Relearning how to live as voluntary peasants

“Part of The Farm’s original vision was to build a village for a thousand people using alternative energy systems that were economically and ecologically responsible. We believed that we could design a graceful standard of living which would be attractive to large numbers of First World people, while also being within reach of all Third World people.”

Just before the Fourth of July, I left my life as a tennis-playing, wine-drinking, spoiled rich white guy to begin this radical eco-odyssey. And in the six months which have ensued, I have watched the sun rise over the Atlantic and set over the Pacific, joined Peak Oil groups in three time zones, and visited ecovillages as far apart as North Carolina and Oregon. Plus I spent a couple of months training with the Permaculture Army in Berkeley. But it is to The Farm, the thirty-six-year-old intentional community in Tennessee, that I keep returning.


I didn’t hear good things about The Farm when I was on my way to visit. I had participated in the Earth First! Rendezvous in the Appalachian Mountains. There I saw former mountains apocalyptically sliced down to nothing to yield up coal which will be called “clean” to perhaps be liquefied for toxic methanol — marketed as something disingenuous to shut Americans up about Peak Oil and Global Climate Chaos. The Farm was beckoning as a bastion of back-to-the-land activism in one of the mountain-top removal states.

At the Rendezvous I had met a young farmer who lives at The Farm. Her old VW van had broken down somewhere east of The Farm and west of the Appalachians, and she needed a ride back to it. I had still not yet given away my car (I would do so soon enough — to firm up my eco-cred), so I was glad to help her out. “At The Farm,” she told me on the way, as the big-box-bound tractor-trailers and the super-sized SUVs whooshed past, “there is no farming.”

I would hear similar reports about The Farm as far away as the Left Coast. “It’s a gated community now,” a teacher of urban gardening in Oakland said. “It’s like the suburbs now” said a permaculturist in Oregon, “and nobody wants to get their hands dirty by farming.” “It’s a retirement community for old hippies,” said a rich young hippie in Berkeley, on his way to India.

Culture Change