Homesteading and the "Whole Earth" Movement

Thoughts after visiting the "Homesteaders of America" Conference

Joel Salatin of Polyface Farm (based in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley) is one of the heroes of the modern Homesteading/Farmsteading movement. In this photo he is reading from his most recent book “Homestead Tsunami” which can be ordered directly from Polyface Farm.

Yesterday (Saturday 15 October) Jill and I traveled about an hour north from our VA farm to join a friend, journalist Maike Hickson of LifeSite News, who had arranged for press passes to visit this years Homesteaders of America conference. Held in the modest Warren County Fairgrounds of Front Royal, VA, this conference has been running for seven years now, and this time all tickets were sold out months before the event. We were only able to get in because of Maike’s contacts, perhaps influenced by the fact that she is a local that lives just down the road from the fairgrounds in an old farmhouse with a classic bank barn.

I had no idea what we were walking into, imagining a modest local gathering at a fairgrounds where we once showed our Draft horses, back in the day when we were breeding Percheron. To my surprise, the sold out conference was attended by well over 5,000 people, drawn both locally and from across North America, the UK and Europe. Jill and I had the pleasure of meeting many participants from New England, Europe, and Illinois as well as locals such as our neighbor and Virginia State Delegate Nick Freitas. Suffice to say, parking was jammed and overflowing, local hotels were completely full, and many of those who came from a distance resorted to tents and trailers.

Although the Homesteading/Farmsteading movement is truly decentralized, if there is an intellectual, philosophical and practical core, it would probably be the amazing and deeply empathetic Mr. Joel Salatin. I had the pleasure of listening to Joel both summarize his new book “Homestead Tsunami” , and to gift those in attendance with readings from two chapters. Basically, the book was written with three types of readers in mind. 1) The person who wants to get into homesteading/farmsteading, 2) The person who has jumped in a couple of years ago and may be discouraged by the normal setbacks, and 3) Those who, with the best of intentions, actively discourage others from attempting to homestead. As Joel was reading from one chapter, he actually had to pause as tears welled up when he spoke of the profound beauty and deeper meaning of jarred tomatoes prepared from the labors of himself and his wife/partner. Make no mistake, Mr. Joel Salatin is actually another American revolutionary Virginian who happens to also be a farmer, akin to Jefferson and Madison whose historic farms are nearby.

Here is how Joel describes the scope of his new book, which is NOT presently available on Amazon:

Whether we’re in good times or bad, having some control of our basic needs reduces worry and fear. Social, cultural, and physical disturbances are making more people ready to protect our families, fortunes, and faith through homesteading.

From his 66-year farm, food, and family experience, Joel Salatin explains why people flee cities during uncertainty. The current urba-to-rural exodus offers a promised land haven of hope and help in turbulent times.

From food security to healthy, happy kids, functional homesteads head on multiple fronts. Whether you’re thinking about it, tired of it, or baffled why your friends are packing, the rewards are worth the effort. Find out why.

Millions of people want to disentangle from urban, social, economic, and food dependency but have trouble articulating their intuitions. This book gives voice to these heart yearnings.

For those considering homesteading/farmsteading, you may wish to consider his many other prior publications, most of which are listed here.

I can personally testify that Mr. Salatin is both an amazing writer as well as an amazing communicator, and has deep knowledge about the time honored and almost lost art of making a small farm work. Aside from the Amish and Mennonite communities which Jill and I frequently visited and interacted with back in the day when we bred, drove, showed, and worked our farm with Percheron, Mr. Salatin may be one of the few who still knows how to sustainably live off the grid. He is another that talks the talk, walks the walk, has been modestly doing it all his life, and is committed to helping others succeed with this way of self-sufficient living.

We need more of these people to become coaches, writers, speakers and leaders, and if what I observed at this years Homesteaders of America Conference, a new generation is now ready to meet the challenge.

---

Waking up today, the Sunday after, Jill and I started talking about what we had observed yesterday at the conference. There were many vendor stalls set up outside at the conference, but the ones that seemed busiest were providing how-to information, access to key supplies (such as metal spider trusses), and access to tools. Which brought to mind another time, another world (no likeness to the postmodern world of today) which had once enthralled both of us during our youth and young adulthood.

You ask me:
Why do I live
On this green mountain?
I smile
No answer
My heart serene
On flowing water
Peachblow
Quietly going
Far away
This is

Another earth

Another sky
No likeness
To that human world below

~Li Po, On The Mountain: Question And Answer
(translated by C.H. Kwôck & Vincent McHugh)

Once upon a time, long long ago (ergo the ‘60s), a member of the SF Bay area hipster community named Stewart Brand published a book called the “Whole Earth Catalog” and lit the emerging North American “back to the land” movement on fire.

Quoting from a NY Metropolitan Museum of Art catalog introduction:

“In 1968, Stewart Brand founded an alternative information service and distribution system within a single publication, called the Whole Earth Catalog. Influenced by the work of Buckminster Fuller, the catalog developed into an extensive reference tool for designing the environment, living spaces, and new media practices. In sections titled “Understanding Whole Systems,” “Shelter and Land Use,” “Communications,” “Community,” and “Nomadics,” the catalog publicized a compendium of useful resources, with a primary focus on books.”

Our cherished copy, which Jill and I poured over but seems to have been lost to time in our many moves and relocations, was actually titled “The Last Whole Earth Catalog”, and looked pretty much like this well worn version (notice that the price went up a whole dollar).

Access to tools, indeed. Which is what the attendees at the Homesteaders of America Conference seem to be craving with an insatiable hunger.

And so much more. It was both a window into and a manifesto of “how to” for the idealistic environmental movement which become such a powerful social force during the late 60s and 70s. And then that movement somehow became coopted and consumed while running aground on the rocks of naivety, cultism, and non-sustainability. The last vestige of which seems to be today’s “climate crisis” true believers. Greta and Lurch (a common nickname for Mr. Gore) are the modern embodiment of that burned out naive hopefulness. What a horrid end to such a hopeful beginning, to be consumed by the false religion of Scientism.

Back then, intentional communities were all the rage, and were often called “communes”. Yurts and geodesic domes were scattered across whatever marginal farmland could be purchased on the cheap because it did not fit into the new Earl Butts Agriculture model of “get big or get out”.

And now the wheel of time has turned once again, and a new self-sufficiency movement is on the rise. But this one seems grittier and more determined. Tempered by the flames of the COVIDcrisis. I have never been to a non-conservative or non-COVID meeting where so many recognized me, sought to shake my hand, and thanked me for my courage and contributions. And selfies, of course. I had not anticipated that. Sometimes I would prefer to be more anonymous. But like signing baseballs, it is really about recognizing and respecting others, their need to reach out and connect, and helping to build and support a growing community of dissenting free thinkers and speakers.

What can we learn from the past, from what happened to Stewart Brand and the “Whole Earth Catalog” community, so that we are freed up to make new mistakes rather than repeat those of the front edge of the Boomer wave?

Considering the question, I decided to see what I could find out regarding what had become of this crew, and discovered this gem in The New Yorker archives. I see the events through different eyes from those of the author, and draw different conclusions (particularly regarding co-optation and the sharp left authoritarian turn taken by the Silicon Valley elites). But buried within the very urban/Silicon Valley/New York frame of mind reporting are layers of lessons learned which I believe we should keep in mind if we are to avoid repeating history.

The following are key excerpts from that fascinating retrospective article. Rather than impose too many of my opinions and interpretations, I invite you to ponder and share your insights in the comment section below. I hope you enjoy this brief history of a long-gone time, and also hope that we can all learn from the past as we collectively imagine a “Great Awakening” rather than being victimized by the “Great Reset”.

At the top of my list of sins to be avoided would be hubris. Note what appears to be a historic antecedent of Yuval Harari’s “Homo Deus” - Man god- found in the first Whole Earth catalogue’s statement of purpose: “We are as gods and might as well get used to it”. We all know where that has lead to- the new false religion of Transhumanism, which has its roots in Silicon Valley culture, which derives in significant part from Stewart Brand’s embryonic group of environmentalist-rebels.

Beware all who enter here, for there be dragons.

---

The Complicated Legacy of Stewart Brand’s “Whole Earth Catalog”

From The New Yorker, 2018

In the fall of 1968, the Portola Institute, an education nonprofit in Menlo Park, California, published the first edition of the “Whole Earth Catalog”: a compendium of product listings, how-to diagrams, and educational ephemera intended for communards and other participants in the back-to-the-land movement. The catalogue’s founder, Stewart Brand––a photographer, writer, former army lieutenant, impresario, and consummate networker––had spent part of the summer driving a pickup truck to intentional communities in Colorado and New Mexico and selling camping equipment, books, tools, and supplies to the residents. Brand returned to the Portola Institute (a gathering place and incubator of sorts for computer researchers, academics, career engineers, hobbyists, and members of the counterculture), hired a teen-age artist to handle layout, and began production on the catalogue’s first edition.

At the height of the civil-rights movement and the war in Vietnam, the “Whole Earth Catalog” offered a vision for a new social order—one that eschewed institutions in favor of individual empowerment, achieved through the acquisition of skills and tools. The latter category included agricultural equipment, weaving kits, mechanical devices, books like “Kibbutz: Venture in Utopia,” and digital technologies and related theoretical texts, such as Norbert Wiener’s “Cybernetics” and the Hewlett-Packard 9100A, a programmable calculator. “We are as gods and might as well get used to it” read the first catalogue’s statement of purpose. “A realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.”

The communes eventually collapsed, for the usual reasons, which included poor resource management, factionalism, and financial limitations. But the “Whole Earth Catalog,” which published quarterly through 1971 and sporadically thereafter, garnered a cult following that included founders of Airbnb and Stripe and also early employees of Facebook. Brand went on to work as a journalist, documenting the burgeoning hacker culture, and co-founded a small galaxy of publications and companies. Among them were CoEvolution Quarterly, a journal focussed on environmentalism; the “Whole Earth Software Catalog,” a digitally oriented update to the original; the Hackers Conference; the well, one of the earliest online communities; and a corporate-consulting outfit, the Global Business Network, that emphasized scenario-planning with a dash of optimistic futurism.

Brand doesn’t have much to do with the current startup ecosystem, but younger entrepreneurs regularly reach out to him, perhaps in search of a sense of continuity or simply out of curiosity about the industry’s origins. The spirit of the catalogue—its irreverence toward institutions, its emphasis on autodidacticism, and its sunny view of computers as tools for personal liberation––appeals to a younger generation of technologists. Brand himself has become a regional icon, a sort of human Venn diagram, celebrated for bridging the hippie counterculture and the nascent personal-computer industry. In a 2005 commencement address at Stanford, Steve Jobs described the “Whole Earth Catalog” as “Google in paperback form, thirty-five years before Google came along.” Brand’s centrality to Silicon Valley history was cemented, in 2006, with the publication of Fred Turner’s “From Counterculture to Cyberculture.”

Last month, on a brisk and blindingly sunny Saturday, over a hundred alumni of the “Whole Earth Catalog” network—Merry Pranksters, communards, hippies, hackers, entrepreneurs, journalists, and futurists—gathered to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication, and, per the invitation, to come together “one last time.” The event was held at the San Francisco Art Institute, a renovated wharf warehouse with vaulted ceilings, views of Alcatraz, and the cool sterility of an empty art gallery. A number of early-Internet architects, including Larry Brilliant, Lee Felsenstein, and Ted Nelson, floated around the room.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

A week after the reunion, Brand and I spoke over the phone, and he emphasized that he had little nostalgia for “Whole Earth.” “ ‘The Whole Earth Catalog’ is well and truly obsolete and extinct,” he said. “There’s this sort of abiding interest in it, or what it was involved in, back in the day, and so the reunion was a way for the perpetrators to get together and have a drink and piss on the grave.” Brand continued, “There’s pieces being written on the East Coast about how I’m to blame for everything,” from sexism in the back-to-the-land communes to the monopolies of Google, Amazon, and Apple. “The people who are using my name as a source of good or ill things going on in cyberspace, most of them don’t know me at all,” he said. “They’re just using a shorthand. You know, magical realism: Borges. You mention a few names so you don’t have to go down the whole list. It’s a cognitive shortcut.”

Brand now describes himself as “post-libertarian,” a shift he attributes to a brief stint working with Jerry Brown, during his first term as California’s governor, in the nineteen-seventies, and to books like Michael Lewis’s “The Fifth Risk,” which describes the Trump Administration’s damage to vital federal agencies. “ ‘Whole Earth Catalog’ was very libertarian, but that’s because it was about people in their twenties, and everybody then was reading Robert Heinlein and asserting themselves and all that stuff,” Brand said. “We didn’t know what government did. The whole government apparatus is quite wonderful, and quite crucial. [It] makes me frantic, that it’s being taken away.” A few weeks after our conversation, Brand spoke at a conference, in Prague, hosted by the Ethereum Foundation, which supports an eponymous, open-source, blockchain-based computing platform and cryptocurrency. In his address, he apologized for over-valorizing hackers. “Frankly,” he said, “most of the real engineering was done by people with narrow ties who worked nine to five, often with federal money.”

---

And there you have it. “Post-libertarianism” in Silicon Valley. Government, its funding, and it’s modern safety net/nanny state is good, and Trump’s efforts to deconstruct the administrative state are bad. That pretty much encapsulates the current state of Silicon Valley political thought and culture. This is the culture that has worked so hard to censor, propagandize, and justify imposing the totalitarian hellscape so clearly foreshadowed by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell. My, how far they have fallen from the Apple Computer crowd’s infamous ‘1984’ Macintosh commercial (Directed by Ridley Scott of “Bladerunner” fame!).

Instead of libertarianism and disrupting the stranglehold monochrome totalitarianism of big business, Silicon Valley pushes the New World Order/Great Reset creed of the WEF- socialism for thee and capitalism for me. Silicon Valley culture has become that which it set out to overthrow.

Will postmodern transhuman androids dream of electric sheep?

I think that Stewart Brand and his new reality remains at the heart of Silicon Valley. What a shame, and how deeply disillusioning.

The question is, with people like Mr. Joel Salatin, the organizers and invited speakers of the Homesteaders of America conference leading by example, can we learn from the past and do better in the future?

After what I saw and heard yesterday, I have renewed but cautious hope.

---