Dirt and Dung, Enduringly

Steven Stoll. Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Hill and Wang, 2002. 320 pp. Black and white illustrations, notes, and index. $30.00 (cloth); $14.00 (paper).

Steven Stoll sets himself a difficult challenge. He wants us to sympathize with "cranky elders" fussing about topsoil and grumbling about emigration, right when the momentum of American society—and most historians' attention—is heading West, over the Appalachians and ultimately across the Mississippi and beyond (p. 27). He wants us to understand the prescience and importance of the agricultural advice called out by a relatively small number of entrenched eastern farmers to the heedless waves of emigrants leaving the "old states" behind for "new" lands of the West. Stay! they implored. Improve your land! Use crop rotation, cattle dung, and endless mucky labor to return to your soils the nutrients your plants take from them! And in so doing, keep the original states of the Union strong by staunching the hemorrhage of people flowing out across the terrain.

These "improvers" reveal a different conception of the United States and its ecological consciousness, Stoll argues, one that has been lost by historians all too often caught up by the romantic rush to places beyond the old Proclamation Line. Restorative farmers' valuation of limits, their recognition of the ecological boundaries within which all settled agriculture has to unfold, offered an alternate notion of "progress," he contends—and one that has ramifications within the very different social and agricultural context of the contemporary United States (p. 9).

There lies his second challenge. Stoll wants his improvers to matter to us not only in the portrait of early-nineteenth-century life—where as quaint old uncles we might be convinced to tolerate them—but as nearby figures, tapping us on the shoulder, reminding us that environmental stewardship is not this generation's invention, but an idea grounded in the irrefutable evidence of a few carefully restored and balanced farmsteads set among an American landscape of worn-out fields, depleted crops, and scrub growth. His is a powerful story of the present day, as well as a rescue of fusty characters little heeded in an earlier world. That Stoll achieves so much in both dimensions—making his anxious agriculturalists matter both in their time and in our own—testifies to his rhetorical power in making such unsympathetic characters matter.

Stoll starts us off with the quite literal problem of getting poop on his shoes. He does not own rubber boots, he explains, and the animal manure expert in whose company he plans to spend the day therefore regards him with deep skepticism. The two nonetheless do tramp across a small-scale farm in northwestern Connecticut; Stoll argues that the resultant mess on his footwear exemplifies what works about "sustainable agriculture" and stands for his larger question: how did the smelly details of fecund animal waste underlie some of the most important political, social, and constitutional debates of the fractious first half of the nineteenth century?

Climbing over fence posts and culling through U.S. agricultural writings between the War of 1812 and the California Gold Rush, Stoll directs our attention to some very un-American behavior: the recognition by some of 1820s America that their use of resources had limits, and their call to recognize those limits voluntarily and work within them, rather than simply exhausting and abandoning their home sites. He identifies countervailing voices of moderation and constraint in the midst of the brawling and noisy nineteenth century.

Like his stubbornly immovable restorative farmers, Stoll anchors himself firmly in time and place, but surveys undaunted the vast expanses of human history. Settled agriculture, he reminds us, is an innovation quite recent to the history of humankind; it may yet prove to be an unsustainable one. Erosion and mineral depletion threaten all agricultural societies (with a different regional focus, he might have noted the groundwater depletion and resultant subsidence that increasingly characterize North America...