Counterculture Ecology in The Mother Earth News, "Back to the Land" Archive of First Production Year Issues, 1970

The Mother Earth News

Archive

Six first year issues of The Mother Earth News, 1970, documenting how the 1970s counterculture movement converted anti consumerism, Vietnam War era disaffection, and ecological politics into practical instructions for rural migration. Topics of homesteading, cooperative living, food production, recycling, and off grid domestic work became increasingly popular in the 1970s as young Americans reacted against the postwar expansion of suburban consumer culture, corporate advertising, automobile dependency, processed food, and disposable household goods. Issued in the year of the first Earth Day, these numbers show the magazine defining rural self sufficiency as a counterculture program, containing instructions to buy land, build shelter, grow food, reuse waste, generate power, and form communities outside the consumer economy.

Archive of Issues six issues and one index, seven items total. The Mother Earth News. Madison, Ohio and Hendersonville, North Carolina, 1970 to circa 1979. All six periodicals published in 1970, and "The Mother Earth News Index, Nos. 1 to 60" published in 1979; regular issues average 70 to 90 pages.

[1] The Mother Earth News. Vol. 1, No. 1. January 1970. First issue, with cover price of 50 cents and contents including Gary Snyder’s “Four Changes,” “Free Folk,” “Morning Glory Farm,” “The Plains Indian Tipi,” “Digger Bread,” “How to Recycle Garbage,” and early coverage of Twin Oaks.

[2] The Mother Earth News. “How To Get Out Of The City And Back To The Land.” 1970. Special issue organized as a migration manual, with visible emphasis on buying land, growing food, raising animals, finding rural shelter, and converting counterculture exit from the city into household practice.

[3] The Mother Earth News. No. 3. May 1970. Includes Earth Day material, “How To Retire 6 Months Every Year,” “How I Survive In The City,” methane production, power from garbage, and a sheepherder’s wagon article, placing ecological protest beside self sufficiency mechanics.

[4] The Mother Earth News. No. 4. July 1970. Includes commune and experimental building material, including Rivendale, “How To Get Plans For A 30 Foot Dome,” and coverage of Copionics, extending the magazine’s back to the land program into intentional community, dome construction, and alternative technology.

[5] The Mother Earth News. No. 5. September 1970. Includes a Plowboy Interview with Jacques Yves Cousteau, “Bug Off!,” “Buy Land With Little Or No Money Down?,” wind power, barter, organic gardening, and reuse of an old schoolhouse.

[6] The Mother Earth News. No. 6. November 1970. Includes a Plowboy Interview with René Dubos, a Stewart Brand letter, Ken Kern owner built home material, wind plant information, goat raising, and legal environmental writing on the Refuse Act of 1899.

[7] The Mother Earth News Index. Nos. 1 to 60. Hendersonville, North Carolina: The Mother Earth News, circa 1979. Index volume covering the magazine’s first sixty numbers, with subject and author access to articles on communes, food, construction, energy, animals, gardening, politics, health, and rural economics.

The group belongs to the first publishing phase of The Mother Earth News, when the magazine served readers who wanted explicit instructions for leaving cities, acquiring land, building shelter, growing food, and organizing life outside conventional consumer systems. Its named appearances by Gary Snyder, Jacques Yves Cousteau, René Dubos, Stewart Brand, and Ken Kern connect the magazine’s practical homesteading program to counterculture poetry, marine conservation, ecological medicine, whole earth networks, and owner built architecture. The inclusion of the later Nos. 1 to 60 index makes the group more usable as a research set by preserving the magazine’s own subject map for its first decade of articles. Moderate page toning, and small edge defects; bindings intact. Overall very good condition. Housed in a magazine storage box printed with The Mother Earth News logo on the side panel. A compact first year record of how The Mother Earth News turned early 1970s ecological counterculture into readable and later popular instructions for land, food, shelter, energy, and domestic independence.

Item #23540

Price: $380.00