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

Prior to Love of the Land, to read even the most comprehensive historical monographs on the history of environmentalism through 1920 has been to read much about George Perkins Marsh, David Thoreau, John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt, and Gifford Pinchot but to read little about prominent rural scholars and writers such as John Lee Coulter, the eldest Henry Wallace, and Isaac Phillips Roberts. In fact, a quick survey of the indices of half a dozen of the best and most comprehensive environmental histories finds no entries for Isaac Phillips Roberts—the Cornell University professor Liberty Hyde Bailey called “the wisest farmer I have ever known.” Moreover, repeating the search for arguably the most influential agrarian writer of his day, Liberty Hyde Bailey, is to find no entries under his name in nearly half of the recent treatments of U.S. environmental histories, including Ted Steinberg’s fine book Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (2002) and the second edition of First Along the River: A Brief History of the U.S. Environmental Movement (2000). Conversely, to read the definitive studies of agricultural history, including R. Douglas Hurt’s American Agriculture, A Brief History and David B. Danbom’s Born in the Country: A History of Rural America is to find no entries for John Muir—the most prominent naturalist of his day, a farmer’s son by birth, and a practicing farmer well into his early adulthood—and a single entry between the two books for one Henry David Thoreau. The problem here is not poor or incomplete scholarship—these are the most excellent histories available, and this book owes much to them. The problem is essentially disciplinary, which is to say agricultural history and environmental history, as emerging fields of graduate study and the stuff of professional conference- and association-making, have varied interests and, in any case, much already on their disciplinary plates. Each is involved, as in older, more established degree-granting academic programs, in defining and redefining its canon. This simple fact remains: a rural historian will find different historical significance and attach different historical weight to, for example, the Homestead Act than will an environmental historian, as the Homestead Act affected farmers differently than wilderness advocates. That is, perhaps, as it should be. And yet the few topics on which agricultural history and environmental history emphatically and equitably overlap often assume disproportionate importance at the expense of other equally crucial areas of mutual concern, including, for example, agricultural wetlands and farmland wildlife biology.