The movement had a counterpart in Britain, where in 1976 John Seymour's book The Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency was published. Like Ruskin and co before him, he believed industrial society to be damaging, finding freedom in the backbreaking work of self-sufficiency. His book provided advice on everything from how to plough a field to how to kill a pig, selling more than a million copies and helping to inspire the satirical TV hit The Good Life. Things were forever going wrong for central characters Tom and Barbara. Their methane-powered car continually breaks down, the generator packs in, they cant bring themselves to slaughter one of their chickens for supper. Adding to the comedy, they were striving for self-sufficiency in the heart of suburbia, but their fictional setbacks werent entirely unrepresentative of how many a back-to-the-land adventure has panned out, irrespective of time and place. After all, no amount of idealism can make up for crippling inexperience, and theres a lot more to it than simply sowing a handful of seeds, as disenchanted social media posts featuring pencil-thin carrots and stunted radishes attested this summer.

There is, of course, an altogether darker strand to the history of such movements. In 19th Century Germany, for instance, some of the notions that the Arts and Crafts Movement embraced about the purity of rural ways of life coined the expression blut und boden (blood and soil). By the 1930s, that had mutated into a key Nazi slogan. Even today, it hasnt gone away: recently, the country has seen a growth in right-wing extremist organisations with links to environmentalism and organic farming. Likewise, in America, fans of self-sufficiency include not just liberal environmentalists pursuing a life free from the taint of capitalism, but also right-wing survivalists. Meanwhile, in China, where young artists have begun to leave cities for villages abandoned in the nations rapid urbanisation, the ghosts of Chairman Maos Down to the Countryside Movement linger on. Beginning in 1968, it saw the forced rural relocation of some 17 million 15- to 23-year-olds 10% of Chinas urban population at the time to learn the superior ways of peasants, creating what many believe to be a lost generation.

Lasting legacies

Its easy to poke fun at the dreamers who willingly turn their backs on city life in search of a simpler, more authentic-seeming existence in a yurt or on a commune. All too often, they hail from the ranks of the privileged dilettantes who can afford to be idealistic. And yet, in the end, whats surprising isnt that so many of these experiments fail, its that they bring about enduring change regardless.

The Arts and Crafts Movement, for instance, petered out with World War One, having never solved the problem of how to make its beautiful, costly goods accessible to the urban poor they sought to save. However, it not only had a lasting aesthetic impact on British cultural life, its principles influenced the founders of The National Trust and The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB). The former was brought into being by housing reformer Octavia Hill, Lake District cleric Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley and solicitor Sir Robert Hunter. All three shared a love of nature and a deep faith in its healing power; for Hill and Rawnsley in particular, they had Ruskin to thank for it. Both struck up friendships with him as idealistic youths, and it was in fact he who introduced them. As for the SPAB, its manifesto a significant document in the history of building conservation was written by William Morris himself. His co-author was architect Philip Webb, a close friend, collaborator and fellow Arts and Crafts advocate.

See the article here:

Why we look to nature in uncertain times - BBC News