Liberty Hyde Bailey

Essential Agrarian and Environmental Writings

Liberty Hyde Bailey, Zachary Michael Jack

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780801457593
• Topic: Scienze biologiche
• Subtopic: Saggi sulla natura

"Nature-study not only educates, but it educates nature-ward; and nature is ever our companion, whether we will or no. Even though we are determined to shut ourselves in an office, nature sends her messengers. The light, the dark, the moon, the cloud, the rain, the wind, the falling leaf, the fly, the bouquet, the bird, the cockroach-they are all ours. If one is to be happy, he must be in sympathy with common things. He must live in harmony with his environment. One cannot be happy yonder nor tomorrow: he is happy here and now, or never. Our stock of knowledge of common things should be great. Few of us can travel. We must know the things at home."—from "The Meaning of the Nature-study Movement"

"To feel that one is a useful and cooperating part in nature is to give one kinship, and to open the mind to the great resources and the high enthusiasms. Here arise the fundamental common relations. Here arise also the great emotions and conceptions of sublimity and grandeur, of majesty and awe, the uplift of vast desires—when one contemplates the earth and the universe and desires to take them into the soul and to express oneself in their terms; and here also the responsible practices of life take root."—from "The Holy Earth"

Before Wendell Berry and Aldo Leopold, there was the horticulturalist and botanist Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858–1954). For Wendell Berry, Bailey was a revelation, a symbol of the nature-minded agrarianism Berry himself popularized. For Aldo Leopold, Bailey offered a model of the scholar-essayist-naturalist. In his revolutionary work of eco-theology, The Holy Earth, Bailey challenged the anthropomorphism—the people-centeredness—of a vulnerable world.

A trained scientist writing in the lyrical tradition of Emerson, Burroughs, and Muir, Bailey offered the twentieth century its first exquisitely interdisciplinary biocentric worldview; this Michigan farmer's son defined the intellectual and spiritual foundations of what would become the environmental movement. For nearly a half century, Bailey dominated matters agricultural, environmental, and scientific in the United States. He worked both to improve the lives of rural folk and to preserve the land from which they earned their livelihood. Along the way, he popularized nature study in U.S. classrooms, lobbied successfully for women's rights on and off the farm, and bulwarked Teddy Roosevelt's pioneering conservationism.

Here for the first time is an anthology of Bailey's most important writings suitable for the general and scholarly reader alike. Carefully selected and annotated by Zachary Michael Jack, this book offers a comprehensive introduction to Bailey's celebrated and revolutionary thinking on the urgent environmental, agrarian, educational, and ecospiritual dilemmas of his day and our own. Culled from ten of Bailey's most influential works, these lyrical selections highlight Bailey's contributions to the nature-study and the Country Life movements.

Published on the one-hundredth anniversary of Bailey's groundbreaking report on behalf of the Country Life Commission, Liberty Hyde Bailey: Essential Agrarian and Environmental Writings will inspire a new generation of nature writers, environmentalists, and those who share with Bailey a profound understanding of the elegance and power of the natural world and humanity's place within it.

Introducing Sower and Seer, Liberty Hyde Bailey

Before Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson, before Aldo Leopold and Henry A. Wallace, there was Liberty Hyde Bailey.

In fact, the works of Wallace, Leopold, and Berry, arguably the most influential land-use voices of the twentieth century, all evoke Bailey as a seminal influence. For Vice President Henry A. Wallace, whose grandfather, “Uncle Henry” Wallace, served on the Country Life Commission with Bailey, Bailey was a personal hero. For Wendell Berry, he was a revelation, a symbol of the nature-minded agrarianism Berry himself popularized for the Boomer generation. For Aldo Leopold, Bailey offered a model of the scholar-essayist-naturalist, so much so, in fact, that the foremost contemporary scholar of environmental history, Roderick Nash, cites Leopold’s direct “intellectual debt to Liberty Hyde Bailey.”¹ Most recently, in his 2006 release The Landscape of Reform, scholar Ben Minteer tell us that Wes Jackson channeled the “Bailey legacy” into his program of sustainable agriculture at The Land Institute. Further, Minteer claims, Bailey’s work extends well beyond neoagrarians to echo “across a number of canyons in contemporary environmental thought and practice.” Minteer cites Bailey’s foundational role in popularizing “ecotheological” writing and environmental ethics while acknowledging his legacy as an impetus for contemporary, secular manifestations of Earth awareness, including the 1992 Rio Summit, the Land Stewardship Project, and the Forest Stewardship Council. Minteer concludes that Bailey’s work is “clearly an important historical source for the ‘caretaker’ ethic in the air today” and declares Bailey’s most long-lived book of environmental philosophy, The Holy Earth, to be a “classic of the genre.”²

In all matters agricultural, environmental, and scientific, Bailey offers an unprecedented resume that includes the chairmanship of Roosevelt’s famous Country Life Commission, the editorship of the influential journal Country Life in America, and the undisputed, ceremonial “deanship” of disciplines ranging from horticulture, to botany, to agriculture. Ever the virtuoso, Bailey assumed leadership of a dizzying variety of disparate organizations, including presidencies of the American Society of Horticultural Science, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Country Life Association, and the Botanical Society of America. Along the way he was decorated with medals from the Royal Irish Academy, the National Institute of Social Science, and the Societe Nationale d’Acclimatation de France, among countless others. Scholars and biographers have called him “one of the greatest agricultural leaders . . . the world has ever known”³; a purveyor of a “prophetic ecological worldview”⁴; and “America’s best-known plant scientist.”⁵ In a career spanning more than fifty years, Bailey authored in excess of sixty-five books and edited nearly twice that, a “nearly superhuman rate” of scholarly production.⁶ Along the way he popularized nature-study in U.S. classrooms, lobbied successfully for women’s rights on and off the farm, and bulwarked Teddy Roosevelt’s pioneering conservationism.

In addition to long hours and unrivaled talent, one secret to Bailey’s unparalleled productivity as a writer was a two-birds-with-one-stone brand of efficiency. Contemporary researchers have often been surprised to see retooled passages from the author’s earlier works; for example, a passage from What Is Democracy? (1918) reprinted with minor changes in The Harvest of the Year to the Tiller of the Soil (1927). As a lifelong university lecturer working from notes, building on the intentional amplifications such digests made possible was a natural for Bailey, as it was for many agricultural writers of his era, including, most notably, “Uncle Henry” Wallace, whose beloved books for farm boys were often reworkings of his “Sunday School lessons” from Wallaces’ Farmer. Indeed, partially as a result of such purposeful duplications, Bailey wrote so much of such high quality that he himself lost track of his bibliographic achievements. At the ninetieth birthday party thrown him by Cornell University President Edmund Day, Bailey said with characteristic modesty, “I have written books. I suppose that several hundred have gone through my hands as editor.”⁷ In 2004, an actual accounting was undertaken by Cornell University in its invaluable electronic exhibit “Liberty Hyde Bailey: A Man for All Seasons,” which counts 117 titles edited by Bailey from 1890 to 1940, confirms Bailey’s count of 65 books authored single-handedly, and adds 1,300 articles and over 100 papers on pure taxonomy to this remarkable reckoning.⁸

Regrettably, such productivity has partially obscured the full impact of Bailey’s legacy, as the sheer volume and breadth of Bailey’s writing has daunted some scholars. Citing his dizzying output as a potential explanation for scholarly neglect, two of the most productive Bailey researchers of the new millennium, Paul A. Morgan and Scott J. Peters, lament, “Bailey wrote so much and only a small amount is available to the casual researcher.” Moreover, Morgan and Peters add, “Scholarly evaluation has been hampered by the unavailability of much of his writing, and . . . this has contributed to incomplete and faulty analysis.”⁹

This volume, Liberty Hyde Bailey: Essential Agrarian and Environmental Writings, amends both deficiencies, separating the wheat from the chaff, appropriately. Here for the first time is a Bailey anthology suitable for the general and scholarly reader alike, offering a comprehensive introduction to Bailey’s revolutionary thinking on agriculture, nature, community, and education, among other topics. The selections in this carefully chosen “best-of” have been handpicked from Bailey’s nontechnical books, especially the prose works from the seven-volume Background Books series. Diverse selections for this anthology have been made from five of the most important Background volumes: The Holy Earth (1915), Universal Service (1918), What Is Democracy? (1918), The Seven Stars (1923), and The Harvest of the Year to the Tiller of the Soil (1927). And in deference to Bailey’s fine reputation as a poet of the natural world, brief poetic excerpts from a sixth book, the sole volume of verse in the Background series, Wind and Weather (1916), are included as section breaks. In these Background books, aimed at nonspecialists, Bailey best articulates the agrarian esprit de corps.

Appropriately, Liberty Hyde Bailey also features prose from Bailey’s work in the nature-study and the Country Life movements, preserving the organic, whole-Earth consciousness of farm and nature for which Bailey argues so persuasively and lyrically in The Holy Earth. Additional essays included in this anthology, then, have been selected from The Nature-Study Idea (1903), The Outlook to Nature (1905), and the Country-life Movement in the United States (1911). Rounding out the readings, the brief, opening chapter from Bailey’s The Apple Tree (1922), a book Bailey biographer Philip Dorf cites as including “some of [Bailey’s] most lyrical prose writing”¹⁰ leavens the mix. In sum, ten of Bailey’s most influential books are herein represented.

Applying similar logic, Norman Wirzba collected the work of Liberty Hyde Bailey spiritual heir Wendell Berry in The Art of the Commonplace, citing Berry’s prolific writing–“well over thirty books in the form of poetry, short story, novel and essay”–as necessitating a thoughtful, digestible grouping. The book, a great boon to agrarian scholars and lay readers alike, represents an effort, Wirzba writes, to “return us to the fundamental questions of human existence: ‘Who are we? How does our life with others affect this self-understanding? What is a properly human desire? What are the limits and possibilities of communal life? How do we form an authentic culture? What are the conditions of peace and joy.’” That Bailey wrestled with these same questions a century ago argues for a long-view of the agrarian vision. “Agrarianism, in other words,” Wirzba continues, “promises a path toward wholeness with the earth, with each other, and with God, a path founded upon an insight into our proper place within the wider universe.”¹¹

Liberty Hyde Bailey, One Hundred Years Later

Despite a resurgence in interest in agrarianism, Liberty Hyde Bailey is, one hundred years after heading the prestigious Country Life Commission, both overlooked and underappreciated, notwithstanding a flurry of articles in the last decade partially reestablishing his prominence. Morgan and Peters, as noted, offer a full page of analysis of the previous scholarly overlooking of Bailey’s work. They identify, among other possible explanations, the unprecedented volume and interdisciplinary tenor of Bailey’s writing as a challenge to discipline-bound scholars, scholars who, even if they are willing to undertake the genre- and mind-bending Bailey oeuvre, have difficulty locating it.¹² Though Morgan and Peters overlook it as a factor, Bailey’s employment at a university for the first twenty-five years of his working life also appears to have undermined, unfairly, his “credentials” as an environmentalist, in particular. In an era when the standard for the naturalist-seer was the rugged, fiercely independent John Muir, an equally progressive visionary on a university payroll seemed something less than bona fide, at least in the popular imagination. In one of the first Country Life analyses undertaken after Bailey’s death in 1954, scholar William Bowers posits an anti-intellectual backlash by which the rural public often unfairly scorned “professors, authors, and other intellectuals as ‘impractical men’ whose statements should be ignored.”¹³ Of course, no one could dispute Bailey’s resume as a plant scientist, agriculturalist, and nature-study advocate, though they could, and did, discount h...