Rural Renaissance

The Earth reached a noteworthy milestone in 2007. For the first time in history, more of its human population lived in urban areas than in rural areas. In the United States that milestone was passed almost a century earlier, in the 1920s. The United Nations projects that by 2050, approximately two-thirds of the world's population will reside in urban areas. Urban immigration is often accompanied by smaller, counter emigrations to rural settings. The term Rural Renaissance broadly describes those ex-urban movements.

In the strictest sense, Rural Renaissance describes a period in the United States from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. During this period, for the first time since before the Great Depression, practically all indicators of population and economic growth pointed to rural areas instead of urban centers. However, the term Rural Renaissance more broadly has described a variety of counter-urban movements throughout the 20th century in the United States, as well as in Australia, Japan, and a variety of European nations. In the 21st century, the term Rural Renaissance has experienced renewed use to describe revitalized hopes and opportunities for life in rural places.

Although the primary direction of migration in the United States during and following the Great Depression was toward the nation's urban centers, at that time there were also counter movements promoted by men such as Ralph Borsodi that encouraged empathizers to return to the land to live simply and self-sufficiently. Although the majority of the people moving were immigrating to urban areas to find employment, a minority was optimistically moving to rural areas in an attempt to sustain themselves off the land. That movement continued through and following World War II.

A significant moment in the United States’ Rural Renaissance occurred in 1954 with the publication of Scott and Helen Nearing's influential Living the Good Life, a book that significantly contributed to the hope for a Rural Renaissance that peaked at its demographically identifiable height in the 1960s and 1970s. Together with that book, periodicals like Whole Earth Catalog and The Mother Earth News provided the principles and practicalities for the back-to-the-land movement.

Following the migration of people and their accompanying wealth to the perceived higher quality of life in rural areas during the late 1960s and 1970s, rural employment growth expanded by almost twice the urban growth rate. Although the numbers of people employed by farming and agriculture continued a two-decade decline, the hiring by manufacturing and service industries relocating to rural areas more than offset the losses. In addition, rural retirement communities multiplied as women and men of means left cities and sought a higher quality of life and a lower cost of living in more scenic rural atmospheres.

From its earliest time, the Rural Renaissance movement has been spurred by the need many people felt to recover a better, simpler life, free from the problems of urban living. [Page 380]Fueling the height of the rural population shift of the early 1970s were sentiments described by some as feeling out of touch with nature, disgust with rampant consumerism, frustration with perceived shortcomings of government, and urban deterioration. In addition to principle and sentiment, the population shift of the early 1970s was fueled by the practical reaction against the era's widespread pollution and energy shortages. By the latter 1970s and early 1980s, the movement had additional proactive motivations such as the increased health value of noncommercially produced foods.

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