| Chapter : | America’s Love of the Land: An Introduction |
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To wit: Each of the Progressive Era’s prominent farming and conservation writers had to come to terms as much with their own divided loyalties as with others’. Roderick Frazier Nash’s Wilderness and the American Mind, perhaps the best historical treatment of the enlarged, land-use theme, traces the roots of Muir’s ambivalence as follows:
Nash further considers how, “[in] juxtaposing the needs of civilization with the spiritual and aesthetic value of wilderness, the conservation issue extended the old dialogue between pioneers and romantics” (ibid). Clearly, capturing the diversity of a thoroughly complicated man such as John Muir requires a number of snapshots varying in width and depth of field, documenting the individual at various stages in their evolution. Hence, the figures who most nearly represent a hybrid of the conservationist and the agriculturalist—John Burroughs, John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt, and Liberty Hyde Bailey—are represented in Love of the Land by several essays. For the same reason, a cast of forerunners and fountainheads, including the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Jean Crevecoeur, and Frederick Law Olmsted, merit inclusion as emblems of the shared roots from which the agrarian and conservation movements sprang.
1 Roderick Frazier Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind, 4th Edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 122.