Hipbillies by Jared M. Phillips

Author:Jared M. Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610756594
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press

CHAPTER 5

The Ozark Mystic Vision

The revolution in our own lives has us . . . becoming much closer to the land and its seasonal rhythms and requirements.

—Jerry Friedberg

THE WORK OF the Ozark Institute was not the only way in which hipbillies sought to become an asset to their new home. As they established themselves and learned from native Ozarkers, hipbillies became deeply involved in their local communities, often in ways meant to bridge the gap between ideals of the deep revolution and lived experience in the Ozarks. While the Institute might have been a flashier vision of this, it is best understood within a larger network of community-based activism that emerged alongside of, and perhaps despite, its efforts. These grassroots efforts are, in many cases, what has served as the lasting influence of the hipbillies on the Ozarks.

As the back to the landers settled into the rhythms of Ozark life, they faced certain realities. Hipbillies arriving in the region had envisioned the Ozarks as pristine, a place where the impurities of America were erased. However, instead of a bucolic paradise, they encountered the growing use of chemical herbicides by the US Forest Service (USFS), larger farms, power companies, and others—something that, given Rachel Carson’s then-recent Silent Spring, should have come as no surprise to the hipbillies.1 One hipbilly noted years later, “It was one of those things that you kind of think that happens someplace else, that doesn’t happen here.”2 But it was happening in the Ozarks. Faced with such a reality, the neopioneers did what they had done elsewhere: organized with gusto.

In what became an ongoing act of back to the land engagement in local politics and economy in the Ozarks, the hipbillies protested the USFS’s attempts to escalate the use of 2,4 D and 2,4,5 T throughout the Ozark and St. Francis National Forests. The USFS had previously used the herbicide in ground applications in clear-cut areas, but in the fall of 1974 and in early 1975, it announced it would begin an aerial spraying program. Opposition within the back to the land community began almost immediately, as groups throughout the larger Ozarks raised concerns. In November 1974, Fayetteville resident Sidney Bell wrote to LION about the efforts of the Women’s Center Committee on the Environment in Fayetteville to have the chemical banned in Arkansas.3 Just what made 2,4 D so controversial? According to Gary Turner, 2,4,5 T was a hormone-based herbicide, “which kills many plants by causing them to grow themselves to death.”4 It was often used to clear weeds in rice or soybean fields, as well as to make space in timber stands for fast-growing pine trees. Indeed, as Kathryn Newfont has shown in her work on forest commons in Appalachia, USFS was engaged in a broad strategy throughout the south to create single-aged forests for easy harvesting and replanting. While in some areas—like the Blue Ridge Mountains—clear-cutting was the USFS’s first choice to manufacture forests for harvest, in others, surplus chemicals from Vietnam, like 2,4 D in the Ozarks, were the weapon of choice.

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