Back-to-Landers Built Their Utopia in Northern California. It’s Slowly Disappearing

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Alexis Madrigal (0:54)

Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal.

It's hard to imagine thousands of communes spread across Northern California. The sky's worth of social experiments rather than the small constellation that seems to have remained. Few people in the modern counterculture seem to be willing to go all in on their visions of a different life and land is too expensive anyway. But this was not always the case. As we read in Handmade Utopia, beautiful, truly gorgeous book by David Jacob Kramer and photographer Michael Schmeling, the back-to-land life was once one that could be lived. Tens of thousands of people tried it in Northern California alone. Millions dreamed about it across the country, buying the Whole Earth Catalog or Lloyd Khan's Shelter or Alicia Bay Laurel's Living on Earth, which itself sold 350,000 copies.

Most of those who tried to go back to the land couldn't hack it. It's a lot of work for one, and it could be lonely or weird, or code enforcement could come down on you. But a few found their space among the redwoods and stuck it out. They are largely the subjects of Handmade Utopia, and a few of them will join us here this morning. But first, we've got David Jacob Kramer, author of Handmade Utopia, Back-to-the-Land Architecture in Northern California. He's also the author of Heads Together, Weed and the Underground Press Syndicate, 1965 to 1973 Welcome to Forum, David.

David Jacob Kramer (2:19)

Thanks for having me.

Alexis Madrigal (2:21)

So great, this is a truly fantastic book. Thank you. And maybe you could just start with talking about the Back-to-Land Movement, like its actual reality, and how much of a true cohesive movement it was, or if it was sort of a diversity of aims and goals, or kind of lumped together.

David Jacob Kramer (2:39)

Sure. It certainly wasn't monolithic. You had an array of personalities who were kind of drawn to it. That's something that a lot of people say, and I've heard Lloyd Kahn say it, he's one of the authors, he's the author of Shelter and The Dome Books, is that the 60s kind of happened in the 70s, you know, this was like a manifestation of a lot of the ideals that were brewing in the 60s, especially around like the Haight and, you know, the Bay specifically. And this was kind of putting those ideals to the test in a way. And also there was a sense that this couldn't happen in the city. The city was kind of too far gone.

There was a lot of chaos, there was a lot of violence, there was a lot of paranoia.

So it was time to start from scratch. And it really is a historical phenomenon. I mean, you mentioned some of those figures, but it was the greatest urban to rural exodus in American history, where in America over a million young people and more across the world left the cities and went to start new lives in the woods, more idealistic lives.

Alexis Madrigal (3:53)

Yeah. You know, at the time, tons of books documented these kind of early days. You know, I remember seeing another one about solar houses that also sold into the six figures of copies.

And so we have kind of some incredible documentation, say, up until about 1975 But then it feels like there's fewer and fewer photographs, less and less documentation. How did you sort of get back on the cold case of many of these homes and communes?

David Jacob Kramer (4:26)

Totally. I mean, that's such a good point. I didn't realize that there were any of these left, you know?

And I was up in Northern California doing research for my last book that was about the underground press of the 60s and early 70s. And I had heard about a kind of archive, community archive of libraries that had been like commune libraries and when the communes might have disbanded, they'd been donated. And it was a broader archive about the kind of history of these communities. And one of the- My God, that's so cool.