The desire to escape the rat race, till the land, raise your own chickens, listen to the whippoorwills and otherwise escape the grind of city life has launched countless daydreams, many books and at least one highly annoying TV show: "Green Acres." Two new books—one personal, the other a broad history of "back to the land" enthusiasm—may touch a chord in a desperate urban-dweller's heart, but they may also show, if sometimes inadvertently, that Mother Earth's bosom is not always welcoming to mere humans. Tom Montgomery Fate, whose "Cabin Fever" falls into the category of "nature writing," is far from a full-time homesteader. He is an English professor at the College of DuPage in Illinois, lives in a Chicago suburb with his family and minivan, participates in the antiwar movement, and could easily be mistaken for a cog in the notorious wheel. But he is also devoted to Henry David Thoreau's "Walden" and especially to the idea of living a "deliberate life," which Mr. Fate defines as "a search for balance—in mind and body and spirit—amid our daily lives." That search often takes him to a cabin a few hours from his home, where he observes nature, and himself, at close quarters. The book is organized into seasonal essays, starting with spring, a time when the sun brings the earth to blossom, though Mr. Fate is equally alert to life forms that have kept the pesticide industry in deep clover. He has a fascination for ticks, for instance. They go "questing" for blood donors, spearing their victims with a "beaklike projection" and drawing a "quantity of blood that is a hundred times their 'empty' weight." Mr. Fate is also a fan of ants. "Today there are more than a million ants for each person on the planet," he claims in a more-the-better spirit. As Mr. Fate watches ants doing their chores, including passing along "regurgitated" food and cooperating in ways that would make Mr. Rogers smile, he arrives at an epiphany: "It strikes me that humans could never reach such communal efficiency and economy." If the ant is condemned to be an ant and nothing more, "we too are absurdly trapped by our design"—but in our case the trap is "the labyrinth of language and reason." We must also contend with mind-numbing "choices" and "possibilities" that the ant might not imagine. In such passages humans often appear as a less than heroic species. When Mr. Fate finds a "roadkill raccoon" who is not quite dead, he carries the stricken animal to the road's shoulder; soon he finds himself "kneeling down in the damp weeds in a sort of wordless prayer—for forgiveness, I think." He counts himself among the worst beasts in the forest, feeling as he strolls a riverbank "the burden of my role in its slow destruction." Yet Mr. Fate has a talent for chuckling at the mind-numbing "possibilities" of existence, such as losing one's car in a parking lot. He confesses that he once found his billfold "in the cheese drawer of the refrigerator." Middle-aged readers (ahem) might find themselves mumbling, "Et tu, Fate?" Best of all, Mr. Fate is a fan of the coyote—a creature whose tenacity is noticeably less precious and humble than the ant's. The city life seems to suit coyotes, Mr. Fate writes, observing that rural coyotes have a "30 percent chance of living through their first year" while their city dwelling cousins "are twice as likely to live that long." He tells the story of a coyote skulking into a Chicago sub shop, apparently in search of food, and another who stalked a 60-year-old woman through a suburban parking lot. Suddenly, Mr. Fate writes, the coyote "lunged for her miniature poodle, clamping his jaws around the dog's hindquarters." The woman prevailed in the ensuing tug-of-war. Perhaps there is hope for us humans yet. As animals wander into suburban spaces—bears and deer as well as coyotes—they are betting that they'll eat better among humans than among their own kind. Man has attempted a version of this reverse migration, too, over the centuries. The never-ending search for grub is a central theme in Dona Brown's "Back to the Land." Ms. Brown, also a professor (the University of Vermont), chronicles a movement that embraces people like Mr. Fate— professional, "progressive," concerned about the environment—but that has also included Americans who hoped to find "food self-sufficiency," preferably apart from a life of wage slavery. That desire was sweetly enunciated by 19th-century writer Philip G. Hubert: "Why is it not possible for a healthy man . . . to make bread and butter for his little ones and himself without chaining himself down to a life of drudgery?" Ms. Brown starts with a look at early back-to-the-land efforts, which she says ended around World War I. They tended to attract Americans, some in financial peril, who struck out for the rustic regions "as a means of preserving artisanal skill, personal autonomy, and household self-sufficiency in the face of a rising tide of mechanization, monopoly and consumerism." Later chapters carry the story through to later expressions of the same basic impulse: for example, the Southern Agrarian movement, whose ideal society might owe something to feudalism, and the cluster of thinkers known as "decentralists," who sought a world in which "everyone had access to productive property—to the tools and materials that would allow them to feed, clothe, and shelter themselves." In the 1930s, government programs sought to bring about "self-sufficiency," providing land to down-and-outers, including Johnny Cash's parents. Four decades later, suburban kids who didn't know a hoe from a howitzer traded the country club for the commune. Ms. Brown reads deeply in the movement's core literature, including the seminal "Ten Acres Enough" (1864), by Edmund Morris, both a journalist and real-estate man. The book contained "detailed information about deep plowing, how best to save manure, and the treatment of worms on peach trees." Ms. Brown notes that a revised version of the book is still in print. Not everyone thought it necessary to leave town to grow your own. Bolton Hall (1854–1938), a wealthy New Yorker with radical economic ideas and perhaps a green thumb, tended a third-acre garden at 137th Street and Lenox Avenue. In his "Three Acres and Liberty" (1907), he hailed other urban food-raising efforts: "Near San Francisco there are a number of frog ranches." In a similar spirit, Henry Ford provided gardens for 50,000 Detroit auto workers after the 1929 stock-market crash. Working the gardens for food was mandatory. Ms. Brown writes engagingly, and while her sympathies are not exactly right of center, she doesn't mind detailing the hypocrisy and messianic extremes of some of the movement's more radical leaders. Helen and Scott Nearing, devoted homesteaders and ascetic socialists, sought the good life in rural simplicity and preached abstinence from all animal products, even though Helen ate ice cream. Worse yet, she declared that domestic animals were "slaves" and yet owned a cat. Scott ended up fasting to death in 1983, at age 100. As Ms. Brown makes clear, the rural impulse can inspire a kind of religious intensity. The author and New Age activist Ray Mungo cast modern-day back-to-earthers as holy penitents: "Pushing long hair out of their way and thus marking their foreheads with beautiful penitent dust," he wrote in 1970, they "till the soil to atone for their fathers' destruction of it." Self-adoration, we are reminded, grows everywhere like a weed. Toward the end of her survey, Ms. Brown observes that "the old question of food self-sufficiency simply no longer requires quite the same go-it-alone approach that characterized the 1970s." We have more cooperatives stores now, she says, and community-supported farms. And there are hopeful signs, in her view: The Obamas dug up part of the White House lawn in 2009 and planted a garden, while in Los Angeles 245 people (latest count) have joined the online "Los Angeles Urban Chicken Group." Still, one has to wonder how many Americans would truly forsake their daily grind to raise chickens (and frogs), shovel manure, and operate that wonder of nature known as the cow udder. While a small portion may find solace in the soil, far more would probably prefer not to flirt with dirt.
