Although this Leaf Chronicle article stays superficial (the lead is about whether the residents mind being called hippies), it is a good update on what has happened to The Farm, an enormous intentional community in Summertown, Tennessee started in 1970 and going through changes but still going strong. I have long had an interest in what they were doing and spent some time visiting there during the summer of 1980 when I was a medical student volunteering in rural Tennessee as part of the Appalachian Student Health Coalition. The Farm was already legendary in countercultural circles by that time. However, I had lost touch with what was happening there in the last decade or so and, frankly, expected it not to have survived. Good to hear otherwise.
How can it be, however, that the article mentions the spiritual godfather of The Farm, Stephen Gaskin, only once, and spiritual godmother Ina May Gaskin not at all? Her midwifery values were at the core of The Farm’s philosophy and activities. It was well-known that down-and-out expectant mothers from anywhere could come there to give birth and, if I remember correctly, have their children raised there instead of aborting their pregnancies. I wonder where Ina May and Stephen are. Stephen Gaskin, if he is still alive, is 70 now. This online resumé has not been been updated since 1995, but I noted his presence on the scene as recently as 2000 in FmH, when I linked to this R.U. Sirius interview with Gaskin. Gaskin was desultorily seeking the Green Party nomination during the 2000 Presidential campaign. Unfortunately, Sirius asked Gaskin little else about what he was up to back then, preferring to gossip with him about how much pot Al Gore smoked.
Here is a Smart Communities Network entry for The Farm with more details about what they are up to. Again, there is little mention of the Gaskins except in a historical vein. Could they have parted ways with The Farm community or departed the planet? Do any FmH readers know?
Part of the triviality of the Leaf Chronicle article lies in its focus on The Farm’s drift toward some private ownership of property from its stringently communitarian beginnings. Mainstream press coverage of intentional communities has always focused (often triumpally) on this prevalent trend as if it is proof of failure (and somehow a part of the global defeat of Communism?) when in reality it is merely an epiphenomenon of the ongoing compromises and struggles needed to balance right livelihood and principled vision on the one hand with accommodating to the pressures of the real world on the other. What would have been more appropriate would have been a greater focus on the good works of what was and is, after all, an idealistic community which has done an enormous amount to put its principles into action! One aspect of The Farm’s activities which drew my attention was the Plenty Project, a Gaskin-led charity bypassing government structures to offer direct international development assistance, including (if I remember correctly) owning their own freighter to ship relief aid, building materials, grain and seed, farming implements etc. abroad. Plenty International’s website was updated as recently as the tsunami disaster of last winter. It appears as if its scope has, not surprisingly, narrowed, but not its vision.
One of The Farm’s offshoots, the Ecovillage Network of North America, “an effort to link a wide variety of green communities, Eco-City projects and ecovillages, and to encourage a transition from the traditional Western consumer lifestyle to one of sustainable development,” sounds interesting.
Related: The Hippie Origins of PCs, a mini-review of What the Dormouse Said by John Markoff:
