The Holy Earth. Liberty Hyde Bailey
Читать онлайн книгу.
The Holy Earth as part of a series from the beginning, which he called “The Background Books: The Philosophy of the Holy Earth.” In his initial contract with Scribner’s, The Holy Earth is listed alongside Wind and Weather, his only full-length book of verse, which was published the following year as the second in the series. The series continued to grow as it moved from publisher to publisher, ultimately expanding to seven volumes by 1928, each one extending and complicating Bailey’s vision in important ways.18 While any characterization of Bailey’s philosophy based on any one of these volumes in isolation will fall short, it could also be said that the later volumes all grew out of what he began with The Holy Earth, which, in its sometimes strange, mosaic structure, presents the most cohesive articulation of his broad-ranging earth philosophy.
While it did end up in Aldo Leopold’s hands, the book did not experience much commercial success until World War II, when, in 1943, Bailey granted permission to the Christian Rural Fellowship to publish a cheap paperback edition to use in their outreach work. Decades after its initial publication, the book experienced a renaissance. Bailey initially granted the organization permission to print 4,000 copies, but, as leaders in the Christian Rural Fellowship began advertising the reissue and soliciting preorders among their network of churches and conservation organizations, they quickly had to increase their request to 5,000, and, by the time the reset text went to the printers, that number had climbed to 10,000. The original Scribner’s edition had not surpassed 2,100 copies. The Fellowship continued reprinting in subsequent years and even obtained permission to translate portions of the book into Spanish and a number of African languages to be distributed in the many countries where they were advocating for increased soil conservation as a spiritual practice. “Perhaps I am surprised that the book should be used as a missionary tract,” Bailey wrote in his response to the request for translation rights in 1943. “I had not written it with any didactic or propaganda purpose in mind, yet it should be applicable in any faith or with any people if my thesis is correct that out [sic] attitude towards the earth should be consciously reverent and religious.”
That edition was the first to be completely reset, and, other than writing a new “Retrospect” for the work, Bailey claims not to have looked at the book “since the proofs left my hands nearly thirty years ago” (xxvi). This is also borne out in his correspondence with the secretary of the Christian Rural Fellowship, John Reisner. For that reason, this edition takes as its basis the earlier edition, adding to it the Retrospect as it appeared in 1943, in order to present for the first time the authoritative text of one of Bailey’s most significant works. Specifically, I have used the text of the 1916 printing — in another demonstration of his commitment to the book, Bailey made six minor editorial changes along with a rewrite of the last two pages of “The daily fare” between the 1915 and 1916 printings, all of which seem clearly to reflect the author’s hand. The discrepancies are not noted here, except for an end note regarding the large rewrite. Readers familiar with Bailey’s works will note that we have taken a small liberty with the author’s name — while Bailey listed himself on nearly all of his books as “L. H. Bailey” after he dropped the “Jr.” in the 1880s, and while he spelled it that way on every edition of The Holy Earth published during his lifetime, for this edition we have decided to follow more recent convention and spell out the full name (minus the “Jr.”) that is increasingly recognized the world over for its foundational place in agrarian thought. The goal throughout has not been to produce a scholarly edition, but to do justice to the historic text and to introduce Bailey’s work afresh to new generations of readers who we hope will find in it something of the vision that has nourished and challenged so many of us over the past century.
My thanks and deep appreciation go to John Stempien, Fred Kirschenmann, Wendell and Tanya Berry, Jack Shoemaker, Lisa Gitelman, and the staffs of the Cornell University Rare and Manuscript Collections, the New York Public Library Manuscripts and Archives Division, the Prince ton University Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, and the Liberty Hyde Bailey Museum. Everything good I owe to my parents, Robert and Rebecca. Whatever I have been able to offer of value to this ongoing project I would dedicate to Curtis and Ruth Johnson and to Robert E. Linstrom, and in loving memory to Marcene Linstrom, all of whom have passed along their love of the things that grow from the good earth to a deeply grateful grandson.
JOHN LINSTROM
New York City, 2015
Many years have passed since The Holy Earth was written. I think I have not read the book since the proofs left my hands nearly thirty years ago. Others have read it in more recent time, and I have agreed to their request for a reprint.
The book was my expression of an experience in life. I was born against the primeval forest. My youth was on the farm cut from that forest. I grew up with woodsmen and settlers and pioneers. Indians still inhabited the region. Wild animals were numerous. Passenger pigeons had a vast colony. It was a rigorous and wholesome discipline. Then I taught with and for country folk. All these experiences were against the background of simple and natural conditions.
I had been impressed with the fact that nature repairs and reconstructs itself. It provides its own healing. If the farm is wholly abandoned, nature takes it over and in time rears a new forest and builds new land. The city and the factory do not rebuild themselves when neglected or abandoned: they, too, in the processes of time return to forest or desert or plain. The circumstances of the native earth are the essential background of the race of men. What should be the spiritual and emotional reaction of the race of men to these circumstances? The book attempted to express an attitude.
The Holy Earth was written mostly on ship in the South Seas. I had been impressed again on long journeys with the majesty and fertility of the waters. I was not thinking of land alone. The sea is the larger part of the earth. I had in mind the planet on which men live. The planet is part of a program we do not comprehend but in which we may partake. We manipulate the surface of the earth for good or for ill. We must keep and protect the heritage for the millions who are to come after us. This is a moral obligation.
We did not make the earth. We have received it and its bounties. If it is beyond us, so is it divine. We have inescapable responsibilities. It is our privilege so to comprehend the use of the earth as to develop a spiritual stature. When the epoch of mere exploitation of the earth shall have worn itself out, we shall realize the heritage that remains and enter new realms of satisfaction.
L. H. BAILEY
Ithaca, N. Y.
Oct. 26, 1942.
THE HOLY EARTH
SO BOUNTIFUL hath been the earth and so securely have we drawn from it our substance, that we have taken it all for granted as if it were only a gift, and with little care or conscious thought of the consequences of our use of it; nor have we very much considered the essential relation that we bear to it as living parts in the vast creation.
It is good to think of ourselves — of this teeming, tense, and aspiring human race — as a helpful and contributing part in the plan of a cosmos, and as participators in some far-reaching destiny. The idea of responsibility is much asserted of late, but we relate it mostly to the attitude of persons in the realm of conventional conduct, which we have come to regard as very exclusively the realm of morals; and we have established certain formalities that satisfy the conscience. But there is some deeper relation than all this, which we must recognize and the consequences of which we must practise. There is a directer and more personal obligation than that which expends itself in loyalty to the manifold organizations and social requirements of the present day. There is a more fundamental co-operation in the scheme of things than that which deals with the proprieties or which centres about the selfishness too often expressed in the salvation of one’s soul.
We can be only onlookers on that part of the cosmos that we call the