A Green and Permanent Land: Ecology and Agriculture in the Twentieth Century (review)

Dust storms and the migration of farmers from the southern Plains during the Great Depression caused soil scientists, ecologists, and government planners to meditate on the permanence of agrarian society. Soil finally became a "natural resource" worth preserving when experts realized that it could be lost to wind and rain and that the millions of people who subsisted upon it could be endangered. "Permanent agriculture" emerged as a policy objective and one of the first ecological causes among a group of New Dealers that included Rexford Tugwell, Morris Cooke, and Hugh Bennett. Its constituency embraced readers of the prescient journal The Land, published by the Friends of the Land during the 1940s, among whose contributors were Henry Wallace, Stuart Chase, J. Russell Smith, Paul Sears, Aldo Leopold, and Russell Lord.

Randal Beeman and James Pritchard make the case that permanent agriculture represented the first application of ecological thought to land under cultivation and initiated an agrarian consciousness that has resulted in the movement for sustainable agriculture. They trace that evolution though politics, conservationist thought, farm practice, and American culture, featuring the ideas of Jim Hightower, Wendell Berry, E. F. Schumacher, J. I. Rodale, and Miguel Altieri. A Green and Permanent Land is an intellectual history of practice and policy that features characters often neglected by other histories of environmentalism. One such is Louis Bromfield, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who returned from Europe in 1939 to his childhood home in Ohio, where he founded Malabar Farm. There he sought to practice restorative agriculture and bring to life a hard-run piece of land. Like so many others, Bromfield was influenced by Sir Albert Howard, often referred to as the originator of organic farming. Then there was Edward Faulkner, whose "trash farming" infused topsoil with organic matter, a practice farmers and gardeners today recognize as composting.

This is the lineage of sustainable agriculture as that idea emerged between the 1960s and 1980s. The difference between the earlier and later movements is akin to the difference between conservation and postwar environmentalism. In the authors' words, advocates of sustainable agriculture interpreted the problem of pesticides and soil erosion as a "crisis of humanity." It is worth pointing out, however, that others had come before. A generation of eastern farmers came up with many of the same ideas in the 1820s, and, like the advocates of permanent agriculture a century later, they floated their agronomy out of fear of social erosion. The one person whose life and work bridges the nineteenth century and the early twentieth is Liberty Hyde Bailey, professor of agriculture at Cornell University in the 1890s and chair of President Theodore Roosevelt's Country Life Commission, whom Beeman and Pritchard select as their intellectual touchstone for the movement that followed his career. Bailey insisted that agriculture not be recreated in the image of industrialism and treated agronomy as an economic, environmental, and social problem. By the end of the century, agrarian thinkers argued that a permanent or sustainable agriculture provided the best model for an ecologically sound society.

Beeman and Pritchard's conclusions are based on substantial research; their sources include archival material taken from four presidential libraries, the records of the Soil and Conservation Service, and the papers of Scott and Helen Nearing, though the majority come from a great assortment of printed material. This book fits nicely into a growing historiography that connects agricultural and environmental history, and it will be read by all those with an interest in agrarian thought. It is an illuminating and useful volume, even though it does not go deeper than its sources into the social and political circumstances of permanent agriculture. Agrarian thought is intensely political, and Beeman and Pritchard do not address the political differences between the writers they feature and those with...