The Holy Earth

Environmentalism is not a thing exclusive to the second half of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Even at the turn of the century, people sensed something wrong. "The Holy Earth" takes a look at one of the loudest yet relatively unknown voices of early environmentalism in Liberty Hyde Bailey. Touching on his early writings and words, it's intriguing to see one of the first environmentalist minds in action. "The Holy Earth" is much recommended to any environmentalist who appreciates his cause's history.

In 1915, Liberty Hyde Bailey's book The Holy Earth was first published as part of his series of "Background Books." Bailey, a botanist and horticulturist, wrote this series as a call for the care of the earth as a holy and divine creation, a responsible and cooperative participation with the earth via agriculture and a concern for the increasing separation between people and the land, the backgrounds, as he names them. This book, then, makes the argument for local culture to use local nature as its measure: "the creation...is the norm." Using nature as measure, though, the land and all its inhabitants must be understood as parts of a creation, so that "[the farmer] must handle all his materials, remembering man and remembering God. A man cannot be a good farmer unless he is a religious man." This is a religion grounded and made manifest in the particularities of a place, which is practiced by the stewardship of the land and the peaceful relationships within the community. "If God created the earth, so is the earth hallowed; and if it is hallowed, so must we deal with it devotedly and with care that we do not despoil it, and mindful of our relations to all beings that live on it ... To live in sincere relations with the company of created things and with conscious regard for the support of all men now and yet to come, must be of the essence of righteousness." Overwhelmingly with this book, I am reminded of many of Wendell Berry's essays, both in the large concepts, as well as many particulars, including saving land for wildness, an argument for diversified agriculture and the adaptation of culture to a place. This shared theme has been expressed by Berry, particularly in his essay "A Practical Harmony," in which he traces back further to Virgil, and to Job, the "view of things [that] holds that we can live only in and from nature, and that we have, therefore, an inescapable obligation to be nature's stewards and to live in harmony with her" (Berry, "A Practical Harmony" in What Are People For?). For Bailey (as for Berry), this means that "we shall find our rootage in the soil." This rooting begins with the background spaces, "the large environments in which we live but which we do not make ... the facts and situations that stand at our backs, to which we adjust our civilization, and by which we measure ourselves." As the creation becomes the measure, all human acts must exist in accord to it. Bailey elaborates throughout the book on three practices that are in need of correction to be a "practical harmony": agriculture, division of property and war. Agriculture is given the most attention in this book; it is helpful to consider the rise of industrialized agriculture in Bailey's day, and compare this to our present time. His warnings of "foods transported from the ends of the earth, and compounded by impersonal devices and condensed into packages that go into every house alike"