demonstrate how that concept might be applied pragmatically to such social problems as rural planning and mapping, land conservation and preservation (significantly both, and from a farmer’s perspective), general and specialist education (from primary schools to college and then university extension), food purity and adulteration, and, ultimately, the democratic outlook of a people. The significance of Bailey’s project is finally being recognized by an increasingly broad readership today, the result of one hundred years of doing its work quietly, in the backgrounds of some of our most significant national and global discussions. This centennial edition seeks to do justice to an underappreciated landmark work of ecological thinking.
To appreciate Bailey’s significance, we need look no further than Aldo Leopold, the writer and conservationist who gave us the term “land ethic” and elaborated it both philosophically and poetically in his posthumous A Sand County Almanac of 1949. Sixteen years earlier, in his important book Game Management, Leopold states that “a few naturalists have attempted to formulate” the “philosophical problem” of the ethical response to the nonhuman, but he gives only two texts as his examples: Bailey’s The Holy Earth and a later, 1927 essay by H. F. Lewis.5 Leopold even concludes the first chapter of the work, titled “A History of Ideas,” with a block quote from The Holy Earth:
We are at pains to stress the importance of conduct; very well: conduct toward the earth is an essential part of it.… To make the earth productive and to keep it clean and to bear a reverent regard for its products is the special prerogative of good agriculture.6 (9–10 and 78, this text)
Describing The Holy Earth as the birth of a modern land ethic, then, is no stretch of the imagination (although Leopold, like Bailey, traces similar concepts as far back as Judeo-Christian scripture). The lineage is clear, from Bailey’s “morals of land management” to Leopold’s more condensed “land ethic,” which has exerted such influence over our conservation thinking and policy today. That Leopold would gesture so prominently to The Holy Earth as early as 1933 makes the lineage significant.
Of course, we need no more endorsement of Bailey’s text than that given by Wendell Berry, one of our modern prophets and a sane visionary of the agrarian ideal, in the foreword to this edition. We may also look to the work of Wes Jackson, Fred Kirschenmann, and Norman Wirzba, to name only a few of the other leading agrarian voices who speak clearly to us today and who have pointed back in their own publications to Bailey’s significance. Members of the academy who are attuned to the urgent need for a public agrarian vision have also begun to rally behind Bailey in recent years. Philosophy and ethics scholar James A. Montmarquet argues that “if there is a single ‘solution’ to be found to the problem of formulating a viable agrarian philosophy today, its main lines are to be found in Liberty Hyde Bailey’s writings and philosophy.”7 Scholar Ben Minteer has published important work on Bailey’s significance to civic pragmatism and argues that The Holy Earth “deserves to be on the short list of American environmental classics.”8 Historian of environmentalism Kevin C. Armitage argues that “Bailey’s thought was more radically ecological than any of his peers save John Muir” and cites him as exemplary of the strain of Progressive-Era conservationism that integrated nineteenth-century romanticism into the framework of American pragmatism, defying the era’s more technocratic impulses.9 Paul A. Morgan and Scott J. Peters use the wider corpus of Bailey’s environmental philosophy to argue that in it lie the seeds of a new “planetary agrarianism,” and that furthermore Bailey’s entire lifework — his nature-study advocacy, his leadership in the Country- Life Movement, his democratic vision for land-grant and extension education as early Dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell University, even his academic agenda to have botanists “climb the garden fence” and bring the science of botany to bear on the study of cultivated plants (horticulture)10 — can best be described in terms of collective worldview transition, supported by organizations but enacted and lived out by everyday independent individuals, a ground-up but integrated approach to reform that speaks even more forcibly to the corporatized, industrial world of today.11 Even in 1915, Bailey worried that we were too “tied up” (34, 36).
Bailey first began to commit his massive vision to book-length form in the Rural Outlook Set — four volumes that each treated his idea of a necessary “rural outlook” to counteract the dehumanization of bureaucratic society, each from a different perspective: The Nature-Study Idea (1903), The Outlook to Nature (1905), The State and the Farmer (1909), and The Country-Life Movement in the United States (1911). In 1913, just a few years after chairing President Theodore Roosevelt’s national Commission on Country-Life and after serving for ten years as Dean of the College of Agriculture at Cornell, Bailey stepped away from his institutional affiliations to “retire,” which meant for him the chance to focus his unflagging work on the topics that most concerned him. When Roosevelt urged him, nearing retirement, to run for governor of New York on the Progressive ticket, Bailey all but laughed the suggestion off — “Never have we needed the separate soul so much as now,” he would write a year later (88).
It was on a sea voyage in 1914 to give a series of lectures in New Zealand that he reportedly began writing down a new kind of work, one that would take all of his diverse philosophical and civic ideals and weave them into a single, condensed articulation. “On the backs of letters, scraps of paper, anything which came to his hand,” as one biographer writes, and under an open sky with the unending sea around him, he wrote the book that would most carry him into the future.12
While he was at sea and in the process of writing, the First World War broke in Europe, sending the conference he was traveling to, the Australasian meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, into a scramble throughout Bailey’s time in New Zealand. Many of his fellow scholars from Europe chose to return to their home countries rather than stay for the conference, although Bailey remained to give at least one of his planned lectures, on the topic of “Research as the Basis of Rural Life.”13 The constant news of Europe’s unraveling no doubt lent urgency to Bailey’s writing and shaped his discussion of that “war of commercial frenzy” (18).
While a global, oceanic perspective lent something of the wild “salt” to his masterful concluding chapter on “the ancestral sea” and the outbreak of the Great War imposed new urgency on the project, strong in his mind too were the influences of his humble upbringing on his parents’ farm outside of South Haven, Michigan, which had then grown from the ramshackle pioneer settlement of Bailey’s childhood into a bustling fruit town.14 He found himself visiting that farm several times in the years leading up to his New Zealand trip in order to help manage the sale of the property in the wake of his father’s death and his mother’s decline. In letters to his brother, he wrote that he hated to see the property go, but that there was no way around it — as he spent time there and helped his family let go of the place, his memories of growing up in a rural frontier community must have shaped his thinking.15 We see that influence in the deeply personal penultimate chapter on “the open fields,” which includes a description of South Haven and the surrounding countryside, as well as in the previous chapter describing the “primeval forest.” Each of these environments literally formed the “background” of his young life and the outlook he would carry with him to his last years. And, truly, the open vista of the sea did not present a scene foreign to him — in addition to his prior sea voyages to Europe and the Caribbean for his research, he grew up not much more than a mile from the shore of Lake Michigan. We cannot doubt the effect on a young child of standing on South Haven’s sandy beaches, tracing the straight line between water and sky and wondering at the vastness that stretched from infinity right up to the harbor of his little hometown. In the farmhouse of his childhood, now a museum, still sit two clumsy, rough-hewn canoe paddles with the initials “L. B.” carved into them. Alongside them, a curiously resonant artifact, lies his father’s old garden hoe, the blade worn thin, four distinct finger grooves opposite a long thumb groove rubbed into the handle’s wood through years of steady work. In some ways, the closeness of home must never have felt all that disconnected from the vastness of
