The Holy Earth. Liberty Hyde Bailey
is settled: We are now and have long been dominant. The question of interest is how, being dominant, we will conduct ourselves. If, taking Genesis seriously, we see the earth as holy, then reverence and humility ought to prompt us to use it conservingly and kindly: “If the earth is holy, then the things that grow out of the earth are also holy. They do not belong to man to do with them as he will” (13). This invokes a chastening moral fear, actual and ancient, that we have reduced to a “problem” merely technological and political. The damning fact is that “our dominion has been mostly destructive” (17), and this book was written to remind us that the proper keeping and good care of the earth is our highest and most solemn duty.
If Bailey’s language, in what I have called its completeness, is deliberately poised against the disheartening language of materialism, well begun in his time, it is also by its nature poised against our own time’s “ecocentric” misanthropy and its ugly neologisms. In the terms of this book, humans are by no means excused from their long history of irresponsibility and destruction, but they are nowhere seen as “anthropocentric” interlopers. To see the earth as holy, and therefore as demanding the most conserving arts and sciences of husbandry, is to put humans where they belong: central of course, like all creatures, to their own consciousness of their own needs, but also subordinate to, called to adapt their work to, the ordering of things in which the earth is the primary good.
For me, and I’m sure for others who share my reasons, there is a happiness and a kind of reassurance in Bailey’s unworried use of the language of conserving qualities. But there are also problems with his language, and these have got to be dealt with. Dealing with them requires some trouble, but it is also rewarding, for they bring us directly into the presence of our history. The problems all arise from the differences made by the hundred years between the first publication of The Holy Earth in 1915 and this new edition of 2015. Perhaps we should not say that no century ever has more changed the world, but we can say with some confidence that no century ever has changed it more drastically, or, from our own point of view, done it more damage.
In 1915, World War I still had three years in which to reveal its horrors. Bailey could to some extent anticipate the catastrophe that lay ahead, both military and industrial — his foreboding moved him to write this book — but he could not yet have known its limitless violence. He was still free of actual knowledge of the actual destructions that by the time of his death in 1954 had already made the twentieth century the most destructive of any so far. And so he could write with a confidence that could not come so easily now:
We … know that the final control of human welfare will not be governmental or military, and we shall some day learn that it will not be economic as we now prevailingly use the word.…We shall know the creator in the creation. We shall derive more of our solaces from the creation and in the consciousness of our right relations to it. We shall be more fully aware that righteousness inheres in honest occupation. (84)
Legitimate human hope could not be better stated than this. It is good prophecy as Isaiah is good prophecy — for Bailey’s time, our time, and all time — but it bespeaks a fulfillment easier to foresee then than now.
When in 1942 he wrote a “Retrospect,” a sort of foreword, for a new edition, he continued his old prophecy, in much the same tone:
When the epoch of mere exploitation of the earth shall have worn itself out, we shall realize the heritage that remains and enter new realms of satisfaction. (xxvii)
Today we long for this with the same longing, but now we must ask if this epoch will not wear itself out by wearing out the earth. And 1942 was only the first year of America’s engagement in World War II. In 1942 Bailey had not known that war in the full progress of its brutality and violence. By the time he died in 1954 he would have known of the Holocaust, the firebombing of cities, the coming of the science of nuclear terror, the beginning of the Cold War and the first of its spawn of “small” hot wars. He could not have begun to imagine the extent of the progress of industrial warfare against humans and against the earth between 1954 and now.
And so, though we read The Holy Earth in our time as an act of acknowledgement and appreciation of one of the best in the lineage of conservationists, our reading becomes also an act sometimes of a kind of translation. History, to begin with, has simply overturned some of his most cherished articles of faith. He believed — or wanted to believe, as who would not? — that the natural world or “background” was more durable, less vulnerable to human harm, than it has proved to be. In 1915 he could write, though already whistling in the dark, “The fields do not perish…” (107). But we know, by measures objective enough, that they do. Though most of us still prefer not to know, the fields are now perishing, every day and all over the world, from erosion, poisoning, “development,” and neglect. Bailey wrote that “the sea remains beyond [our] power to modify, to handle, and to control” (109). But now, by pollution and other forms of violence, we certainly have “modified” the sea, the seas, the oceans, and all the waters of the world. So modified, they may be less controllable than ever, and all because of our inability to control ourselves.
As a result, many of us now cannot so easily speak of the human “conquest of the earth” and our “contest with the planet” (57) as Bailey did in the chapter entitled “The Struggle for Existence: War.” Mainly the problem here is that the language is out of fashion. Bailey was too well experienced and knowing to doubt that we must, to an extent, struggle for existence, and that we are, to an extent, in a contest with the planet or with nature. That struggle and that contest can be denied only by people with sedentary jobs who don’t work outdoors in the wintertime. But Bailey’s chapter is a brief against war, and he specifically denies any equation between the struggle for existence and war, or any attempt to justify or excuse war as “natural.” And his terms “conquest” and “contest” are sternly qualified by two statements radically pertinent to our predicament now. The first is evolutionary: “the final test of fitness in nature is adaptation, not power” (56). The second is traditional wisdom, far older and more necessary than any precept of science:
The final conquest of a man is of himself, and he shall then be greater than when he takes a city. The final conquest of a society is of itself, and it shall then be greater than when it conquers its neighboring society. (56–7)
But when he goes on to say, “We have passed witchcraft, religious persecution, 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,