…Naturally enough, this situation dismayed part of the citizenry. They saw the nation stumbling this way and that, buffeted by international forces and paralyzed by internal political blockages. In their different ways, they began to opt out. The better-off who had managed to move to the suburbs disavowed the agonizing problems of the cities. They voted for tax cuts that reduced public services and withdrew financial powers from local governments. They bought guns and began to hoard food and gold coins against a currency collapse, and many of them seemed almost to relish the idea of a war over the oil fields of the Middle East.
But another group of citizens, most numerous in the Northwest, drew different conclusions. The surreal state of the national life made them seek a new kind of moral grounding for their lives. So they retreated far beyond the suburbs to the real country. There they hoped to restore a sense of fundamental reality. To learn “where they were” they studied the geography and geology and botany and history of the places in which they lived. In this process, they hoped, they could see how how the region could best support them; and if they truly knew their region, perhaps they could defend it against the national madness.
Building small but lovely and often innovative houses with their own hands, they lived on city savings until they learned subsistence agriculture, or the growing of marijuana as a cash crop, or found jobs in nearby towns. They began, in a way new to most late-twentieth-century Americans, to consider themselves settled and permanent inhabitants of their region–responsible for it, and for passing it on unimpaired to their children, so that the land might support their descendants unto the seventh generation. When they could not see having their lively children subjected to the lockstep curriculum prescribed by the state, they founded their own cooperative schools. They became crafty gardeners, alert to variations in soil and moisture and sun. They rehabilitated or replanted orchards let go to ruin, and relearned old methods of drying fruit in the sun instead of with expensive gas dryers. They started cooperative natural food stores and handicraft sales outlets. They planted trees; they cleared underbrush, doing with their labor what fires had once been left to do. They mobilized politically and fought off developers, highwaymen, miners. They sought out the places of early Indian habitations and, sitting on great rocks next to old acorn grinding holes, they found comfort in knowing that humans had once lived in these spots in balance with the natural order. And so little by little, year after year, their children grew up–knowing the plants and the insects and the fishes and the angles of the sun, knowing the natural stages of creeks and rivers, feeling at home on the land, occupying it not for profit but for sustenance and survival.
-Ernest Callenbach, from Ecotopia Emerging, 1981
