The Holy Earth. Liberty Hyde Bailey
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)
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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)
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It is worth while to have an intellectual interest in a fruit-tree. (73)
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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, the small volume managed both to articulate ahead of its time the idea that “human” morals and ethics ought rightly to extend beyond the merely human and then to 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,