Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America [Hardcover]

Steven Stoll (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0809064316 | ISBN-13: 978-0809064311 | Publication Date: July 20, 2002 | Edition: 1st

A major history of early Americans' ideas about conservation

Fifty years after the American Revolution, the yeoman farmers who made up a large part of the new country's voters faced a crisis. The very soil of American farms seemed to be failing, and agricultural prosperity, upon which the Republic was founded, was threatened. Steven Stoll's passionate and brilliantly argued book explores the tempestuous debates that erupted between "improvers," who believed in practices that sustained and bettered the soil of existing farms, and "emigrants," who thought it was wiser and more "American" to move westward as the soil gave out. Stoll examines the dozens of journals, from New York to Virginia, that gave voice to the improvers' cause. He also focuses especially on two groups of farmers, in Pennsylvania and South Carolina. He analyzes the similarities and differences in their farming habits in order to illustrate larger regional concerns about the "new husbandry" in free and slave states.

Farming has always been the human activity that most disrupts nature, for good or ill. The decisions these early Americans made about how to farm not only expressed their political and social faith, but also influenced American attitudes about the environment for decades to come. Larding the Lean Earth is a signal work of environmental history and an original contribution to the study of antebellum America.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Historian Stoll deepens the increasingly urgent discussion of the more alarming aspects of agribusiness in a study of soil, the substance that unifies "the gases of the atmosphere, the minerals of the lithosphere, and the organisms of the biosphere." Although it takes centuries to form, soil can be lost in mere decades, a scary reality European settlers discovered by 1820, when the soil of the original colonies was so depleted that farmers either headed west to use up yet more land or stayed put and learned how to "improve" their homesteads by working in harmony with natural processes. With great felicity of language and a firm grasp of forces biological and social, Stoll explicates the methods and ethic of "improvement" as practiced by an enlightened coterie of highly successful northern farmers, then contrasts their ecologically wise approach (manure was a key factor) to the brutal and unsustainable operations of southern planters. Grounded in rarely referenced farming literature, farmers' and planters' diaries, and political records, Stoll's eye-opening and rousing chronicle of American agriculture and its industrialization explores an overlooked yet crucial facet of our past, and points the way to a more bountiful future. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"Steven Stoll's brilliantly original Larding the Lean Earth unearths hidden layers of meaning behind American antebellum farm practices and the westward movement. This thoughtful and far-reaching work traces the origins of today's ecological crisis to the failure of the antebellum ethic of 'improvement.' Evocative and provocative, written with verve and passion and with new insights on every page, this is a book that every nineteenth-century historian will want to read."--Daniel Feller, University of New Mexico

"Nineteenth-century Americans were overwhelmingly rural, agrarian, and westwardly mobile. No wonder, then, that ordinary folks and the profoundest minds were preoccupied with dirt -- soils' quality, conservation, abandonment -- for civilization was, after all, founded upon thriving, stable agriculture. Now we have at last a thorough and imaginative history of American soil that is scientifically and agronomically astute, politically contexturalized, and often poetic of expression."--Jack Temple Kirby, Miami University

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Hill and Wang; 1st edition (July 20, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0809064316
• ISBN-13: 978-0809064311
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,610,070 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Larding the Lean Earth, September 23, 2002

By 

"ecobeetle" (Burnaby) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (Hardcover)

When we think of the conservation movement in America, our minds are drawn to people such as John James Audubon, John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, and Aldo Leopold. Although these men wrote with passion about conservation, the political movement had deeper roots. In his original and thought provoking book, Steven Stoll proposes that conservation thought emerged as a political force in the 19th century exploitation of the land. Two forces emerged - the improvers of the land who believed that farming practices must be used to sustain the soil, - and the emigrants who kept moving to new untouched wilderness as their land gave out. Today, most of the arable land is cultivated and much of it in North America is maintained by technology. Larding the Lean Earth explores how technology has come to dominate the agricultural landscape. It is a must read for anyone interested in the history of conservation, and anyone close to the land.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The debate over natural resource management, February 10, 2003

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Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Larding the Lean Earth: Soil and Society in Nineteenth-Century America (Hardcover)

Farming occupied the majority of American pursuits in the 19th century, tied up most of the nation's capital, and occupied the thoughts of farmers and politicians alike. Before expansion into the West could succeed, conservation of land and resources would have to be taken into account: Larding The Lean Earth points out that the debate over natural resource management began in the 1820s and pitted farmers against plantation owners in a conflict which would affect westward expansion processes as a whole.