Love of the Land: Essential Farm and Conservation Readings from a ...

isolated, as they were, from distant markets. Many if not most American farmers kept livestock and poultry, farmed a crop, provided for their subsistence, and sold what little, if any, remained. As the writings of Crevecoeur, Morris, and Burroughs indicate, many ventured into the “wild” to collect honey or fruit for home use or for market. At the turn of the nineteenth century, in fact, perhaps 80 percent of the population was engaged in agriculture, a percentage that would remain nearly steady in the South, at least, until the beginning of the Civil War, while, in the country as a whole, the percentage would drop to around 50 percent.

Still, “conservation” as a theory and practice in the years 1770–1880 applied more in the East, where land claims were longer settled than west of the Appalachians, where ignorant squatters and fly-by-night cultivator-speculators often overfarmed and overgrazed a plot of ground before leaving for “virgin” lands to the west—a practice condemned as “land-skinning.” The courtship of farming and conservation—a hybrid later known by such terms as agro-ecology, sustainable farming, and permanent agriculture—began in the relatively more prosperous, more urbane East, which could afford circumspection of the kind practiced by transcendentalists Thoreau and Emerson, whose studies in philosophy and religion formed the basis of a spiritual land ethic. Thomas Jefferson and Vermont Congressman George Perkins Marsh were well positioned on the eastern seaboard to read the latest agricultural news and reviews from Europe. Fellow northeasterners John Burroughs and Frederick Law Olmsted came by their conservationist tendencies via American farm upbringings leavened by European travel. Alone in this grouping, John Muir came from the hinterlands, Wisconsin territory, and it is perhaps no surprise that his writings highlight especially hard-won wisdoms.

The supplementary anthology-within-an-anthology that follows shows the diversity and energy of agricultural and ecological dialogues underway in the Antebellum period and shortly thereafter. With the possible exception of John Muir, these forerunners explicitly or implicitly endorse the Jeffersonian notion that “cultivators are the most virtuous citizens,” though, in doing, they are forced to more