Defining Utopia: Continuity and Change in Back-to-Land Movements in the Pacific Northwest, 1890s-2010s

Lucy Wavra

doi:10.7273/000003783

The history of counterculture movements in the Pacific Northwest is expansive, and people have been creating small countercultural communities centered around the back-to-land movement since the industrial revolution. Modernity pushed humanity farther from the land as machines slowly began taking the jobs of humans, and as facets of life (such as farming) became more industrialized. The Pacific Northwest has been fertile ground for counterculture groups over the last 100 years. These groups have resisted this abandonment of tradition for various reasons – for example, colony members along the Puget Sound in the 1890s resisted industrialism as a way to resist industrial capitalism and turn toward anarchism, socialism, and communism. Another example takes shape in the 1970s in the wake of the environmental movement, as radical counterculturalists reached back to their small-scale farming roots in order to become more sustainable and extend the longevity of the planet. Furthermore, with the rise in popularity of the internet for promoting social movements, Tilth has reached into contemporary social media strategies for spreading their back-to-land ideologies. This paper ultimately argues that in three key periods the countercultural impulse to go back to the land, rely on community dynamics, and become sustainable took a regional form in the Pacific Northwest, and that this pattern of rejecting mainstream societies reemerges throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as forms of social activism; furthermore, in the context of these groups there is a primary focus on alternative forms of communication, gathering, and community. In order to study these cultural trends in the Northwest across time, I used Washington State University and University of Washington archival resources, and compared them against secondary literature on a wide range of contexts and subjects. This project required me to study Washington State history in the nineteenth century, and the economic and feminist contexts of History 469 with Dr. Sanders. In this class, we studied Washington State University’s Tilth collection, and wrote an original research paper using the sources available through the university. This paper is an extension of that original research, and a majority of this paper will focus on the Tilth Alliance’s origins in the 1970s and its contexts. This research will also analyze the precedents set by the colonies in the 1890s and the legacies in communications and gatherings of the present day will show the continuity of the back-to-land counterculture across time and space in the Northwest; therefore, it adds context for the countercultural movements that preceded Tilth in the Northwest – this paper also extends Tilth’s back-to-land reaches into the twenty-first century, and the use of social media in food activism.

Defining Utopia: Continuity and Change in Back-to-Land Movements in the Pacific Northwest, 1890s-2010s

Files and links (1)

Abstract

Metrics

Details