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of farm and conservation writers fresh from a golden age. The table of contents represents preeminent agrarian literary voices—Mary Hunter Austin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Dallas Lore Sharp, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman prominent among them; groundbreaking social scientists—Wilbert Lee Anderson, Kenyon L. Butterfield, John Lee Coulter, H. W. Foght, Charles Josiah Galpin, Frederick Jackson Turner, Thorstein Veblen, and others; and the household names of conservation studies—Liberty Hyde Bailey, John Burroughs, John Muir, Gifford Pinchot, Ellen H. Richards, Theodore Roosevelt, and Henry Wallace. Made by referral and endorsement of top scholars in the field, the selections in Love of the Land reflect thorough peer review. Their breadth suggests the true diversity of those who love the land and its people. Their presentation as primary works means the giants of conservation speak for themselves. Their nature, concise and highly readable, suggests a careful and voluminous survey of the literature for consumption and agriculture by nature enthusiast and credentialed historian alike. Finally, their extensive introductions, author biographies, and special sections—such as the supplementary anthology-within-an-anthology of agrarian and conservation forerunners, 1770–1880—offer context, as rich and full as space allows.
The result is a book to which I plan to return often in my own teaching of rural studies and environmental narrative and in my own life lived on the land. For me, the voices behind the more than fifty readings in Love of the Land, sampled from a golden age of farming and conservation writing, echo eerily across the generations, just as surely as my great-grandfather’s whisper (Because a man owns a farm does not mean that he owns the land to do with as he pleases) resonates for me. I hope the reader finds here writing to be quoted often and well, writing that is engaging and enlightening, and writing that seems uncannily contemporary in its substance. And I sincerely hope the work anthologized here not only informs a love of the land, but sustains it.
I have worked as a groundskeeper, a librarian, a journalist, and a professor, among other callings, and yet my most enduring role is that of a conservation farmer’s great-grandson, grandson, and