Why we look to nature in uncertain times
overnight become both office and school, leaving zero time to bake, discovered a newfound appreciation of nature and the way in which a mindful stroll beneath open skies can put life’s stresses into perspective. Many of these trends had been simmering for a while. Looming ecological calamity has already seen a small but determined cadre embracing farming as a form of social activism.
The Covid crisis and its, longhaul recovery challenges are binding a group of trends that would otherwise seem only loosely connected, adding urgency and recalling similar back-to-nature movements that have emerged at past pivot points. When life becomes wrenchingly uncertain, history tells us, human instinct is to retreat to the natural world, seeking not just physical security but also mental wellbeing and a renewed sense of purpose in eternal rhythms untouched by cycles of boom and bust or passing pandemics.
In Victorian Britain, for instance, as the Industrial Revolution brought about fasttrack mass urbanisation, the Arts and Crafts Movement found inspiration in the preindustrial past, harking back to a time when, they believed, the world was purer for being more closely tied to nature.
The American back-to-the-land movement began to stir at around the same time, galvanised by the financial panics of 1893 and 1907. It faded with WWI but emerged resurgent during the Great Depression, when New Deal officials saw it as a way to rebuild a shattered economy, seeking to rehouse urban slum-dwellers in new farm villages and autonomous garden cities.
A love of nature was paramount to the Arts and Crafts Movement, but in America, it was very much secondary – until the 1970s, when the homesteading movement took off. Rooted in counter-cultural protest against mainstream materialism and corporatism, thousands of young adults packed up and made for the backcountry, taking with them books like On Your Own in the Wilderness by Townsend Whelen and Bradford Angier. Much of its thinking is dated: it conjures up a world in which swathes of wilderness still exist where meat is free for the hunting, trees can be felled for heating, and land can be settled on without displacing others. Yet, there’s a logic to its opening salvo: “A lot of us are working harder than we want, at things we don’t like to do. Why? In order to afford the sort of existence we don’t care to live.”
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 hasn’t gone away: recently, the country has seen a growth in rightwing 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 nation’s rapid urbanisation, the ghosts of Chairman Mao’s 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 China’s urban population at the time
– to learn the superior ways of peasants, creating what many believe to be a lost generation.
It’s easy to poke fun at the dreamers who willingly turn their backs on city life in search of a simpler, more authentic-seeming existence. All too often, they hail from the ranks of the privileged – dilettantes who can afford to be idealistic. So many of these experiments fail, but they bring about enduring change regardless.
What will be the legacy of the present back-to-nature impulse? Permanent changes to how and where we work might well be among them, as well as altered views on what we need to make us happy. We may not have sought out the experience, but there is something at once grounding and liberating in stripping life back to basics – air in our lungs, bread on the table, the touch of a loved one. As Henry David Thoreau observed, “Most of the luxuries and many of the so- called comforts are not only dispensable, but positive hindrances. Our life is frittered away with detail.”
The earliest back-to-nature movements were essentially nostalgic. In the 21st Century, once the Covid-19 pandemic has abated, there will still be climate change to cope with, and in the face of that particular catastrophe, the future may very well belong to the nature-savvy.
(Courtesy BBC)