| Chapter : | America’s Love of the Land: An Introduction |
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General readers and historians searching for a truly interdisciplinary approach are, as a consequence, left to construct their own metaphoric Venn diagrams or to feel otherwise verboten among even the new generation of welcoming interdisciplinary associations and annual conferences, such as the well-subscribed Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE). Truth be known, to be a student of both rural history and environmental history equally, or purposefully betwixt and between, often feels to the devoted scholar and lover of the land to be a kind of new Unitarianism—or perhaps an old-fashioned limbo.
The American Progressive Era, roughly inclusive of the years 1890 to 1918, presents the historian with men and women so eclectic as to be utterly singular. Notable among them are Frederick Law Olmsted, John Muir, the elder Henry Wallace, Theodore Roosevelt, Liberty Hyde Bailey, and Mary Hunter Austin, to name a few, who farmed or ranched whether as children or adults and who also played a prominent role in the conservation and preservation movements. Indeed, Liberty Hyde Bailey, whose book The Holy Earth is considered a conservation classic, doubled as the editor of Country Life magazine and the chair of the Country Life Commission. Likewise, the eldest Henry Wallace served as a Country Life Commissioner while soon after presiding over the Third National Conservation Congress in 1910. In a Renaissance fashion, these characters in the farming and conservation drama resist categorization, appearing over and over in progressively more nuanced and conflicted guises. To compile an anthology of works wide enough to showcase their eclectic interests and expertise is a daunting task indeed.
Thus William Butler Yeats, himself a combination of poet, painter, philosopher, dramatist, mystic, politician and ruralist, found cause to say, “Out of the quarrel with others we make rhetoric; out of the quarrel with ourselves we make poetry.” It should not surprise, then, that John Muir once described himself to friend and conservationist co-conspirator Robert Underwood Johnson as “poeticio-trampo-geologist-bot, and ornith-natural, etc.!—!—!”1