By Liberty Hyde Bailey, Centennial Edition, Foreword by Wendell Berry
The agrarian tradition runs as an undercurrent through the entire history of literature, carrying the age-old wisdom that the necessary access of independent farmers to their own land both requires the responsibility of good stewardship and provides the foundation for a thriving civilization. At the turn of the last century, when farming first began to face the most rapid and extensive series of changes that industrialization would bring, the most compelling and humane voice representing the agrarian tradition came from the botanist, farmer, philosopher, and public intellectual Liberty Hyde Bailey. In 1915, Bailey’s environmental manifesto, The Holy Earth, addressed the industrialization of society by utilizing the full range of human vocabulary to assert that the earth’s processes and products, because they form the governing conditions of human life, should therefore be understood not first as economic, but as divine. To grasp the extent of human responsibility for the earth, Bailey called for “a new hold” that society must take to develop a “morals of land management,” which would later inspire Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic” and several generations of agrarian voices. This message of responsible land stewardship has never been as timely as now.
Liberty Hyde Bailey (1858–1954) was born and raised on a small fruit farm in western Michigan and went on to become the “Father of Modern Horticulture,” a leading public intellectual on the question of rural communities, and a national spokesperson for agricultural policy. His birthplace and childhood home functions as a museum and educational outreach center devoted to telling Bailey’s story and engaging the modern world with his philosophy and ideals.
Wendell Berry is the author of fifty books of poetry, fiction, and essays. He was recently awarded the Cleanth Brooks Medal for Lifetime Achievement by the Fellowship of Southern Writers and the Louis Bromfield Society Award. For over forty years he has lived and farmed with his wife, Tanya, in Kentucky.
“I am reading Professor Bailey’s ‘The Holy Earth’ with pleasure and profit. I like the audacity of the title; it confers new dignity upon the farmer and the countryman. Some of the chapters are very timely and convincing, like that on the struggle for existence and war. It is sound natural history and sound philosophy. I have never seen the case better put.” -John Burroughs
“There is something clear, high, and noble about this little volume, a quality of thought and of phrase that distinguishes it as sharply from the hard and sapless character of official scientific writings on the one hand as from the lax and conscious character of official literary writing on the other. It is the utterance of a true seer, so rare a sound among us since the voices of Carlyle and Emerson ceased to be heard.” -The Nation
John Linstrom 