the inquisition, subjugation of women, the enslavement of our fellows except alone enslavement in war,” we can only reply, “Don’t we wish!”
In some places this book can easily be misunderstood just because certain words don’t mean to us now what they meant a hundred years ago. If our eyes widen on first encountering Bailey’s phrase “the holiness of industry” (79), that is our mistake, not his. By “industry” he meant the virtue of industriousness, the ability and willingness to work — not, as to us, an economic and technological system of violent production and wasteful consumption.
When he speaks, on page 89, of the need to preserve “individualism,” he is not referring to the supposed right of separate persons to do as they please, or of the strong to triumph over the weak, but rather to the proper respect for individuality that would “protect the person from being submerged in the system” (87). He associates “individual” with “independent,” “original,” “responsible,” and “free.”
And when he says, on page 97, that “The life of every one of us is relative,” what he has in mind is nothing akin to the idea of relativism. He means that we are related or connected to what, in this part of the book, he calls “the backgrounds,” or “the background spaces.” I think these latter terms are regrettable. He seems to be reaching toward “ecosystem” and “ecosphere,” neither of which was then in use. But he could have said “nature” or “the natural world,” and I wish he had. “Background” suggests a stage setting, as our own degraded word “environment” suggests surroundings. We are fortunate now to have the term “ecosystem” in common use, for it denotes a household of which the indwelling creatures, living and non-living, are mutually the parts.
But these and other such differences, though they require some vigilance and care in reading, do not mean that this book is irrelevant or obsolete, as industrialists and certain ologists would like to think. We need Bailey now as a teacher and ally because the problem of land use, which is to say land abuse, is a constant from his time to ours, and is worse in ours than in his. He wrote this book because he saw the need to “act rightly toward the earth” (4), and the need for such right acting is more urgent now than a hundred years ago.
As a countryman by birth, upbringing, and predilection, Bailey was ceaselessly aware that the results of our use of the earth, whether abusive and extractive or responsible and conserving, are inescapably practical. Nobody in the lineage of conservationists so far has been so attentive, not just to the need to care for the earth, but to the arts, the sciences, and the pleasures of doing so. He knew, as most conservationists do not yet know, that everything depends on the character, the culture, the motives, and the skills of the people of the land economies who use the earth and, by using it, connect the whole society to it.
He knew also that there is no practical difference between the land user who does not know how to act rightly toward the earth, and the land user who cannot afford, or who does not have the time, to do so. Another constant from his time to ours has been the inferior economic and social status of the farmer. Through all the centuries of war, he wrote,
there have been men on the land wishing to see the light, trying to make mankind hear, hoping but never realizing…. They have been on the bottom, upholding the whole superstructure and pressed into the earth by the weight of it. When the final history is written, the lot of the man on the land will be the saddest chapter. (91–2)
Bailey was as mindful of “the planet” as we are, but to save it he would have liked to see it equitably and democratically divided so as “to give the husbandman full opportunity and full justice” (92). He believed in 1915 that the establishment of governmental departments of agriculture and the land grant universities would lead to such opportunity and justice, helping to achieve “a satisfying husbandry that will maintain itself century by century, without loss and without the ransacking of the ends of the earth for fertilizer materials…” (22). From our perspective in 2015, this is another forlorn optimism.
But a vision is not necessarily invalidated by failure. Bailey’s vision, by no means his alone, was wrong for industrialism but right for agriculture. It was right in general, and in plentiful detail, validated by a long history of good and bad examples — and validated in our time by the now-manifest failure of the industrial juggernaut of the years following World War II. He has a high and honorable place in the lineage of teachers — Thomas Jefferson, F. H. King, J. Russell Smith, Sir Albert Howard, Stan Rowe, Wes Jackson — who, if we ever finally decide to act rightly toward the earth, will light our way.
We need him for his practicality, but also for the pleasure of his company. He was unapologetically a countryman. He would never have described himself deprecatingly as “just an old country boy.” He liked country life in all its aspects, and everything he had to say about it is informed and seasoned by affection. His prose is robust, energetic, direct, and economical, with sometimes a surprising exactitude that would have delighted Marianne Moore:
This kind of apple is very perfect in spherical form, deeply cut at the stem, well ridged at the shallow crater, beautifully splashed and streaked with carmine-red on a yellowish green under-color, finely flecked with dots, slightly russet on the shaded side, apparently a good keeper; its texture is fine-grained and uniform, flavor mildly subacid, the quality good to very good… (69)
We feel, as Robert Frost said we should, what a hell of a good time Bailey had in writing that.
The point, to him, was not only that a beautiful thing gives pleasure, but also that the beauty and the pleasure were ordinary, within reach of anybody — democratic, as he might have said. The apple was “a thing of exquisite beauty,” but its beauty was not rare or expensive. It was a common amenity of the kind that made a farmer’s life worth living, and a proper appreciation of it raised farming to a place of honor among the kinds of human work:
It is no doubt a mark of a well-tempered mind that it can understand the significance of the forms in fruits and plants and animals and apply it in the work of the day. (70)
..............................................................
I think it should be a fundamental purpose in our educational plans to acquaint the people with the common resources of the region, and particularly with those materials on which we subsist. (73)
..............................................................
It is worth while to have an intellectual interest in a fruit-tree. (73)
..............................................................
Fowls, pigs, sheep on their pastures, cows, mules, all perfect of their kind, all sensitive, all of them marvellous in their forms and powers, — verily these are good to know. (73)
He thus gives to our cant phrase “quality of life” a gravity and a happiness that most of us have forgot even to try for, exceeding the capacity of our language of novelty and the news, but reachable if ever again we should decide to try.
WENDELL BERRY
Port Royal, Kentucky, 2015
Editor’s Introduction by John Linstrom
In The Holy Earth, Liberty Hyde Bailey produced a manifesto of what he often called his “outlook” — something different from formal philosophy or theology, grounded in equal parts practical experience and personal affection, which he meant to condense into a book that would impact society pragmatically by inspiring his readers morally and spiritually. Simultaneously expansive and compact, growing from tradition and challenging dogma,
