Hippie Family Values. Directed by Beverly Seckinger. Newburgh, NY: New Day Films, 2017. 64 minutes.

From Seed to Seed. Directed by Katharina Stieffenhofer. Oley, PA: Bullfrog Films, 2019. 87 minutes.

Sustainability in Back-to-the-Land Films

Hippie Family Values opens with a naked woman playing in a bubbling stream and enjoying the natural countryside with her grandchildren, who are also naked. It then switches to show a group of people reveling in music and food at The Ranch in New Mexico, a communal living site founded in the 1970s by "rebellious youth" in their twenties and thirties. Those "flower children" are now grandparents in their sixties. The Ranch is a back-to-the land community whose core beliefs are "consensus decision making" and "stewardship of the land and waters." When The Ranch opened, some members moved into pre-existing buildings; others lived in tents or teepees; and others built their own houses. It was an experiment in sustainable, communal living—one that continues as the members have aged and the undertaking has evolved.

Beverly Seckinger, the filmmaker, tells viewers that she wanted to show that the word "hippie" should not be an epithet or a cartoonish stereotype. The aging hippies profiled in the film remain committed to sustainability and communitarianism, and the vignettes depicting them are entertaining and often touching. Covering a ten-year span, the film features interviews with members who explain their reasons for joining The Ranch and elaborate on their experiences. One woman, Kate, says she saw it as a refuge from the nuclear family. She wanted to be "a mother among mothers, raising kids in a community." Echoing this feeling, another woman reminisced about how they used to take care of one another's children; and the children felt that they had several mothers and would go through phases of rotating houses without one particular authority figure. Another mother said The Ranch fostered creativity because they had no televisions, so the children would create complex games that would run on for weeks. Bjorn reflects on the community more generally: he explains that during the first decade, the Ranch was extremely cooperative, but in recent years more people have tended to do their own thing. For example, a man who claims to be the coach and morale booster of The Ranch says he tries to get people to work harder, but it's difficult to convince members to pitch in when they don't have to. And according to Steve, members are surprised that The Ranch has lasted this long. They know they need more new young blood, yet younger members say they get frustrated when their ideas about change are met with resistance. It takes a long time to convince the group to act on new initiatives.

Only twenty people live at The Ranch full time, though members come from around the country for biannual Equinox Meetings. They eat together in the dining hall, but during the rest of the year the hall is unused. Several women are pictured cleaning the kitchen and preparing the meal for the meeting. One woman explains that during her first eight years at The Ranch, everybody ate in the communal kitchen; since then more people began using their own kitchens, seeming to prefer individual family meals over the "mayhem" of the dining hall. Regardless of these changes, former residents still feel affinity with The Ranch and the forms of living it has offered. When members returned for a thirtieth reunion they shared their connection to the site: one woman reminisced that during her first Thanksgiving at The Ranch another woman took off all her clothes and started dancing. . . so everybody else removed their clothes, and they danced as well.

From Seed to Seed, a documentary by Katharina Stieffenhofer, highlights Terry Mierau and Monique Scholte, a couple who left behind careers as European opera singers to become eco-friendly farmers while raising their three children at Cedar Lane Farm in Southern Manitoba. They care for a dozen cattle, pigs, chickens, sheep, and lambs in a remote region. The passion Mierau and Scholte have for ecology and health is influenced by Mireau’s identity as Mennonite and shared by the primarily Mennonite local agricultural community. Scholte also loves farming and believes that access to clean air, seeds, and water and being able to grow one's own food are basic human rights. Viewing seeds as a way to bring people together, she proudly shows off her “humble seed library” and encourages communal gatherings where neighbors share seeds and meals. A little more ambivalent, Mierau says farming alternates between hope and despair; but, for the most part, he seems to love the rural life he chose, as well.

Mierau and Scholte have additionally served as mentors to young people who are learning to become farmers themselves. Dr. Ian Mauro, a geographer at the University of Winnipeg, describes the huge amount of interest among this population to grow food because agriculture is an ideal space to practice their principles of sustainability and to express their desire for a better world. The small-scale farmers featured in the film grapple with climate change and insist that farmers must alter the types of crops they grow and how they manage water. Debates over plant breeding loom large, since corporations often attempt to control the seeds farmers can use. In contrast with biotech companies and large-scale commodity agricultural operations, the film portrays small, organic farmers in a heroic light. Academics and activists interviewed in the documentary also share a belief that farming without chemicals can produce plenty of good food, on any scale.

Hippie Family Values focuses primarily on human relationships, while From Seed to Seed puts a greater spotlight on relationships with the land. Many books about going back to the land, communes, local food, and small-scale agriculture could be assigned to students, including The Good Life: Helen and Scott Nearing's Sixty Years of Self-Sufficient Living (Nearing and Nearing 1989), Coming Home to Eat: The Pleasures and Politics of Local Foods (Nabhan 2002), Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America (Brown 2011), Gaining Ground: A Story of Farmers’ Markets, Local Food, and Saving the Family Farm (Pritchard 2013), Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm's Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land (Penniman 2018), and The New American Farmer: Immigration, Race, and the Struggle for Sustainability (Minkoff-Zern 2019).

If screening either film in a course, I would ask students to take notes on connections to the issues we had been discussing. Potential discussion questions would be: What messages are presented—or ignored—in this film? Who is the intended audience? What biases does it express? How might these messages resonate with different audiences? Overall, is this an effective film? Both films would be appropriate for courses in women's studies, US history, sociology, anthropology, and environmental history.

Robin O’Sullivan teaches American history, environmental history, food history, cultural history, gender history, African-American history, and historiography at Troy University. She is the author of American Organic: A Cultural History of Farming, Gardening, Shopping, and Eating (University Press of Kansas, 2015). She has a PhD in American studies from the University of Texas at Austin. She can be reached at @historynibbles on Twitter.