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The idea of going back to basics is nothing new. And the hippies of the 1960s and 1970s didn’t invent the concept, either. It’s much, much older than that.

Thoreau went to Walden Pond to “live deliberately” back in 1845, and Helen and Scott Nearing promoted “the good life” from their rustic New England farmhouse in the 1930s, influencing a generation of idealistic young Americans to take up woodworking and gardening. The back-to- the-land movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s had young people poring over the Whole Earth Catalog and flocking to rural communes, hoping to build a simpler, better world away from the constraints of what they saw as a sick mainstream society. Perhaps it was the drugs, perhaps it was the overly idealistic nature of some of these communes (“free love” tended to create commune-destroying jealousy; poverty was rampant), perhaps it was just the natural cycle of things, but the movement didn’t last long and had pretty much petered out by the end of the 1970s.

“As the 1979 energy crisis waned in the following years, so too would the accompanying desire to live more simply,” writes Melissa Coleman, the daughter of 1970s homesteaders, in her memoir,
This Life Is in Your Hands. “By the 1980s oil glut, jobs and opportunities would become so plentiful in the cities that few could resist the pull to return.”

The past few decades have been solidly urban, consumerist, and technology oriented, and the idea of “back to nature” seemed passé and laughable to many, a patchouli-scented relic of a foolishly naive era. But then, starting around the early 2000s, fears about food safety and climate change began to drive a new interest in DIY food cultivation. The recession, with its subsequent reevaluation of the American Dream, helped all these trends begin to gel into something larger.

Hayes calls it radical homemaking. Others call it “simple living,” “intentional living,” “sustainable living,” “slow living,” “voluntary simplicity,” or “downshifting,” all terms that have entered or reentered the lexicon in the past few years. But “homesteading” seems to have emerged as the modern term of choice for this new kind of self-sufficient, home- focused, frugal, slowed-down lifestyle.