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

Forerunners: Readings 1770–1880

Introducing the Forerunners:

Jean de Crevecoeur, Thomas Jefferson, Alexis de Tocqueville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Perkins Marsh, John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, Edmund Morris, Frederick Law Olmsted, and John Burroughs.

The following ten readings represent early engagements between farming and conservation that would blossom into a complete but sometimes fraught matrimony by the early twentieth century. Significantly, these selections portray salad days for the American republic when farmers and conservationists (though the term conservation itself would not enjoy popular usage until the days of the Theodore Roosevelt administration) were not yet fully aware of their differences nor polarized by labels concerning belief and practice. The earliest presidents—Washington, Jefferson, and Madison—considered themselves cultivators, habitually blending politics, war-making, and surveying with farming. Farmers, as the writings of Jean Crevecoeur and Edmund Morris here show, were “conservationists” by necessity,