its consequences. The sex is Olympian, but fraudulent. Like porn. After a while, I had to wean myself back to the land of emotion. And that meant that I also had to reassess my relationship with porn. Porn is a drug, and like any other drug it can ruin your mind and life, especially if you don’t realize you’re addicted. Sexuality has been unleashed and demystified by things like pornography and Viagra, but I don’t think this was Wilhelm Reich’s vision of what would happen if repression were destroyed.

I Shall Not Hate by Izzeldin Abuelaish

back-to-the-land, clean water, facts on the ground, Suez crisis 1956, two and twenty, unemployed young men

Like the roots of the stubborn sabra that have defied the shovel of deportation, the people of Gaza have had to dig in and seek survival. My childhood was spent in the shadow of a promise: We’ll go back soon. Maybe in two weeks, maybe a little longer. But eventually we’ll leave this brutal place and go back to the land of our forefathers, where we belong. The village where my father and his father and the fathers who came before them lived is called Houg. It’s in the southern part of Israel, near Sderot. There were kibbutzim all around my family’s land, the village cemetery was nearby, and sheep grazed as far as the eye could see.

Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by Jacob Goldstein

Alan Greenspan, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, back-to-the-land, bank run, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, break the buck, card file, central bank independence, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Edmond Halley, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, index card, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, life extension, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, Steven Levy, the new new thing, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs

But somehow, appointing a nonexistent general changed things. The invention of Ned Ludd made the whole thing seem bigger. There weren’t just a few disgruntled workers. There was a secret army of what people started calling Luddites spreading across northern England. These Luddites weren’t some anti-technology cult. They weren’t back-to-the-land proto-hippies. They just wanted to get rid of the machines that were taking their jobs. In Nottinghamshire, in the spring of 1811, they started doing it by force. Almost every night, week after week, a band of armed stocking-frame knitters went out and, using hatchets and sledgehammers, broke into factories and smashed the wooden machines that were being used to knit stockings.

How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, bank run, blood diamond, Bob Geldof, borderless world, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, congestion pricing, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, double entry bookkeeping, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, facts on the ground, failed state, financial engineering, friendly fire, global village, Global Witness, Google Earth, high net worth, high-speed rail, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, Masdar, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, microcredit, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, private military company, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, sustainable-tourism, Ted Nordhaus, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, X Prize

They emphasize common purpose over clientelism, society over bureaucracy, and tangible belonging over abstract citizenship. Around the world, the community is taking center stage in development and politics. Israelis have long practiced the art of kibbutz living, and today Chinese and Japanese people are moving back to the land in droves in search of stable and sustainable community living. The Self-Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in India has its own community-level banks, health clinics, child-care programs, legal services (such as sexual harassment and workers’ compensation), and retirement accounts. SEWA doesn’t just champion women’s rights; it provides those rights through its own quasi-economic and political communities across India.

How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell

Airbnb, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Burning Man, collective bargaining, congestion pricing, context collapse, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Filter Bubble, full employment, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Ian Bogost, Internet Archive, James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, Minecraft, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, Port of Oakland, Results Only Work Environment, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Snapchat, source of truth, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, union organizing, white flight, Works Progress Administration

I want to trace a series of movements: 1) a dropping out, not dissimilar from the “dropping out” of the 1960s; 2) a lateral movement outward to things and people that are around us; and 3) a movement downward into place. Unless we are vigilant, the current design of much of our technology will block us every step of the way, deliberately creating false targets for self-reflection, curiosity, and a desire to belong to a community. When people long for some kind of escape, it’s worth asking: What would “back to the land” mean if we understood the land to be where we are right now? Could “augmented reality” simply mean putting your phone down? And what (or who) is that sitting in front of you when you finally do? It is within a blasted landscape of neoliberal determinism that this book seeks hidden springs of ambiguity and inefficiency.

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, behavioural economics, Blitzscaling, blockchain, blood diamond, Burning Man, call centre, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, digital divide, digital nomad, digital rights, end-to-end encryption, Extropian, functional programming, future of work, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, job automation, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, means of production, medical residency, microaggression, microapartment, microdosing, new economy, New Urbanism, Overton Window, passive income, Plato's cave, pull request, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech bro, tech worker, technoutopianism, telepresence, telepresence robot, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, urban planning, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, work culture , Y2K, young professional

I did not see myself becoming an executor of the sixties counterculture, but I was interested in its endurance—even startup founders held company retreats at Sea Ranch. Everywhere else, the counterculture was a historical subject, a costume-party theme, kitsch. Certainly, this side of the sixties was not a reference for my friends in New York. They had back-to-the-land fantasies, too, of a sort: renovated barns up the Hudson, with vegetable gardens and vintage pickup trucks and farmhouse sinks. Utopianism did not loom large. I didn’t know if this indicated clear-eyed realism or a failure of imagination. Around midnight, I returned alone to the tent and zipped myself into a sleeping bag, Ian’s fleece camping pillow bundled under my head.

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Boeing 747, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, company town, crowdsourcing, fulfillment center, full employment, game design, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, Mars Rover, new economy, Nomadland, off grid, off-the-grid, payday loans, Pepto Bismol, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, six sigma, supply-chain management, traumatic brain injury, union organizing, urban sprawl, Wayback Machine, white picket fence, Y2K

She told me that, after we’d lost contact in the desert, she and Gary had progressed seventy miles on their cross-country journey to Kentucky before stopping for the night in Springfield, Missouri. “We have been driving three hundred miles a day,” she added. “Gary is very fatigued and the heat is kicking my ass.” “I’m glad you’re getting close!” I wrote back. Then I gave up on texting and called her. Our conversation turned back to the land. “It was beautiful,” Linda said. “When you put your hand in the dirt I was like, ‘Damn, that’s nice dirt!’” Then she told me more about Gary. “He really likes me,” she said. “And he’s done about as many jobs as I have!” Gary had run a radiology department, managed a grocery store, and worked in construction, she elaborated.

The Wisdom of Frugality: Why Less Is More - More or Less by Emrys Westacott

Airbnb, back-to-the-land, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Bonfire of the Vanities, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate raider, critique of consumerism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, degrowth, Diane Coyle, discovery of DNA, Downton Abbey, dumpster diving, financial independence, full employment, greed is good, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, income inequality, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, loss aversion, McMansion, means of production, move fast and break things, negative equity, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, paradox of thrift, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sunk-cost fallacy, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Veblen good, Virgin Galactic, Zipcar

Since, as Marx pointed out, constant change is a defining feature of modernity, we can expect it to trigger a longing for simpler times, and we see this longing expressed not only in a large body of literature but also in the deliberate lifestyle choices that some people make: downsizing, downshifting, going back to the land, growing one’s own food, choosing greater self-sufficiency over consumerism, and seeking to preserve or revive traditional crafts like basket weaving and quilt making. A similar motive has given rise to the Slow Movement, a general term for the various ways in which people seek to combat the frenetic pace of modern life.

The botany of desire: a plant's-eye view of the world by Michael Pollan

back-to-the-land, clean water, David Attenborough, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Francisco Pizarro, invention of agriculture, Joseph Schumpeter, mandatory minimum, Maui Hawaii, means of production, off-the-grid, paper trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Steven Pinker

Deep down I suspect that many gardeners regard themselves as small-time alchemists, transforming the dross of compost (and water and sunlight) into substances of rare value and beauty and power. Maybe at some level we’re still in touch with the power of the old gardens. Also, one of the attractions of gardening is the independence it can confer—from the greengrocer, the florist, the pharmacist, and, for some, the drug dealer. One does not have to go all the way “back to the land” to experience the satisfaction of providing for yourself off the grid of the national economy. So, yes, I was curious to see if I could grow some “really amazing Maui” in my Connecticut garden. It seemed to me this would indeed represent a particularly impressive sort of alchemy. But as things turned out, my experiment in growing marijuana was of a piece with my experience smoking it, paranoid and stupid being the operative terms

Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle by Dan Senor, Saul Singer

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, Benchmark Capital, Boycotts of Israel, call centre, Celtic Tiger, clean tech, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Fairchild Semiconductor, friendly fire, Gene Kranz, immigration reform, labor-force participation, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, new economy, pez dispenser, post scarcity, profit motive, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, smart grid, social graph, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Suez crisis 1956, unit 8200, web application, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

You feel like a falah [“farmer” in Arabic], a farmer of high tech. You dress down. You’re with your buddies from the army unit. You talk about a way of life—not necessarily about how much money you’re going to make, though it’s obviously also about that.” For Margalit, innovation and technology are the twenty-first-century version of going back to the land. “The new pioneering, Zionist narrative is about creating things,” he says. Indeed, what makes the current Israeli blend so powerful is that it is a mashup of the founders’ patriotism, drive, and constant consciousness of scarcity and adversity and the curiosity and restlessness that have deep roots in Israeli and Jewish history.

New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle

AI winter, Airbnb, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boeing 747, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, congestion charging, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Eyjafjallajökull, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fear of failure, Flash crash, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Greyball, Haber-Bosch Process, Higgs boson, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Bridle, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Large Hadron Collider, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Leo Hollis, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, oil shock, p-value, pattern recognition, peak oil, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social graph, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stem cell, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, Uber for X, undersea cable, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks

In the first few years, the humans easily beat their computer opponents, even increasing the margin of victory as their skills in the new game improved faster than the programmes challenging them. But in 2015, the contest was won decisively by a machine, a result unlikely to be reversed. It is tempting when confronted by the power and opacity of intelligent systems to delay, derail, or concede the ground. Where Levy and Alterman built walls, Arimaa went back to the land, attempting to carve out an alternative space outside the sphere of machine dominance. This was not Kasparov’s approach. Instead of rejecting the machines, he returned the year after his defeat to Deep Blue with a different kind of chess, which he called ‘Advanced Chess’. Other names for Advanced Chess include ‘cyborg’ and ‘centaur’ chess.

Green Economics: An Introduction to Theory, Policy and Practice by Molly Scott Cato

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bretton Woods, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, deskilling, energy security, food miles, Food sovereignty, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job satisfaction, land bank, land reform, land value tax, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Money creation, mortgage debt, Multi Fibre Arrangement, passive income, peak oil, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Rupert Read, seminal paper, the built environment, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, tontine, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons

But there is another meaning implied in it which is far greater and much more important. Swadeshi means ‘reliance on our own strength’. ‘Our strength’ means the strength of our body, our mind and our soul.13 This call for self-reliance was a clear inspiration to the self-sufficiency movement in Europe and the US from the 1960s onwards, with its impetus to move back to the land and provide for one’s own needs.14 As shown by the activities of Indian peasants listed in Box 8.2, Gandhi’s message is still inspiring emancipatory activity in the poorer countries of the South. Following its negative experiences on the boom-and-bust roller coaster, Thailand has now stepped aside to follow its own path to human-scale development, as reported in the latest (2007) UNDP Human Development Report for that country.

The Knife's Edge by Stephen Westaby

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Boris Johnson, call centre, dark triade / dark tetrad, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, presumed consent, stem cell, Stephen Hawking

His potential demise or the straightforward risk to my own reputation? I wasn’t expecting the professor to regain consciousness that evening, but he did. I was still in my office when the night registrar bounced in to let me know. It cheered me up immensely, so I set off for intensive care to welcome him back to the land of the living. Waking up doesn’t equate to intact intellect, but it’s an important start. Might it be that the intermittent short bursts of brain reperfusion delivered sufficient oxygen to keep him safe, or did they just do enough to keep his brain stem alive? After all, he might still be a vegetable.

1989 The Berlin Wall: My Part in Its Downfall by Peter Millar

anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, glass ceiling, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, kremlinology, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Prenzlauer Berg, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sinatra Doctrine, urban sprawl, working-age population

If a West Berlin allotment-owner fancied spending Sunday afternoon doing a bit of weeding, he rang the bell and an East German soldier escorted him along a track lined with barbed wire fencing to another door in a concrete wall, behind which lay his vegetable plot. When he wanted to come back, he repeated the procedure. ‘I wouldn’t be surprised,’ the pilot said as we wheeled around and headed back towards sanity, ‘if every now and then they slip one of them a cabbage or two.’ As we headed back to the landing ground he showed me one more of the Berlin Wall’s anomalous ‘exclaves’, as bizarre as the isolated allotments: the hamlet of Steinstücken. By any sensible point of view Steinstücken was part of Babelsberg, a suburb of Potsdam, the old city of royal palaces south-west of West Berlin (and therefore in East Germany).

The New Economics: A Bigger Picture by David Boyle, Andrew Simms

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Crossrail, delayed gratification, deskilling, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, financial deregulation, financial exclusion, financial innovation, full employment, garden city movement, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, John Elkington, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, light touch regulation, loss aversion, mega-rich, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, mortgage debt, neoliberal agenda, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, profit motive, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, systems thinking, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, working-age population

69 When Tom and Barbara Good, the popular characters in the BBC sitcom The Good Life, first emerged on British TV screens in the 1970s, the word ‘downshifting’ wasn’t in common use. It was actually coined in 1994 by Gerald Celente, the director of the Trends Research Institute in Rheinbeck, New York.6 But the idea of living a bit more simply, or going back to the land – as people put it then – was very much in people’s minds. By the 1990s, downshifting had emerged as an option for being less busy, taking more time, and trying to get off the treadmill to live a bit more authentically – which by then often meant making relationships more central in our lives.

Stuffocation by James Wallman

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Black Swan, BRICs, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, collaborative consumption, commoditize, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, happiness index / gross national happiness, hedonic treadmill, high net worth, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Hargreaves, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Paul Samuelson, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, post-materialism, public intellectual, retail therapy, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, Streisand effect, The future is already here, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, World Values Survey, Zipcar

“In the popular imagination there is a tendency to equate the simple life with Thoreau’s cabin in the woods by Walden Pond and to assume that people must live an isolated and rural existence,” Elgin wrote in Voluntary Simplicity: Toward a Way of Life that Is Outwardly Simple, Inwardly Rich. The simple life is not like that, though, he explained. “While ecological living brings with it a reverence for nature, this does not require moving to rural setting. Instead of a ‘back to the land’ movement, it is more accurate to describe this as a ‘make the most of wherever you are’ movement.” In the book, Elgin was keen not only to explain what voluntary simplicity was, but also to show how popular it was becoming. Near the beginning of the 1993 reprint of his book, he demonstrated this with some compelling statistics from two magazines.

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles, Mehmet Cansoy

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, carbon footprint, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, future of work, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, global supply chain, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, mass incarceration, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer rental, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Stewart Brand, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, wage slave, walking around money, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

They viewed technology through the lens of war, as a destructive, dehumanizing force.6 New Communalists rejected politics as part of the problem and saw technology as a solution. Their bible was Stuart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog, which was known for its innovative gadgets and technical offerings. When personal computing and the internet developed in the 1990s, New Communalists hailed them as the route to the ecotopias they had failed to create in their back-to-the-land phase. The New Communalists’ views morphed into what became known as the Californian Ideology.7 It combined libertarian politics, countercultural aesthetics, and techno-utopian visions.8 Its core belief was that technology would yield personal liberation and egalitarian community. Individuals could now determine their own fates, as personal computers plus the internet offered ways to earn money without relying on a bureaucratic institution.9 The financial accessibility of computers meant that everyone could join in as equals.

Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World of the Bushmen by James Suzman

access to a mobile phone, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, clean water, discovery of the americas, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, full employment, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, means of production, Occupy movement, open borders, out of africa, post-work, quantitative easing, rewilding, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, trickle-down economics, unemployed young men, We are the 99%

Soon military clinics spent more time stitching up wounds earned in drunken fights than they did treating soldiers injured in battle, and Ju/’hoansi started talking of Tsumkwe as “a place of death.” Many Ju/’hoansi had grown tired of life in Tsumkwe by the mid-1980s. Food may have been plentiful, but the other “benefits” of modernity started to grate, and people began to feel nostalgic about their old lives. Talk about moving “back to the land” soon turned from idle fireside chatter to a tangible yearning. Soon small groups packed up their few belongings and returned to their traditional territories, where they could be far from the influence of the military, the alcohol traders, the missionaries, and the shops. Supported by a small charity established by John Marshall, they were given assistance in trying to support themselves by farming now that the creation of Bushmanland had much reduced their traditional territories.

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

Brand positioned individuals as being akin to gods and promised the Catalog would equip them with the tools they needed to wield their power toward whatever end they saw fit, and some of those tools were small-scale technologies designed to serve individuals instead of major corporations. The magazine was designed as the place where “the technological and intellectual output of industry and high science met the Eastern religion, acid mysticism, and communal social theory of the back-to-the-land movement.”7 In bringing these communities together, the magazine not only appealed to the communalists dreaming of or living on communes, but also to researchers at university labs and defense contractors who had embraced a more project-based work environment that was seen as a challenge to the traditional hierarchical organization.

The Ecotechnic Future: Envisioning a Post-Peak World by John Michael Greer

back-to-the-land, Black Swan, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, David Strachan, deindustrialization, Easter island, European colonialism, Extropian, failed state, feminist movement, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Santayana, hydrogen economy, hygiene hypothesis, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Jevons paradox, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, McMansion, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-industrial society, Project for a New American Century, Ray Kurzweil, Stewart Brand, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, upwardly mobile, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

I have met far too many people who don’t know enough about plant care to keep a potted petunia alive and have never put in a full day of hard physical labor in their lives — ​most middle class Americans haven’t — ​but talk enthusiastically about the life of subsistence farming they expect to lead in a lifeboat ecovillage as industrial civilization crashes into ruin around them. It’s all very reminiscent of the aftermath of the Sixties, when a great many young people headed back to the land with equally high hopes. Most of them straggled back to the cities a few months or years later with their hopes in shreds, having discovered that fantasies of the good life in nature’s lap make poor preparation for the hard work, discipline and relative poverty of life as a subsistence farmer.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Weeden, ‘Overwork and the Slow Convergence in the Gender Gap in Wages’, American Sociological Review 79: 3 (2014). 132.Keir Milburn, ‘On Social Strikes and Directional Demands’, Plan C, 7 May 2015, at weareplanc.org. 133.State of the Global Workplace: Employee Engagement Insights for Business Leaders Worldwide, Gallup, 2013, pdf available at ihrim.org, p. 12. 134.As usual, the satirical newspaper The Onion is ahead of the curve, with a recent headline declaring: ‘Chinese Factory Workers Fear They May Never Be Replaced with Machines’. 135.Gáspár Miklós Tamás, ‘Telling the Truth About Class’, Grundrisse 22 (2007), at grundrisse.net. 136.While it adhered to unscalable folk-political practices, the ‘back to the land’ movement of the 1970s was in many ways an expression of the desire to escape the dominant work ethic. Bernard Marszalek, ‘Lafargue for Today’, in The Right to Be Lazy, p. 13. 137.Gorz, Paths to Paradise, p. 10. 138.Steensland, Failed Welfare Revolution p. 220. 7. A NEW COMMON SENSE 1.Lesley Wood, Crisis and Control: The Militarization of Protest Policing (London: Pluto, 2014). 2.For an overview of some of the debates around capitalism’s origins, see Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View (London: Verso, 2002), Chapters 1–3. 3.For a foundational step towards understanding the conditions of postcolonial capitalism and the hegemony of ‘development’, see Kalyan Sanyal, Rethinking Capitalist Development: Primitive Accumulation, Governmentality and Post-Colonial Capitalism (New Delhi: Routledge India, 2013). 4.The unique conditions of Venezuela appear to have produced the only space in which this strategy is being meaningfully adopted, albeit in an intriguingly modified form.

Two Nations, Indivisible: A History of Inequality in America: A History of Inequality in America by Jamie Bronstein

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, oil shock, plutocrats, price discrimination, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Strategic Defense Initiative, strikebreaker, the long tail, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wage slave, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) gave block grants directly to states to distribute for relief. FERA also established cooperative farms and rural industries for relief recipients—mostly young families—who wanted to stay in rural areas. The National Industrial Recovery Act also dealt with unemployment by moving some of the urban population back to the land, just as the National Reformers had recommended in the 1840s. Ultimately, these programs were merged into the Resettlement Administration and then the Farm Security Administration, and included not only cooperative communities but also planned suburban settlements.22 Relief also meant having the government directly employ millions of people, setting an example for future administrations that government-sponsored public service was possible and beneficial.23 The Public Works Administration (PWA), later renamed the Works Progress Administration (WPA), employed 8 million people and spent over $10 billion on roads, bridges, post offices, stadiums, and airports.24 It employed writers, artists, actors, musicians, and historians in the largest government-funded cultural project in the history of the United States.

Machinery of Freedom: A Guide to Radical Capitalism by David Friedman

Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, Fractional reserve banking, hiring and firing, jitney, laissez-faire capitalism, Machinery of Freedom by David Friedman, means of production, Money creation, radical decentralization, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Stewart Brand, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

Compulsory social service is so unanswerably right that the very first duty of a government is to see that everybody works enough to pay her way and leave something over for the profit of the country and the improvement of the world [from chapters 23 and 73]. Consider, as a more current example, the back to the land movement, as represented by The Mother Earth News. Ideologically, it is hostile to what it views as a wasteful, unnatural, mass consumption society. Yet the private property institutions of that society serve it just as they serve anyone else. The Mother Earth News and The Whole Earth Catalog are printed on paper bought on the private market and sold in private bookstores, alongside other books and magazines dedicated to teaching you how to make a million dollars in real estate or live the good life on a hundred thousand a year.

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

This is part of the basic definition, recognized around the world, including in Italy. But in Italy one hears executives and boards also insisting that their co-ops are not for their members—they’re for future generations. They’re for the community. One hears this from both the big-time manufacturing executives and back-to-the-land farmers. The members are stewards, like a family with an apartment in what was once a regal palazzo, like the people who sweep the tourists’ trash at a Roman ruin. This sense of history has helped make Italy’s co-ops among the world’s strongest. But history also tolerates their contradictions, their tendencies to drift into oligarchic control or capitalist conformity.

Old Man's War by John Scalzi

back-to-the-land, gravity well

Don't take this the wrong way, but I prayed you would die. I couldn't imagine they could piece you back together like this." "Glad to disappoint you," I said. "Glad to be disappointed," he said, and then someone else entered the room. "Jesse," I said. Jesse came around the bed and gave me a peck on the cheek. "Welcome back to the land of the living, John," she said, and then stepped back. "Look at us, together again. The three musketeers." "Two and a half musketeers, anyway," I said. "Don't be morbid," Jesse said. "Dr. Fiorina says you're going to make a full recovery. Your jaw should be completely grown by tomorrow, and the leg will be another couple days after that.

Immortality: The Quest to Live Forever and How It Drives Civilization by Stephen Cave

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, back-to-the-land, clean water, double helix, George Santayana, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Lao Tzu, life extension, planetary scale, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, stem cell, technoutopianism, the scientific method

He started a little business and settled down to live forever on this magical island. But after three hundred years, he too was growing weary of life’s monotonies—the frustrations of work, the arguments with the neighbors. It all seemed dull and pointless. Finally, having once prayed to Xu Fu to make him immortal, he prayed to him once again to bring him back to the land of mortality. Instantly the paper crane flew out of his pocket and unfolded to its giant size. Sentaro climbed onto its back, and they took off. But on the way a terrible storm struck: the paper crane crumpled and fell into the sea. As Sentaro struggled to stay afloat, he saw a great shark coming toward him, its terrible jaws open—he screamed for Xu Fu to return and rescue him.

Against Everything: Essays by Mark Greif

1960s counterculture, back-to-the-land, Bernie Madoff, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, citizen journalism, collateralized debt obligation, crack epidemic, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deindustrialization, Desert Island Discs, Donald Trump, fixed-gear, income inequality, informal economy, Joan Didion, managed futures, Norman Mailer, Ponzi scheme, postindustrial economy, Ronald Reagan, technoutopianism, telemarketer, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, white flight

First, in the late 1960s, came reactions against the inhuman technical character of food science and “agribusiness.” Critics in this phase pitted themselves against consumer capitalism. This initial reaction was romantic and primitivist, associated with the late-1960s counterculture and the movement “back to the land,” just a few decades after productivity gains had led an agrarian population to leave it. It brought a call to the East for mystic authenticity in the culture of “health foods”—tofu, brown rice, yogurt, seaweed, wheat germ, made from the live spirits and microbes excluded in industrial processing.

Fresh Off the Boat by Eddie Huang

affirmative action, back-to-the-land, Columbine, cuban missile crisis, East Village, Howard Zinn, Lao Tzu, rent control, Telecommunications Act of 1996, W. E. B. Du Bois, walkable city

I remember she had a giant backpack, shorts, and something orange on, but I wasn’t sad. I knew I’d see her again. She already planned to come visit me in Florida when she got back. But I was worried about Taiwan. Who knew when I’d come back? There was a part of me that dreaded going back to Florida. It was like going back to work. I knew that in a matter of days, I’d be back to the land of slanted-eye or ching-chong jokes. After those months in Taiwan, I started asking myself: Why? Why the fuck do I have to be Q-Tip cryin’ Sucka N!gg@? I was sick of explaining myself, sick of being different, and sick of Florida. I felt something weird and new: I was happy. Reconciled. I learned my lesson from America and didn’t want to go back.

The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class by Elizabeth Currid-Halkett

assortative mating, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BRICs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, cognitive dissonance, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, discrete time, disruptive innovation, Downton Abbey, East Village, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, fixed-gear, food desert, Ford Model T, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, income inequality, iterative process, knowledge economy, longitudinal study, Mason jar, means of production, NetJets, new economy, New Urbanism, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-industrial society, profit maximization, public intellectual, Richard Florida, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the long tail, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Hsieh, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, Veblen good, women in the workforce

What makes it so pervasive and prolific is its ability to bring together people from opposite ends of capitalism’s spectrum. Or, as one observer put it with regard to the magazine Modern Farmer, “That means the magazine has attracted readers who include an Amish farmer and vegetable supplier to Whole Foods, Brooklyn rooftop farmers harvesting kale and broccoli and myriad young farmers going back to the land.”10 The environmental awareness and social consciousness that Whole Foods and farmers’ markets propagate is what inspires many of its dedicated consumers. What the sociologist Josee Johnston calls the “citizen-consumer hybrid” of ethical consumption is the way in which we use our consumer choices as a form of social practice.

The Emperor Far Away: Travels at the Edge of China by David Eimer

back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, British Empire, car-free, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, mass immigration, megacity, offshore financial centre, open borders, South China Sea

They’ve taken over nearly all the tourist trade and almost all the money from tourism goes to the Chinese.’ But as Shigatse’s history indicated, the Tibetans in this part of U-Tsang were once traders. By closing the border with India, the CCP hasn’t just sealed off Tibet from foreign influence, it has driven the Tibetans here back to the land. Shigatse’s fifteenth-century dzong, supposedly the model for the Potala Palace, was completely destroyed in the Cultural Revolution and has since been rebuilt, using cement rather than Tibetan stone. The Tashilhunpo Monastery, Shigatse’s other landmark, is rather more authentic. Like Sera, it is the size of a village and as much a university as a monastery.

Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is Sending the Middle Class by Jeff Faux

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, back-to-the-land, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, classic study, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disruptive innovation, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, guns versus butter model, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Hyman Minsky, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, informal economy, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, McMansion, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Minsky moment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, old-boy network, open immigration, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price mechanism, price stability, private military company, public intellectual, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school vouchers, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Solyndra, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, working poor, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War, you are the product

He forecasts that the prairie heartland will be repopulated as advanced telecommunications allow families to live and work where land is cheap. But all of this, he cautions, can happen only if bottom-up local markets are left to flourish free of the heavy hand of centralizing government. Globalization, Kotkin glibly asserts, is decentralizing. Kotkin’s localism is more mainstream Chamber of Commerce than it is radical Tea Party or back-to-the-land communitarian. But like the Tea Party elderly man who demanded that the government keep its hands off his Medicare, Kotkin shares the contempt for big government while happily enjoying its benefits. Thus, for example, he writes that the suburbs and the rural United States spontaneously generate their own economic growth, with little reference to the massive government subsidies that support them.

The Weather of the Future by Heidi Cullen

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, air freight, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, availability heuristic, back-to-the-land, bank run, California gold rush, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, data science, Easter island, energy security, hindcast, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, millennium bug, ocean acidification, out of africa, Silicon Valley, smart cities, trade route, urban planning, Y2K

Some of the gases in the atmosphere—oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen—were essentially transparent to both sunlight and IR, but other gases were in fact opaque: they actually absorbed the IR, as if they were bricks in an oven. Those gases include carbon dioxide (CO2) and also methane, nitrous oxide, and water vapor. These greenhouse gases are very good at absorbing infrared light. They spread heat back to the land and the oceans. They let sunlight through on its way in from space, but intercept IR on its way back out. Tyndall knew he was on to something. The fact that certain gases in the atmosphere could absorb IR implied a very clever natural thermostat, just as he had suspected. His top four candidates for a thermostat were water vapor, without which he said the Earth’s surface would be “held fast in the iron grip of frost”; methane; ozone; and, of course, carbon dioxide.5 Tyndall’s experiments proved that Fourier’s greenhouse effect was real.

The Sirens of Mars: Searching for Life on Another World by Sarah Stewart Johnson

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Astronomia nova, back-to-the-land, Beryl Markham, classic study, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, data science, Drosophila, Elon Musk, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mercator projection, Neil Armstrong, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ronald Reagan, scientific mainstream, sensible shoes, Suez canal 1869

I read about the itinerant rover, named for Sojourner Truth, the former slave who escaped captivity and went on to be a prominent abolitionist, and the rough, rocky floodplain the rover would explore. I read about the engineering systems, about how Sojourner would periodically stop driving and send a “heartbeat” message back to the landing station. One of the articles closed with a quote from a professor at Washington University in St. Louis, a Pathfinder scientist working on the very same campus where I would soon be studying. I underlined his name—Ray Arvidson—and carefully tore the article from the page to send to my father, who was certainly following these distant goings-on.

Owning the Sun by Alexander Zaitchik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, desegregation, Donald Trump, energy transition, informal economy, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, knowledge economy, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Menlo Park, Mont Pelerin Society, Nelson Mandela, oil shock, Philip Mirowski, placebo effect, Potemkin village, profit motive, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, The Chicago School, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, Whole Earth Catalog

No longer interested in how patents retarded innovation and plugged up competition, he penned an influential book, The Economics of Regulation, credited with laying the basis for the undoing of his party’s regulatory legacy, beginning with the Aeronautics Board established by Truman. 35.An understanding of this history, together with the influence of psychedelics and the counterculture, contributed to the open science ethos of the young Silicon Valley. 36.This shift was embodied in Silicon Valley hype men like Stewart Brand, publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, who traded in his back-to-the-land philosophy for a spastic digital utopianism. 37.As of this writing, the NIH website defines the CRADA program as “an exciting opportunity for NIH investigators to join with their colleagues from industry and academia in the joint pursuit of common research goals. Government scientists can leverage their own research resources, as well as serve the larger mission of NIH, to facilitate the development and commercialization of healthcare pharmaceuticals and products.

The Hacker Crackdown by Bruce Sterling

Apple II, back-to-the-land, Future Shock, game design, ghettoisation, Hacker Conference 1984, Haight Ashbury, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, index card, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, machine readable, Mitch Kapor, pirate software, plutocrats, radical decentralization, Silicon Valley, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review

Rigid ideological consistency had never been a strong suit of the Whole Earth Catalog. This Point publication had enjoyed a strong vogue during the late 60s and early 70s, when it offered hundreds of practical (and not so practical) tips on communitarian living, environmentalism, and getting back-to-the-land. The Whole Earth Catalog, and its sequels, sold two and half million copies and won a National Book Award. With the slow collapse of American radical dissent, the Whole Earth Catalog had slipped to a more modest corner of the cultural radar; but in its magazine incarnation, CoEvolution Quarterly, the Point Foundation continued to offer a magpie potpourri of "access to tools and ideas."

The Last Best Cure: My Quest to Awaken the Healing Parts of My Brain and Get Back My Body, My Joy, a Nd My Life by Donna Jackson Nakazawa

back-to-the-land, epigenetics, index card, longitudinal study, medical residency, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, mouse model, place-making, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, stem cell

I am used to waiting during the first ten or fifteen minutes of the day, as I go through my morning routine, for the cranky, creaky pain to subside in my left back and hip. Like the Tin Man in want of an oil can. I have learned to wait, too, for any numb body parts—an arm I slept on, a foot that’s still dead—to come fully back to the land of the living. Yet as I groggily head downstairs to make my first cup of green tea, it dawns on me that I’m not wincing over my back or my left hip. Numbness—well, that’s a perennial. But the back and hip pain are . . . not there. Noticing this one change makes me think: I also haven’t been wincing when I get up from the couch or out of the car.

Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith and Love by Dava Sobel

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, cognitive dissonance, Dava Sobel, Defenestration of Prague, Edmond Halley, germ theory of disease, Hans Lippershey, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Louis Pasteur, Murano, Venice glass, Neil Armstrong, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, Peace of Westphalia, retrograde motion

His descendants redubbed themselves the Galilei family in his honor and wrote “Galileo Galilei” on his tombstone, but retained the coat of arms that had belonged to the ancestral Buonaiutis since the thirteenth century—a red stepladder on a gold shield, forming a pictograph of the word buonaiuti, which literally means “good help.” The meaning of the name Galileo, or Galilei, harks back to the land of Galilee, although, as Galileo explained on this score, he was not at all a Jew. GALILEI GENEALOGY GALILEI FAMILY COAT OF ARMS Galileo Galilei took a few tentative steps along his famous forebear’s path, studying medicine for two years at the University of Pisa, before he gave himself over to the pursuit of mathematics and physics, his true passion.

Origins: How Earth's History Shaped Human History by Lewis Dartnell

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, bioinformatics, clean water, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, Eratosthenes, financial innovation, Google Earth, Khyber Pass, Malacca Straits, megacity, meta-analysis, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pax Mongolica, peak oil, phenotype, rewilding, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, spice trade, Suez crisis 1956, supervolcano, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

At the tip of the Mani Peninsula, the southernmost point of Greece, for example, is the entrance to a cave where the legendary Orpheus is said to have descended into the Underworld to find his deceased wife Eurydice. The beauty of Orpheus’ lyre playing won over the god Hades, who allowed him to take Eurydice back to the land of the living on one condition: that he should not look back. But as soon as Orpheus had reached the upper world he anxiously turned round to check that she was following, and so Eurydice disappeared for ever.12 Where this Tethyean limestone has been baked underground in the convergent plate boundaries around the Mediterranean–by magma rising up and intruding into it, or by its being caught in the tectonic vice crunching up mountain ranges like the Alps–it is metamorphosed into marble.

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality by Richard Heinberg

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, green transition, happiness index / gross national happiness, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, naked short selling, Naomi Klein, Negawatt, new economy, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, price stability, private military company, quantitative easing, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, short selling, special drawing rights, systems thinking, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, tulip mania, WikiLeaks, working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game

In the United States, the term “degrowth” is seldom mentioned; however, over the past twenty years a similar trend in thinking has spurred the “voluntary simplicity” movement, which questions the environmental, psychological, and social costs of ever-growing consumption. The movement has roots in the ethical beliefs of religious groups like the Amish, but also in the writings of philosopher Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862) and back-to-the-land pioneers Scott and Helen Nearing (1883–1983; 1904– 1995, authors of Living the Good Life).36 The books Voluntary Simplicity by Duane Elgin (1981), and Your Money or Your Life by Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin (1992), and the documentary film “Affluenza” (1997) helped define this movement, which now also features magazines and newsletters to assist in the formation of local simple living networks.37 Many simplicity advocates promote Buy Nothing Day, which falls on the Friday following Thanksgiving Day in the United States, as an antidote to pre-Christmas shopping frenzy.

Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo by Rebecca Walker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, call centre, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, export processing zone, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, microaggression, neurotypical, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Rana Plaza, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator

We arrived at our old beach and I picked my daughter up; holding on to her soft, warm body, I waded into the shallow water, afraid to look back. But my daughter wasn’t afraid. She peeked around my shoulder and pointed at the oaks. “Look,” she said, “trees,” and I knew I had to look. Together we turned back to the land, taking in the sight of the new house, the half-dozen oaks towering overhead, the treehouse we built from old railroad ties and pallets when I was ten. “Look,” I said, pointing to the treehouse, “a house.” She laughed then, and even though I had tears in my eyes, I laughed, too. A few seconds later she pointed at the house.

Coastal California by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, electricity market, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, Mason jar, McMansion, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Wozniak, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

The cozy rooms have wooden floors, top-quality beds, breakfast and spa privileges, and no TVs. From Hwy 101, exit at Vichy Springs Rd and follow the state-landmark signs east for 3 miles. Ukiah is five minutes, but a world, away. ORR HOT SPRINGS A clothing-optional resort that’s beloved by locals, back-to-the-land hipsters, backpackers and liberal-minded tourists, springs ( 707-462-6277; tent sites $45-50, d $140-160, cottages $195-230; 10am-10pm; ) has private tubs, a sauna, spring-fed rock-bottomed swimming pool, steam, massage and magical gardens. Day use costs $25, $20 on Mondays. Accommodation includes use of the spa and communal kitchen; some cottages have kitchens.

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Other chefs eager to make their names and fortunes among free-spending wine-country visitors have since flocked to the Napa and Sonoma Valleys, where farm-to-table cuisine is the byword in rustic-chic kitchens. Sonoma hasn’t forgotten its origins as a Mexican pueblo (town) either: you can still spot taco trucks rolling by vineyards. North Coast In the 1970s, San Francisco hippies headed back to the land along the North Coast, seeking a more self-sufficient lifestyle, reviving traditions of making breads and cheeses from scratch and growing their own everything. Early adopters of pesticide-free farming, NorCal’s hippie homesteaders innovated hearty, organic cuisine with a health-minded, global-fusion twist.

Coastal California Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Apple II, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bike sharing, Burning Man, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, flex fuel, Frank Gehry, gentrification, glass ceiling, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, income inequality, intermodal, Joan Didion, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, Lyft, machine readable, Mason jar, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, Peoples Temple, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, starchitect, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, trade route, transcontinental railway, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Wall-E, white picket fence, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Other chefs eager to make their names and fortunes among free-spending wine tasters descended on this 30-mile valley – and now the night skies over Napa are crowded with 11 Michelin stars. To sample the artisanal food scene, stop by Napa's Oxbow Public Market. Santa Barbara Wine Country | ED FREEMAN / GETTY IMAGES © North Coast San Francisco hippies headed back to the land here in the 1960s to find a more self-sufficient lifestyle, reviving traditions of making breads and cheeses from scratch and growing their own everything. Early adopters of pesticide-free farming, these hippie homesteaders innovated hearty, organic cuisine that was health-minded – yet still satisfied pot-smoking munchies.

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Orr Hot Springs A soak in the thermal waters of the rustic Orr Hot Springs resort ( GOOGLE MAP ; %707-462-6277; www.orrhotsprings.org; 13201 Orr Springs Rd; day-use adult/child $30/25; hby appointment 10am-10pm) is heavenly. While it’s not for the bashful, the clothing-optional resort is beloved by locals, back-to-the-land hipsters, backpackers and liberal-minded tourists. Still, you don’t have to let it all hang out. Enjoy the private tubs, a sauna, a spring-fed, rock-bottomed swimming pool, steam room, massage and magical gardens. Soaking in the rooftop stargazing tubs on a clear night is magical. Make reservations.

Free to Choose: A Personal Statement by Milton Friedman, Rose D. Friedman

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, bank run, banking crisis, business cycle, Corn Laws, foreign exchange controls, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, German hyperinflation, invisible hand, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, price stability, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, road to serfdom, Sam Peltzman, school vouchers, Simon Kuznets, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration

One has to do with assuring our safety, protecting our health, preserving clean air and water; the other, with how effectively we organize our economy. Why should these two good things conflict? The answer is that whatever the announced objectives, all of the movements in the past two decades—the consumer movement, the ecology movement, the back-to-the-land movement, the hippie movement, the organic-food movement, the protect-the-wilderness movement, the zero-population-growth movement, the "small is beautiful" movement, the antinuclear movement—have had one thing in common. All have been antigrowth. They have been opposed to new developments, to industrial innovation, to the increased use of natural resources.

Bringing Columbia Home: The Untold Story of a Lost Space Shuttle and Her Crew by Michael Leinbach, Jonathan H. Ward

Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, restrictive zoning, space junk

Management did not seriously consider the recommendations to throw overboard all “loose objects” in the crew module and Spacehab, especially with the official determination that there was no concern for flight safety.5 Ed Mango, my assistant launch director, had supported “Hoot” Gibson and Jerry Ross’s STS-27 mission early in his career at NASA. Recalling how badly beat up Atlantis was on that mission, Mango expected that Columbia would also make it back to the landing site, but would probably be heavily damaged. He requested permission in advance to go out to the runway after the vehicle was “safed” so that he could inspect the ship personally. Ann Micklos said, “Putting on my engineering hat, we were interested to see what the vehicle was going to look like when it came back.

The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime by Mj Demarco

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, back-to-the-land, Bernie Madoff, bounce rate, business logic, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, cloud computing, commoditize, dark matter, delayed gratification, demand response, do what you love, Donald Trump, drop ship, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, housing crisis, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, multilevel marketing, passive income, passive investing, payday loans, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, Ronald Reagan, subscription business, upwardly mobile, wealth creators, white picket fence, World Values Survey, zero day

Some choose short-term mediocre comfort over long-term meteoric comfort. To live unlike everyone else, you have to do what everyone else won't. Arm your expectations to hard work, sacrifice, and other bumps in the road. These are the land mines where the weak are removed from the road and sent back to the land of “most people.” Failure is natural to success. Expect it and learn from it. One home run could set you financially secure for your life, perhaps generations. Home runs can't be hit in the dug out. Moronic risks have unlimited downside (long term) and limited upside (short term). Intelligent risks have unlimited upside (long term) and limited downside (short term.)

Wireless by Charles Stross

air gap, anthropic principle, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Buckminster Fuller, Cepheid variable, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, cosmic microwave background, Easter island, epigenetics, finite state, Georg Cantor, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, jitney, Khyber Pass, Late Heavy Bombardment, launch on warning, lifelogging, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neil Armstrong, peak oil, phenotype, Pluto: dwarf planet, security theater, sensible shoes, Turing machine, undersea cable

She splashes the best part of a gallon of fuel over the heap, coughing with the stink: she caps the jerry can, drags it away from the mound, then strikes a match and throws it flickering at the disordered insect kingdom. There’s a soft whump as the igniting gas sets the mound aflame: small shapes writhe and crisp beneath an empty blue sky pierced by the glaring pinprick of S Doradus. Maddy doesn’t stay to watch. She hauls the heavy sample case back to the Land Rover, loads it into the trunk alongside John, and scurries back toward town as fast as she can. She’s almost ten miles away before she remembers the camera, left staring in cyclopean isolation at the scorched remains of the dead colony. HOMEWARD-BOUND The big ground-effect ship rumbles softly as it cruises across the endless expanse of the Dzerzhinsky Ocean at nearly three hundred knots, homeward-bound at last.

The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth's Past) by Cixin Liu

Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, cosmic microwave background, Deng Xiaoping, game design, Henri Poincaré, horn antenna, information security, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Norbert Wiener, Panamax, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Von Neumann architecture

Any connections between them would be extremely attenuated. One winter, Ye received an invitation from a not-very-prominent university in Western Europe to be a visiting scholar for half a year. After she landed at Heathrow for her interview, a young man came to meet her. They didn’t leave the airport, but instead turned back to the landing strip. There, he escorted her onto a helicopter. As the helicopter roared into the foggy air over England, time seemed to rewind and Ye experienced déjà vu. Many years ago, when she first rode in a helicopter, her life was transformed. Where would fate bring her now? “We’re going to the Second Red Coast Base.”

Inversions by Iain M. Banks

back-to-the-land, clean water, place-making

Even with the help of the two guards — and it was a refreshing experience to be able to do the ordering around, rather than to be subject to it myself — it would be a close-run thing to produce a small amount of the substance in less than two bells. At least it would give me something to do. I only heard later and at second hand about the outburst of Duke Quettil, in the King's chamber. The sergeant of the guards who had released us from the cell in the torture chamber spoke quietly with you, master, shortly after the King was brought back to the land of the living. I am told you looked a little shaken for a moment, but then went, grim-faced, to inform Duke Quettil of the fate of his chief questioner and his two assistants. 'Dead!Dead? By fuck, Adlain, can you arrange nothing right!' were the Duke's precise words, by all accounts. The King glared.

To the Edges of the Earth: 1909, the Race for the Three Poles, and the Climax of the Age of Exploration by Edward J. Larson

back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, Livingstone, I presume, Scientific racism, the scientific method, trade route, yellow journalism

Fowler, “The Negro Who Went to the Pole with Peary,” American History Illustrated, April 1966, 47–49, who quotes Henson in 1953 as saying about Peary on the outbound trip, “I know the last 133 miles he didn’t walk.” 59.“Matt Henson Tells the Real Story,” Boston American, July 17, 1910. 60.Peary, “Discovery,” August 1910, 170. 61.Ibid. 62.Ibid. Here Peary disparaged Henson, adding, “He would not have been so competent as the least experienced of my white companions in getting himself and his party back to the land.” See also Peary, North Pole, 273. 63.For example, compare Goodsell, On Polar Trails, 126, with Peary, North Pole, 276. Goodsell estimated that, due to its winding way, the trail was about 25 percent longer than a straight-line course. 64.Thomas, “First at the Pole,” 2. 65.Ibid. 66.Peary, “Discovery,” August 1910, 171–72. 67.Peary, North Pole, 271.

The Frayed Atlantic Edge: A Historian’s Journey From Shetland to the Channel by David Gange

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, British Empire, garden city movement, global village, rewilding, Scientific racism, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, work culture

What separates Donn from the Romantics is that when he wrote of awe or joy in response to land, sea or weather, these were never the subject of his verse, but the context for events. He describes, for instance, a change in the weather while a party of Macleod men embarked south, along the coastline I’d soon kayak, before they crossed the Minch to Stornoway: In the morning we were obliged, When the wind rose to a gale, To turn our backs to the land And our faces directly towards the sea, Subjected to the drenchings and the beatings Of the furious great waves Mountainous, foamy, stormy, deep-valleyed, Sucking, thick-lipped, blue. But those seas are merely a stage Donn sets for the actions of his comrades: As she made headway Forwards on her course, The Macleods were unerring and expert About the sheets of the sails.

The Billion Dollar Spy: A True Story of Cold War Espionage and Betrayal by David E. Hoffman

back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, IFF: identification friend or foe, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier

When Hathaway was assigned to become chief of station in Moscow in 1977, he handpicked Guilsher to join him. They had never served together, but Hathaway knew of Guilsher’s language skills. One day, Kissa and their children were summering at the family home in Connecticut when John called with the news: they were bound for Moscow. She was delighted, despite the hardships. They were going back to the land of their forebears, not as children of the nobility, but to carry out espionage against the Soviet Union. They were unsentimental about it; the Russia of their ancestors had been destroyed by the Bolsheviks. John had been working against the Soviet target for twenty-two years from various posts outside the country.

Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters With Reality and Virtual Reality by Jaron Lanier

4chan, air gap, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, cosmological constant, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, game design, general-purpose programming language, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, hype cycle, impulse control, information asymmetry, intentional community, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kuiper Belt, lifelogging, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, peak TV, Plato's cave, profit motive, Project Xanadu, quantum cryptography, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skinner box, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons

Ron Hubbard was an early member of the circle and played around with promoting his ideas as part of the betting pool, gaining skills he later applied with great amplification. 5.   This was Stewart Brand’s humongous book that you could browse for hours; filled with portrayals of people doing interesting things and interesting things you could buy from them. It suggested a comfortably ambiguous utopian principle, in which people retreated back to the land but were also futuristic. The tome is sometimes remembered as a paper prototype of the most colorful aspects of the early Google, or at least that’s how Steve Jobs would later frame it. 6.   The giant cave of dreams for every kid growing up in New Mexico. So big that the sky is rock. A friend from Italy said it was better than the Vatican.

Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey Sachs

agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anthropocene, back-to-the-land, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business process, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, colonial rule, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, demographic transition, Diane Coyle, digital divide, Edward Glaeser, energy security, failed state, Garrett Hardin, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Global Witness, Haber-Bosch Process, impact investing, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mass immigration, microcredit, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, old age dependency ratio, peak oil, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, unemployed young men, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, zoonotic diseases

Most of the rest is in freshwater lakes, with a much smaller amount of freshwater in rivers, wetlands, and the atmosphere. A full breakdown is in Table 5.1. Human life, and ecosystems generally, depend vitally on freshwater, and especially on the flows of freshwater from the land and sea to the atmosphere into precipitation (rainfall) and back to the land and sea in the hydrological cycle. From ancient times, human societies have grown up along rivers and other locations from which they could tap into freshwater supplies for food production and other uses. In recent decades, with the advent of diesel and electrical power for pumping, there has been considerable tapping of groundwater as well, most remarkably, and alas, unsustainably, in Asia.

In the Company of Heroes by Michael J. Durant, Steven Hartov

Adam Curtis, back-to-the-land, friendly fire, job satisfaction, no-fly zone, placebo effect, Saturday Night Live, trade route, urban sprawl

In the meantime, Gerry’s bird had been repaired and was en route back to our landing zone. Ray called on the radio to inform the ops center of our situation, and Gerry heard the call and flew out over the dunes to try to help me. But by now it was completely dark, I had no radio, and I was so pissed off I didn’t even try to signal them as they flew by. I walked back to the landing zone, trying to calm myself down. Back at our bird, I was so red-faced and furious that Ray just watched me like a kid whose alcoholic father is on a binge. I got on the radio and explained to the commander at the ops center what had happened. I acknowledged it was all my fault. He agreed.

Galactic North by Alastair Reynolds

back-to-the-land, Buckminster Fuller, hive mind, information retrieval, Kickstarter, risk/return, stem cell, time dilation, trade route

Iverson lifted a hand from beneath the bedsheets, examining his palm and the pattern of veins and tendons on the rear. “This is the same body I went under with? You haven't stuck me in a robot or cloned me or hooked up my disembodied brain to a virtual-reality generator?” “None of those things, no. Just mopped up some cell damage, fixed a few things here and there and -- um -- kick-started you back to the land of the living.” Iverson nodded, but Clavain could tell he was far from convinced. Which was unsurprising: Clavain, after all, had already told a small lie. “So how long was I under?” “About a century, Andrew. We're an expedition from back home. We came by starship.” Iverson nodded again, as if this were mere, incidental detail.

On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey Into South Asia by Steve Coll

affirmative action, airport security, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, full employment, global village, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

The bishop of Madhu had offered to put us up for the night at his cool, whitewashed compound, a sanctuary in the battlefield where thousands of civilian refugees were arriving daily to take shelter from the soldiers, guerrillas, and paramilitary hit squads roaming around their villages. To get back to the land of international telephone lines from the bishop’s place, we would have to drive along narrow dirt roads through checkpoints manned by Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese security forces. Of course, I was not planning to do any actual driving; I would leave that to Ron, the cherubic Sri Lankan madman who had developed a highly lucrative, monopoly-by-default business of driving journalists around his island’s several wars.

Cyprus Travel Guide by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, back-to-the-land, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, New Urbanism, place-making, Skype

The Sea Gate on the eastern side originally opened directly onto the sea. Today the wharfs of the modern port have extended the land bridge considerably. At the southeastern extremity is the Canbulat Bastion, in which Ottoman hero General Canbulat Bey died valiantly whilst attacking the walls on horseback during the bloody siege. From here the walls loop back to the Land Gate via the Camposanto, Andruzzi and Santa Napa Bastions. Othello’s Tower (The Citadel)HISTORICAL SITE (Othello Kalesi; adult/child 7/3YTL; 9am-8pm Jun–mid-Sep, 9am-12.30pm & 1.30-4.45pm mid-Sep–May) An extension of the Old Town’s main walls, on the northeast seaward side, the tower was constructed in the 12th century during Lusignan rule in order to protect the harbour and the Sea Gate entrance, further south.

Fall; Or, Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson

Ada Lovelace, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, bitcoin, blockchain, cloud computing, coherent worldview, computer vision, crisis actor, crossover SUV, cryptocurrency, defense in depth, demographic transition, distributed ledger, drone strike, easy for humans, difficult for computers, fake news, false flag, game design, gamification, index fund, Jaron Lanier, life extension, messenger bag, microaggression, microbiome, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, no-fly zone, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, planetary scale, ride hailing / ride sharing, sensible shoes, short selling, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, tech bro, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, The Hackers Conference, Turing test, Works Progress Administration

Laurynas was desperate for the photos, so they split up for a couple of hours; Maeve drove down to the sandbar to fetch Tom and the rafts while Bob drove Corvallis up to the top of a mesa from which he predicted—correctly—that it would be possible to get cell phone coverage from another town, many miles from Moab and unaffected by the DDoS attack. From there Corvallis was able to transmit the photos, though it was slow. By the time all of those pictures had seeped down the pipe and Bob had driven him back to the landing strip, Maeve was back with Tom and the rafts, waiting for him. Maeve: Corvallis’s girlfriend. During this little excursion he had suddenly remembered this a few times and been delighted by the newness of it. A couple of years ago he had broken a bone in his hand during weapons practice and been obliged to wear a cast for some time.

…

And he knew that when they sprang forth, they would do so as children, with a simple understanding of matters, and with no memories of past lives to shape—or to misshape—their thinking. Dodge resolved that he must return to the Land to free Spring from her imprisonment and to make himself known to the new souls that she was bringing to life. For those would come into existence with no innate knowledge of their father and grow up as wards of El. He made many attempts to go back to the Land. In each case he was thwarted, not only by the vigilant angels, but by the wards and spells that El had cast up as invisible barriers to Dodge and all of the others who had been cast out. Sometimes Dodge went alone, cloaked in stealth. Sometimes he ventured forth with a small group. Three times, as the centuries passed, he went at the head of an army, armed and armored with new creations from the great forges that Thingor had built upon the burning craters of the Firmament.

Islands in the Net by Bruce Sterling

back-to-the-land, belling the cat, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, disinformation, industrial robot, Malacca Straits, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, South China Sea, VTOL, wage slave

She felt old, sick, like hours had marched through her on hangover feet. She was half-buried in something—she struggled, sudden claustrophobic rush … She was lying in a beanbag chair. Like something her grandmother might have owned. The room around her was bluish with the grainy light of televisions. “You back to the land of the living, Blondie.” Laura shook her head hard. Her nose and throat felt scorched. “I’m …” She sneezed, painfully. “Goddamn it!” She got her elbows into the shifting pellets of the beanbag and levered herself up. The Tamil was sitting in a chair of plastic and tubing, eating Chinese takeout food off a formica table.

Vultures' Picnic: In Pursuit of Petroleum Pigs, Power Pirates, and High-Finance Carnivores by Greg Palast

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", anti-communist, back-to-the-land, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, centre right, Chelsea Manning, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency risk, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Exxon Valdez, Glass-Steagall Act, invisible hand, junk bonds, means of production, Myron Scholes, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Pepto Bismol, random walk, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Seymour Hersh, transfer pricing, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Yogi Berra

Etok himself had flown down to Seattle, where he retained his two Jews: first, former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg (my second cousin, really), and later, Goldberg’s would-be replacement on the Court, Abe Fortis, personal counsel to the President of the United States. Etok had zero sympathy for Father Nicholas and the One-Dollar Warriors. What could I have said to Etok to change his opinion? Maybe this: No Chugach had come back to the land of ice because they’d grown tired of San Francisco and university life. The Chenega refugees and the other Chugach did not have a pot to piss in. When “Humble” Oil showed up, their Native Association had exactly $129 in the bank. I saw the old records. So, how were these Natives who spoke Aluutiq better than they spoke English supposed to get to Seattle?

All the Light We Cannot See: A Novel by Anthony Doerr

back-to-the-land

Here’s a large ornate room crammed with trinkets and crates and books and mechanical parts. A desk, a bed, a divan, three windows on each side. No model. To the sixth floor. On the left, a tidy bedroom with a single window and long curtains. A boy’s cap hangs on the wall; at the back looms a massive wardrobe, mothballed shirts hung inside. Back to the landing. Here’s a little water closet, the toilet full of urine. Beyond it, a final bedroom. Seashells are lined along every available surface, shells on the sills and on the dresser and jars full of pebbles lined up on the floor, all arranged by some indiscernible system, and here, here! Here on the floor at the foot of the bed sits what he has been searching for, a wooden model of the city, nestled like a gift.

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke

addicted to oil, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, demand response, dematerialisation, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Internet of things, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Negawatt, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off grid, off-the-grid, post-oil, profit motive, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the built environment, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, Whole Earth Catalog

It was the middle of the Vietnam War and it became clear to them that the only jobs they could get was with Sikorski Helicopter or some other defense thing which was going to build stuff for Vietnam and they didn’t want to do that.” “So they were stuck with an expertise and many of them went just back to the land and then they sat there and watched the wind go by and said: ‘I know enough about air: I could build a little thing.’ And they began building these little wind turbines in different places in the country. And then they thought: ‘Well, maybe I should build some for my friends and we should make a little company.’

Arabian Sands by Wilfred Thesiger

back-to-the-land, clean water, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, MITM: man-in-the-middle, the market place

We don’t know your customs, and you must help us now as we helped you in the desert.’ We dined that night with the Sheikh of Dibai on the far side of the creek. The lad I hired to row us over asked if he should wait to bring us back and I told him to return at ten o’clock. As we were coming back to the landing-stage bin Ghabaisha suddenly said, ‘Umbarak, we have done an awful thing,’ and when I asked what was wrong he answered, ‘We have forgotten to bring back any food for our travelling companion.’ Puzzled, I asked whom he meant, and he said, ‘The boy who brought us over.’ I assured him that the boy would not expect it, as the customs of the town were different from the customs of the desert, but bin Ghabaisha shook his head and said, ‘We are Bedu.

The Way of the Gun: A Bloody Journey Into the World of Firearms by Iain Overton

air freight, airport security, back-to-the-land, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, clean water, Columbine, David Attenborough, disinformation, Etonian, Ferguson, Missouri, gender pay gap, gun show loophole, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, More Guns, Less Crime, offshore financial centre, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, WikiLeaks, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

After a while I shook their hands, and they told me to stay, to come back soon, but I wanted to leave. I did not want to know more about plastic bags filled with intestines or skulls filled with balloons. And the smell had long ago seeped into my clothes. I had seen enough of death’s ugly business – I knew all too well what the gun could do. I just wanted to head back to the land of the living. Or, at the least I wanted to see a glimmer of hope in all of this sunless despair; so I left and sought instead to meet those who had managed to survive the gun’s barbed impact. 3. THE WOUNDED South Africa – a bedside visit – the gun’s hidden impact revealed – a chat with a trauma surgeon – a blood-tinged night in a Johannesburg emergency ward – understanding how science feeds off the gun’s misery – a trip to the BBC to meet a paralysed correspondent The boy – for he was hardly a man – lay there and watched me.

Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition by Charles Eisenstein

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, capital controls, carbon credits, carbon tax, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, corporate raider, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, degrowth, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, disintermediation, diversification, do well by doing good, fiat currency, financial independence, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, global supply chain, God and Mammon, happiness index / gross national happiness, hydraulic fracturing, informal economy, intentional community, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, land tenure, land value tax, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, low interest rates, McMansion, means of production, megaproject, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, multilevel marketing, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Own Your Own Home, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Scramble for Africa, special drawing rights, spinning jenny, technoutopianism, the built environment, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons

If I go to an indigenous culture, convince its people that subsistence farming is degrading and primitive, and induce them instead to work in a factory and join the market economy, then GDP rises (and I’ve created an “investment opportunity”). If, on the other hand, I inspire people to abandon their high-paying jobs and “go back to the land,” then GDP falls. If I create a community where we no longer pay for child care but instead care for each others’ children cooperatively, then GDP falls. And if we succeed in protecting the Alaskan Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling, that’s tens of billions of dollars that will never materialize.

The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry by Gary Greenberg

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, back-to-the-land, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, impulse control, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, meta-analysis, neurotypical, phenotype, placebo effect, random walk, selection bias, statistical model, theory of mind, Winter of Discontent

I don’t remember why I wanted to be in therapy or very much of what I talked about with my therapist. I do remember that my father was paying for it. He was probably hoping I would discover that my self-chosen circumstances—living alone in a cabin in the woods without the modern conveniences—were a symptom of something that could be cured. What I was being treated for, however, was not “Back to the Land Disorder” or “Why Don’t You Grow Up Already Disorder,” but rather, as I discovered one day when I glanced down at my statement on the receptionist’s desk, Adjustment Disorder. I guess the tag seemed about right. I definitely wasn’t adjusting; and if it occurred to me that by calling my lifestyle an illness (if indeed that’s what he meant to do, as opposed to just rendering the most innocuous-sounding diagnosis possible), my therapist had passed judgment on exactly where the problem resided, I didn’t think much of it at the time.

Creating a Life Together: Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities by Diana Leafe Christian

A Pattern Language, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, Community Supported Agriculture, double entry bookkeeping, intentional community, land reform, off grid, search costs, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, the built environment, urban sprawl

A residential or land-based intentional community is a group of people who have chosen to live with or near enough to each other to carry out their shared lifestyle or common purpose together. Families living in a cohousing communities in the city, students living in student housing cooperatives near universities, and sustainability advocates living in rural back-to-the-land homesteads are all members of intentional communities. Community is not just about living together, but about the reasons for doing so. “A group of people who have chosen to live together with a common purpose, working cooperatively to create a lifestyle that reflects their shared core values,” is one way the non-profit Fellowship for Intentional Community describes it.

Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide by Robert Michael Pyle

back-to-the-land, clean water, D. B. Cooper, dark pattern, Donald Trump, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the High Line, the scientific method, trade route

They may establish songlines or blaze trees to help, but they know. Only we modern ones do not know our way around. Landlorn, without a compass or a clue, we’re stuck in the ruts to the who knows where. Bigfoot doesn’t get lost, not here or anywhere. Maybe it would show us the route, help us spot the path back to the land. If we don’t find our way home soon, we will find ourselves instead out in the sun with Captain Jack, backs against the hot rock wall, hunted out by the howitzers of change. I learned two things here. Whether my compass works or not, I’ll never go in there again without it. And if Bigfoot ever has to make a stand, it ought to be here, in the Big Lava Bed. 18 Mermaids, Monsters, and Metaphors His parting from life was no cause for grief to any of the men who examined the trail of the conquered one saw how, despairing he had rushed away ruined in the fight to the lake of monsters fleeing, doomed in bloody footprints.

Completely Mad: Tom McClean, John Fairfax, and the Epic of the Race to Row Solo Across the Atlantic by James R. Hansen

Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Neil Armstrong, Skype, social distancing, UNCLOS

When the other three troopers still had not made it back by the next morning, Tom headed to the prescribed landing zone where they were to be picked up by helicopter. It took a few days to get there, and even then he had to watch the area for a couple of days to make sure it had not been found and made into an ambush, not just for him—and his three mates (who trickled back to the landing zone and subsequently rescued)—but also for the Royal Marine chopper pilots who were to come haul them out. Rather than feeling alone and in need of assistance through it all, Tom relates, “I was in my element.” It was not just that his jungle survival training and previous patrols prepared him for the experience; he loved facing the challenge solo.

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Kimmerer

back-to-the-land, clean water, commoditize, double helix, food desert, invisible hand, music of the spheres, oil shale / tar sands, p-value, Pepto Bismol, Potemkin village, rewilding, scientific worldview, the built environment, the scientific method

And so it has come to pass that all over Indian Country there is a movement for revitalization of language and culture growing from the dedicated work of individuals who have the courage to breathe life into ceremonies, gather speakers to reteach the language, plant old seed varieties, restore native landscapes, bring the youth back to the land. The people of the Seventh Fire walk among us. They are using the fire stick of the original teachings to restore health to the people, to help them bloom again and bear fruit. The Seventh Fire prophecy presents a second vision for the time that is upon us. It tells that all the people of the earth will see that the path ahead is divided.

Schismatrix Plus by Bruce Sterling

back-to-the-land, complexity theory, Future Shock, gravity well, heat death of the universe, industrial robot, informal economy, life extension, plutocrats, the long tail, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, time dilation

Lindsay focused the telephoto across the interior sky. The fanatics of the Eighth Orbital Army lay sprawled on the fouled earth. A knot of them had been caught trying to escape into the airlock; they lay in a tangle, their arms outstretched. He saw no sign of the airship pirates. He thought for a moment that they had all escaped back to the landing port. Then he spotted one of them, mashed flat against another window panel. “That was excellent footage,” Ryumin said in his ear. “It was also very stupid.” “I owed you a favor,” Lindsay said. He studied the dead. “I’m going over there,” he decided. “Let me send the robot. There’ll be looters there soon.”

Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson

Apollo 13, back-to-the-land, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, dark matter, epigenetics, gravity well, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, mandelbrot fractal, microbiome, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, precautionary principle, printed gun, quantum entanglement, traveling salesman, Turing test

In the infinite black space of ignorance, it is as if stands as the basic operation of cognition, the mark perhaps of consciousness itself. Human language: it is as if it made sense. Existence without Devi: it is as if one’s teacher were forever gone. People came from all over the ship for the memorial. Devi’s body, disassembled to its constituent molecules, was given back to the land of Nova Scotia, with pinches given out also to all the rest of the biomes, and a larger pinch saved for transport down to Aurora. Those molecules would become part of the soil and the crops, then of the animals and people, on the ship and also on Aurora. Devi’s material being would thus become part of all of them.

A Voyage Long and Strange: On the Trail of Vikings, Conquistadors, Lost Colonists, and Other Adventurers in Early America by Tony Horwitz

airport security, Atahualpa, back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, dematerialisation, diversified portfolio, Francisco Pizarro, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, joint-stock company, out of africa, Ralph Waldo Emerson, trade route, urban renewal

That strangled him, and then they buried him next to the tent.” Coronado raised a cross to mark the farthest spot that his expedition had reached in Tierra Nueva. Then, provisioned with dried corn, and led by fresh Indian guides, the conquistador and his thirty horsemen turned and rode west along buffalo paths, back to the land of the “flat-roofed houses.” BLOATED WITH BUFFALO meat, and bleary from too much driving, I barely registered the scenery as I drove east from Elkhart, piloting from silo to silo, the great pueblos of grain marking every town. The farther I went into Kansas, the more incredible it seemed that Coronado had kept going—seventy-seven days on the Plains!

12 Strong: The Declassified True Story of the Horse Soldiers by Doug Stanton

back-to-the-land, index card, Iridium satellite, New Journalism

Dean’s and Nelson’s teams, accompanied by Atta and Dostum, were scheduled to leave for Konduz within several hours, while Leahy had been assigned to stay at the Turkish Schoolhouse. Major Sonntag would oversee the schoolhouse staff, while Major Mitchell would coordinate the movement of the soldiers patrolling the city. Leahy set aside his worries for a moment, and asked if there was any danger in driving back to the landing zone. No, the CIA officer told him. He should be safe. The Taliban had confined themselves to the area near the airfield. In fact, they were asking to be taken prisoner there. Sonntag, Leahy, and Betz headed out the door. Leahy jumped up in the back of the pickup and Betz gunned it. The news of the Taliban had unnerved Betz.

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, business climate, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, complexity theory, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Ritchie, Edward Thorp, Fairchild Semiconductor, Henry Singleton, horn antenna, Hush-A-Phone, information retrieval, invention of the telephone, James Watt: steam engine, Karl Jansky, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, Leonard Kleinrock, machine readable, Metcalfe’s law, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Picturephone, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Russell Ohl, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Skype, space junk, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Teledyne, traveling salesman, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

His mystique, perhaps even more than his intelligence, separated Baker from his colleagues. “Nobody knows what I do,” he would sometimes say to his son. This was correct. And nobody really knew who he was. “IN THE SPRING OF 1913,” Bill Baker’s mother, Helen, wrote about her family, “my husband and I yielded to that mysterious back-to-the-land urge and bought a farm.” In fact they had left New York City and bought four hundred acres, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland on the Chester River where it empties into the Chesapeake. The area, known as Quaker Neck, was located just south of the small town of Chestertown; it was so rural and remote that it was hard to find on road maps.

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, charter city, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, demographic transition, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, feminist movement, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, food miles, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hans Rosling, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute cuisine, hedonic treadmill, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Large Hadron Collider, Mark Zuckerberg, Medieval Warm Period, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, packet switching, patent troll, Pax Mongolica, Peter Thiel, phenotype, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Productivity paradox, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, technological singularity, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, wage slave, working poor, working-age population, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Trade with Egypt and India largely dried up, especially once the Arabs took control of Alexandria, so that not only did oriental imports such as papyrus, spices and silk cease to appear, but those export-oriented plantations in Campania became the plots of subsistence farmers instead. In that sense, the decline of the Roman empire turned consumer traders back into subsistence peasants. The Dark Ages were a massive experiment in the back-to-the-land hippy lifestyle (without the trust fund): you ground your own corn, sheared your own sheep, cured your own leather and cut your own wood. Any pathetic surplus you generated was confiscated to support a monk, or maybe you could occasionally sell something to buy a metal tool off a part-time blacksmith.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Schumacher, Ivan Illich, and—if it’s not too presumptuous—a book I authored called Entropy: A New World View. A new generation of DIY hobbyists, most of whom were veterans of the peace and civil rights movements, loosely affiliated themselves under the appropriate technology banner. Some preached a “back to the land” ethos and migrated to rural areas. Others remained in the poor, urban neighborhoods of major cities, often squatting and occupying abandoned neighborhood buildings. Their self-proclaimed mission was to create “appropriate technologies,” meaning tools and machines that could be made from locally available resources, that were scaled to steward rather than exploit their ecological surroundings, and that could be shared in a collaborative culture.

Lancaster by John Nichol

back-to-the-land, British Empire, colonial rule, haute cuisine, Louis Blériot, V2 rocket, women in the workforce

They would both cycle to Gringley early on Monday morning, arriving in time for Eunice to get to work. Fate seemed to be smiling on James; he’d just changed shifts from day to night, so he’d have all Monday to get back – plenty of time before his own shift began at 7 p.m. Another huge advantage was that he’d have all the rest of that Sunday evening with Eunice, and her company on the way back to the Land Army hostel. He was in seventh heaven. They set off together in the early hours on the 37-mile journey. ‘It was hard work. Eunice always said that she pedalled hard at the back. I’ve always felt that I did all the work! By the time we climbed the steep hill to Gringley, I was completely whacked.

Active Measures by Thomas Rid

1960s counterculture, 4chan, active measures, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, continuation of politics by other means, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, East Village, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, facts on the ground, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, guest worker program, information security, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, Julian Assange, kremlinology, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, operational security, peer-to-peer, Prenzlauer Berg, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Silicon Valley, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, zero day

The Fifth Estate grew out of late-1960s counterculture, and was especially inspired and modeled on the Whole Earth Catalog, then a cult publication. Produced in the San Francisco Bay Area by Stewart Brand, an iconic, technology-embracing hippie maven, the Whole Earth Catalog was an early techno-utopian vision of back-to-the-land living that embraced cybernetic feedback loops, community, wholeness, flattened hierarchies, and the motto “access to tools.” Brand’s catalog would become a prototypical social media platform (and later became the first actual social media platform when it was taken online, in 1984, as the Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link, or WELL).

The Vortex: A True Story of History's Deadliest Storm, an Unspeakable War, and Liberation by Scott Carney, Jason Miklian

anti-communist, back-to-the-land, Bob Geldof, British Empire, clean water, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, hive mind, index card, Kickstarter, Live Aid, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, rolodex, South China Sea, statistical model

But taking the heavily defended position wouldn’t be easy. “I won’t lie to you,” he said, laying out the impossibility of the task ahead of them. “In every war soldiers must give their lives for causes that are greater than themselves. This is probably our time. At Kamalpur many of our brothers gave their blood back to the land. We are going to attack in the morning. You have seen what we are up against. I fully expect that every one of us will die.” His soldiers looked at him with exhausted, bloodshot eyes, unsure of what to say. Hafiz continued: “But here is the question we must ask ourselves: Who should liberate Bangladesh?

Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy by Jamie Raskin

2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, defund the police, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, George Floyd, hindsight bias, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Lyft, mandatory minimum, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Bannon, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem

Senate to prosecute Trump for inciting violent insurrection against Congress on January 6. It was the hardest thing I have ever been asked to do professionally, at the most difficult time I have ever experienced personally, but the assignment became, paradoxically, a salvation and sustenance for me, a pathway back to the land of the living and a fountain of hope that renewed and strengthened my radical faith in democracy, the system of beliefs and practices that upholds the equal rights of the individual and demands that we all work together to take care of our common inheritance. Speaker Pelosi’s invitation forced me to draw upon the deepest springs of meaning and clarity I have in life: the love of my three children and my wife, Sarah; the wisdom of my late parents; Tommy’s remarkable political values; the strength of my siblings; the dreams and fears of my childhood; the insight of my teachers and creativity of my students; the inextinguishable resiliency and solidarity of my Maryland constituents; the genius of my political and academic colleagues; the vision of my mentors and boundless generosity of my friends; the amazing constancy of my staff; and the moral courage of my fellow citizens past and present.

The omnivore's dilemma: a natural history of four meals by Michael Pollan

additive manufacturing, back-to-the-land, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, double entry bookkeeping, food desert, Gary Taubes, Haber-Bosch Process, index card, informal economy, invention of agriculture, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, off-the-grid, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, Whole Earth Catalog

Originally called the New Cascadian Survival and Reclamation Project, the farm was started in 1971 by Gene Kahn with the idea of growing food for the collective of environmentally minded hippies he had hooked up with in nearby Bellingham. At the time Kahn was a twenty-four-yearold grad school dropout from the South Side of Chicago, who had been inspired by Silent Spring and Diet for a Small Planet to go back to the land— and from there to change the American food system. This particular dream was not so outrageous in 1971, but Kahn's success in actually realizing it surely is: He went on to become a pioneer of the organic movement and probably has done as much as anyone to move organic food into the mainstream, getting it out of the food co-op and into the BIG O R G A N I C * 1 4 5 supermarket.

Lonely Planet Wales (Travel Guide) by Lonely Planet

active transport: walking or cycling, back-to-the-land, Brexit referendum, car-free, carbon footprint, country house hotel, Downton Abbey, gentrification, global village, haute cuisine, Kickstarter, land reform, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, period drama, sensible shoes, trade route, urban renewal

Southeast Wales Explore uplifting landscapes in the Black Mountains, Brecon Beacons and along the meandering Wye. Swansea, Gower & Carmarthenshire Surf the Gower and explore Wales' most dramatic castle. Pembrokeshire Home to fantastic clifftop walking and some of Wales' best beaches. Mid-Wales Discover hidden valleys, get back to the land with a farm stay, or ride horses over wild Cambrian uplands. Snowdonia & the Llŷn Hike, bike, sail and kayak in the shadow of the country's highest peaks. Wales for Kids Wales is well geared towards family travel. Children are generally made to feel welcome, facilities are uniformly good and there are discounts at many attractions for family tickets, plus under-fives often go free.

Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn by Daniel Gordis

Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, facts on the ground, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mount Scopus, post-oil, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

The sons and daughters of the men who had died there were determined nineteen years later to fulfill the promise that Gouri had made to the nation. Eshkol’s noncommittal endorsement was all that Porat needed. Within two days, Hanan Porat and his friends (known as “the children of Kfar Etzion”) had begun to resettle Kfar Etzion. In beat-up trucks and buses, they traveled back to the land on which the kibbutz had stood. When they arrived, they unloaded mattresses and threw them on the floors of the makeshift aluminum structures that they would now call home. They then hung a picture of Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook in the men’s dormitory and settled in to sleep for their first night in the first resettlement in the West Bank.

We Were Soldiers Once...and Young: Ia Drang - the Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam by Harold G. Moore, Joseph L. Galloway

back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, Donald Davies, drop ship, friendly fire, machine readable, South China Sea

Out in the Charlie Company sector Sergeant Major Plumley and I walked through the horrible debris of battle. We found Lieutenant Jack Geoghegan's body; the two of us personally carried him from the battlefield. Then we returned, located Platoon Sergeant Luther Gilreath's body, and brought him back to the landing zone to begin the long journey home. Off to our east, more help was on the way. Lieutenant Colonel Bob Tully and his 2nd Battalion, 5th Cavalry were marching in overland. Earlier Tully had radioed asking for the best route and formation for a move into X-Ray. As cryptically as possible over an insecure radio net I told him: Come in paying close attention to the left flank, closest to the mountain.

One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution by Nancy Stout

back-to-the-land, disinformation, land reform, Mason jar, union organizing, urban planning

Not missing a beat, or unable to function without her, depending on how you want to look at it, Fidel started showing up there, daily. RIGHT AWAY, WITH A PLACE to spread things out, Celia hauled out her collection of documents collected in the Sierra. There were battle plans, pieces of correspondence, tapes from her adding machine, notations for her expenses dating back to the landing of the Granma, messages from her Manzanillo helper Elsa Castro, Fidel’s and Frank’s letters. She’d kept this collection close at hand for such a long time. It is a collection of materials that Pedro Álvarez Tabío describes as “born in Celia’s knapsack and the most precious treasure of the Revolution.”

Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa by Martin Meredith

back-to-the-land, banking crisis, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, Great Leap Forward, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, liberation theology, Nelson Mandela, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, trade route

The ultimate aim was to turn southern Africa into ‘one Dominion’, under one flag with a common government dealing with customs, railways, defence and native policy - ‘a self-governing white Community, supported by well-treated and justly governed black labour from Cape Town to Zambesi’. Milner threw himself into his great scheme with formidable energy. A massive effort was soon under way to transport Boers back to the land. By the end of the war the bulk of the Boer population had been removed from their homes: 117,000 men, women and children were living in concentration camps; 31,000 burghers were prisoners-of-war, most of them held in camps overseas, as far afield as Ceylon and Bermuda. Returning farmers were provided with seeds, livestock, implements and building materials.

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

He is a third-generation Memphian; his grandfather was a cotton trader, and mother a local belle, while his father moved here from New York in 1937 to build a paper plant for Kimberly-Clark, only to see it promptly swept away in a flood. Dexter has been on the economic development beat for more than thirty years, so he remembers the day in 1979 when the city essentially decided to go back to the land. Not all the way back to cotton or timber (another discarded mainstay) but to the river and the railroads that had sprung up to support them, to the trucking lines that called the tangle of interstates around Memphis home, and suddenly to the airport, where FedEx was finally beginning to gain some altitude.

Matter by Iain M. Banks

air gap, back-to-the-land, germ theory of disease, gravity well, lateral thinking, megastructure, off-the-grid

“We’ve been sailing over this water for the past five long-days or so and while the prospect is most impressive at first and the air bracing, you’d be amazed how quickly the impressiveness and the bracingness become tedious when that’s all there is to contemplate all day. Well, all there is to contemplate all day save for your good self, of course, sir, and frankly you were no circus of boundless fun either in your sleeping state. Nary a word, sir. Certainly nary a word of sense. But in any event, sir, welcome back to the land of the living.” Holse made a show of looking beneath his feet, through a translucent membrane that showed a hazy version of the ocean far below. “Though land, as you might have noticed, is the one thing this level appears to be somewhat short of.” “Definitely the Fourth?” Ferbin said. He leaned up on one elbow – something twinged in his right shoulder, and he grimaced – to look over the side of the bed he was lying on, peering down through the hazy surface Holse was standing on.

Against All Enemies by Tom Clancy, Peter Telep

airport security, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, illegal immigration, independent contractor, Iridium satellite, low earth orbit, off-the-grid, operational security, Pepto Bismol, Recombinant DNA, US Airways Flight 1549

The mere silhouette of that helicopter summoned up horrific death in the imaginations of the Taliban who’d seen their fellow warriors shredded under its unceasing fire. Ozzy got back on his radio and talked to the chopper pilot, requesting that he come to the village immediately and put his chain gun to work on the insurgents. “We’ll get you back to the landing zone right now,” said Ozzy. “You hear that?” Moore asked Rana. “We’re heading back. We’ll be okay.” Rana clutched his Makarov to his chest. “I don’t like this.” “I’m with you, Rana,” Moore said. “You’ll be fine.” As the words left Moore’s lips, he flicked his gaze up toward the opposite end of the house, where a figure had just rounded the corner, and the figure’s rifle appeared in the moonlight.

Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation by Yossi Klein Halevi

Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, Boycotts of Israel, Burning Man, facts on the ground, friendly fire, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, New Journalism, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, Transnistria, Yom Kippur War

The Ashkenazi Labor establishment reacted with defensiveness and contempt. Golda Meir—who took over as prime minister following Levi Eshkol’s death in 1969—dismissed the Panthers as “not nice.” Jerusalem mayor Teddy Kollek told a group of Panther demonstrators outside the municipality to get off the grass. FOR ALL THE FISSURES, the ingathering of the exiles back to the land of Israel was intensifying. Tens of thousands of Jews from the Soviet Union, the most sealed nation in the world, were being given exit visas. Young men in ill-fitting gray suits, old men with gold teeth and peddlers’ caps, and old bent women in kerchiefs disembarked at Lod Airport with bound boxes for suitcases and squinted into the Israeli sun.

New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson

Anthropocene, availability heuristic, back-to-the-land, Black-Scholes formula, Burning Man, central bank independence, creative destruction, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, decarbonisation, East Village, full employment, gentrification, happiness index / gross national happiness, hive mind, income inequality, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Ken Thompson, Kim Stanley Robinson, liquidity trap, Mason jar, mass immigration, megastructure, microbiome, music of the spheres, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, Planet Labs, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, quantitative easing, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rent-seeking, Social Justice Warrior, the built environment, too big to fail