Appalachia's Alternative to Mainstream America: A Personal Education

"Longtime Appalachian resident, scholar, and historian Paul Salstrom recounts the education in homesteading, subsistence farming, gardening, and community-based mutual aid that he discovered in rural Lincoln County, West Virginia, beginning in the early 1970s. These experiences inspire a reflective history of Appalachia's 'neighborly networking' form of life and an impassioned case for its value to contemporary America. Salstrom notes that the 'back-to-the-landers' of the 1960s and 1970s have by no means disappeared, finding new expression in the farm-to-table and other related movements. But today is different, Salstrom argues. Pandemics, climate change, and deepening political divisions signal a crisis of common sense in mainstream America and cast new light on these old, landed practices, which may yet stand a chance of generating local sufficiency in food and energy production"--