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

gift of prophecy and knew all mysteries and all knowledge, if it had all faith so as to remove mountains, and did not prompt the deeds of love, it would be nothing.” Thus, the back and forth nature of a doctor-patient exchange is captured in the primary readings that follow in ways not possible in an exclusively interpretive history or conventional secondary textbook.

In a modern era when surveys document a growing public distrust of government officials and newspaper journalists as well as doctors and policymakers, the Golden Age of agriculture and conservation reasserts its relevance. Moreover, in an energy-starved twenty-first century economy turning increasingly to renewable bio-fuels produced by those living close to the land, the farmer and the conservationist become once more hot commodities. Whenever our society urgently considers the double bind of limitless war and finite natural resources, as it did during the Golden Age and as it does now, the rural and the remote are looked to as litmus tests. Meanwhile, the pundits—by which we mean the entire class of analysts, consultants, academics, and policymakers mobilized in times of war and shortage—come to the fore along with, but not necessarily alongside, the farmer and the conservationist. The pundit and the pundit’s think tank, the bureaucrat and bureaucrat’s government—draw their substance from the Progressive Era portrayed here, when they were mobilized not only to win wars, build roads, bust trusts, and educate citizens, but to harness—which is to say study, apprehend—the engine that is, or was, the American landscape.

The historic agrarian and conservation writings of Love of the Land echo, sometimes uncannily, the political present. Perhaps even more than his father, George W. Bush, the record shows, has modeled his presidency after Teddy Roosevelt. Covering his campaign stop for the Augusta Chronicle in June of 2000, for example, journalist Justin Martin reported Bush’s admiration of Teddy Roosevelt’s “boundless energy” and “great vision.”⁷ Four years later, when Bush the Younger was locked

⁷ Justin Martin, “Presidential Hopeful Pushes Positive Vision” Augusta Chronicle, http://quest.cjonline.com/stories/060700/gen_vision.shtml (accessed June 7, 2000).