Go Farm, Young People, and Help Heal the Country

A just and sustainable future will require rebuilding rural America. For too many decades, the countryside has been exploited and depopulated to support urban society, and enrich only suppliers and processors. For too many urban people with progressive politics, rural areas are dismissed as parochial, and resented for holding disproportionate power. And young people in rural communities have moved to cities in search of better opportunities. A better strategy, successfully pioneered a generation ago in Vermont, might be to encourage more young people to live in the country. In this pamphlet, environmental historian and farmer Brian Donahue argues for empowering rural people so that they can replace the current extractive economy with an attractive economy, and for repopulating the countryside with intrepid young people to help drive change. Common Sense for Global Crises is a New Perennials Publishing pamphlet series in the radical and reasoned spirit of Thomas Paine. Authors come from a wide variety of backgrounds and walks of life—scholars and activists, scientists and artists, farmers and teachers, elders and youth—reflecting the belief that what we need to know now and in the days ahead will come from diverse and practical perspectives. Contributors Brian Donahue is an emeritus professor of American Environmental Studies at Brandeis University. He has also been a farmer for almost fifty years. He is author of Reclaiming the Commons: Community Farming and Forestry in a New England Town (Yale University Press, 1999); and co-author of Wildlands and Woodlands, Farmlands and Communities: Broadening the Vision for New England (Harvard Forest, 2017), and of A New England Food Vision (Food Solutions New England, 2014). He is on the board of the Massachusetts Woodland Institute and The Land Institute. Bill Vitek is Director of the New Perennials Project and New Perennials Publishing, and a Scholar in Residence at Middlebury College. Vitek taught philosophy for 32 years at Clarkson University, always with the objective of helping students understand that the philosophical imagination can, and must, do useful work in the world. Much of his work has engaged ecological issues, including collaborations with Wes Jackson and The Land Institute for over three decades. Vitek and Jackson co-edited two books, Rooted in the Land: Essays on Community and Place (1996) and The Virtues of Ignorance: Complexity, Sustainability, and the Limits of Knowledge (2008).