This paper documents a connection between the growth of activist environmentalism in the 1950s and the popular literature, fiction and nonfiction, which encourages or dramatizes “rustication,” deplacement to rural locations, by individuals and families. It exemplifies the portrayal of this deplacement through discussion of fictional nostalgia for environmentally undamaged living places, and then chronicling the rich literature of guidebook and memoir describing and urging movement outward, from urban to suburban to true pastoral living, and beyond.