Liberty Hyde Bailey: Essential Agrarian and Environmental Writings

Liberty Hyde Bailey

Published by Cornell University Press 2010

Liberty Hyde Bailey

Essential Agrarian and Environmental Writings

Liberty Hyde Bailey
Edited by: Zachary Michael Jack

https://doi.org/10.7591/9780801458835

Overview
Contents

About this book

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.

Author / Editor information

Zachary Michael Jack is Assistant Professor of English at North Central College, where he teaches courses in writing and rural studies. The great-grandson of Iowa conservation writer Walter Thomas Jack, Zachary is the author or editor of many books on agrarian, environmental and conservation themes, including Love of the Land, Black Earth and Ivory Tower, and The Furrow and Us.

Reviews

Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy:

What a great and lucky thing to have these soaring words back in print—and at exactly the right moment. It's clear, looking at our dwindling supplies of oil, that we're going to need more Americans doing the noble work of farming, literally following in Bailey's footsteps.

Fred Kirschenmann, Director, Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, Iowa State University, and President, Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, Pocontico Hills, NY:

This is a delightful book. The collection of essays Zachary Michael Jack has selected provide the reader with a remarkably comprehensive picture of the life and work of Liberty Hyde Bailey. The timing of this book could not be better: As we approach the end of the industrial era the prescient vision Bailey offered to us in such lyric form may now help us redefine the meaning of progress and well-being.

A. Carl Leopold:

At a time when the need for environmentalism was just beginning to be recognized, Liberty Hyde Bailey was already writing passionately about the importance of a better attitude toward the land, and how the need was increasing with the expansion of urbanism. His vision spoke prophetically of the increasing need to act responsibly to the environment—a clear antecedent to Aldo Leopold's call for an ethical relationship to the land.

It's strange that Bailey (1858–1954) is not more of a household name. Teacher, botanist, horticulturist, rural sociologist, administrator, encyclopedist, poet, photographer, visionary, Bailey did a lot and wrote even more. Jack's judicious selections and annotations provide readers with a neat digest of Bailey's ideas on education, democracy, agriculture, nature, and community. His theme is essentially agrarian, chiefly a concern for the ills that befall people who are at a distance from the things of the earth. In a style that is at once impressionistic, scientific, and surpassingly poetic, he urges us to pay attention, or, in contemporary parlance, be mindful. His prescience is startling; for example, he wrote in 1911, 'when the new lands have all been opened to cultivation, and when thousands of millions of human beings occupy the earth, the demand for food will constitute a problem which we scarcely apprehend today. We shall then be obliged to develop self-sustaining methods of maintaining the producing power of land.' With a revelation on nearly every page, this collection is highly recommended for all libraries looking to bolster their environmental history collections.

Topics

General Interest

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Editor’s Preface. Sower and Seer: Essential Agrarian and Environmental Writings of Liberty Hyde Bailey Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
Introducing Sower and Seer, Liberty Hyde Bailey Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
I. WORKMANSHIP Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	39
II. CONSCIENCE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	77
III. EDUCATION Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	110
IV. COMMUNITY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	135
V. NATURE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	166
VI. FARM Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	188
VII. POETICS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	216
VIII. APPRECIATIONS Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	228
IX. CODA, THE AGRARIAN WAY Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	254
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	259
About the Editor Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	262

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 280
Keywords: General Science; ENVIRONMENT; EDUCATION & HISTORY OF EDUCATION

eBook

Published: December 15, 2010
ISBN: 9780801458835