The collected reflections and wisdoms of 30 contemporary farmer-writer-teachers Heralding the seventy-fifth anniversary of the quintessential agrarian anthology I'll Take My Stand, Zachary Michael Jack, himself a fourth generation farmer's son, has assembled North America's foremost contemporary writers on the present rural experience to provide their own twenty-first-century insights. In the grand tradition of farmer-writers Robert Frost, Henry David Thoreau, and Andrew Lytle, Black Earth and Ivory Tower: New American Essays from Farm and Classroom gathers the disparate wisdoms of modern day stewarts of the land including Victor David Hanson, Michael Martone, Linda Hasselstrom, John Hildebrand, "Country Things" cartoonist Bob Artley, and Duane Acker, former U. S. Assistant Secretary of Science and Education and former president of Kansas State University. These gifted teachers and growers offer hard-won inspiration from the field and the classroom, exemplifying the multifaceted, farm-grounded talents that call them to lives as writers, visual artists, conservation tillers, environmentalists, economists, policymakers, extension agents, and grassroots activists. Seeking a balanced life that reconciles the hands, heart, and head, they follow roads less traveled to find agrarian lifestyles at once enlightening and challenging. At a time when less than two percent of Americans count themselves as farmers, these writers--all of whom have cultivated the earth and climbed the ivory tower--underscore the diversity of the American farm as a wellspring of learning. Their plainspoken commentaries on modern farming, teaching, and living will remind older generations of time-honored, agrarian values and provide a new generation with a literate, critical account of shifting national priorities.

America's first Green president, Theodore Roosevelt's credentials as both naturalist and writer are as impressive as they are deep, emblematic of the twenty-sixth President's unprecedented breadth and energy. While Roosevelt authored policies that grew the public domain by a remarkable 230 million acres, he likewise penned over thirty-five books and an estimated 150,000 letters, many concerning the natural world. In between drafts both personal and political, scientific and sentimental, he quadrupled existing forest reserves while creating the nation's first fifty wildlife refuges and eighteen national monuments, among them the Grand Canyon, and five national parks, headlined by Yosemite. And Roosevelt was far more than a policy wonk and political do-gooder. John Muir, by his own admission, "fairly fell in love with him." John Burroughs wrote that Roosevelt "probably knew tenfold more natural history than all the presidents who preceded him." And the Smithsonian's Edmund Heller dubbed him the "foremost field naturalist of our time." In addition to creating more than 150,000 new acres of national forest, Roosevelt made a new vogue of sportsmanship, famously refusing to shoot a lame bear in Mississippi and inspiring, thereof, an American icon and ecological fetish all at once: the Teddy Bear. Indeed, Roosevelt's Green undertakings produced a truly living legacy-one whose everlasting qualities he took robust pleasure in. Naturalist William Finley once suggested to TR that the President's environmental prescience would serve as "one of the greatest memorials to [his] farsightedness," to which Roosevelt replied, "Bully. I had rather have it than a hundred stone monuments." In fact, Roosevelt would have both-a lasting reputation for environmental protection and timeless stone monuments at Mount Rushmore and elsewhere built to honor his dramatic public policy initiatives. This book will be a critical resource for all those in American history (particularly presidential history), environmental history, environmental studies, nature studies, place studies, Agrarian studies, conservation studies, fish and wildlife biology/management, and ecology.

"Jay G. Sigmund stands as America's most forgotten Regionalist writers of the Jazz Age. Championed by Carl Sandburg, Sherwood Anderson, and Grant Wood, the Iowa writer/insurance man helped make his home state the epicenter of a national Regionalist Movement. The literary stir Sigmund created caused even popular Boston-based critic E. J. O'Brien to declare Iowa as America's new literary center and to choose six of Sigmund's short stories among the best of 1930. From 1921 to 1937, the late-blooming, dark-horse Sigmund shocked East Coast literati with glowing New York Times reviews while delighting tens of thousands of readers each week with down-to-earth verse in the biggest and best Midwestern dailies. The man Ilya Tolstoy hailed as "an American Chekhov and Maupassant," published over 1200 poems, 125 short stories, and over 25 plays while simultaneously working full-time as an insurance executive." "Editor Zachary Michael Jack, himself a celebrated Iowa poet, reintroduces contemporary agrarian writers, poets of place, and eco-critics to Sigmund's essential oeuvre in a jam-packed collection featuring eight Sigmund short stories, more than fifty poems, and a complete one-act play."--BOOK JACKET.

"Nature-study not only educates, but it educates nature-ward; and nature is ever our companion, whether we will or no. Even though we are determined to shut ourselves in an office, nature sends her messengers. The light, the dark, the moon, the cloud, the rain, the wind, the falling leaf, the fly, the bouquet, the bird, the cockroach-they are all ours. If one is to be happy, he must be in sympathy with common things. He must live in harmony with his environment. One cannot be happy yonder nor tomorrow: he is happy here and now, or never. Our stock of knowledge of common things should be great. Few of us can travel. We must know the things at home."—from "The Meaning of the Nature-study Movement" "To feel that one is a useful and cooperating part in nature is to give one kinship, and to open the mind to the great resources and the high enthusiasms. Here arise the fundamental common relations. Here arise also the great emotions and conceptions of sublimity and grandeur, of majesty and awe, the uplift of vast desires—when one contemplates the earth and the universe and desires to take them into the soul and to express oneself in their terms; and here also the responsible practices of life take root."—from The Holy Earth 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. For Aldo Leopold, Bailey offered a model of the scholar-essayist-naturalist. In his revolutionary work of eco-theology, The Holy Earth, Bailey challenged the anthropomorphism—the people-centeredness—of a vulnerable world. A trained scientist writing in the lyrical tradition of Emerson, Burroughs, and Muir, Bailey offered the twentieth century its first exquisitely interdisciplinary biocentric worldview; this Michigan farmer's son defined the intellectual and spiritual foundations of what would become the environmental movement. For nearly a half century, Bailey dominated matters agricultural, environmental, and scientific in the United States. He worked both to improve the lives of rural folk and to preserve the land from which they earned their livelihood. Along the way, he popularized nature study in U.S. classrooms, lobbied successfully for women's rights on and off the farm, and bulwarked Teddy Roosevelt's pioneering conservationism. Here for the first time is an anthology of Bailey's most important writings suitable for the general and scholarly reader alike. Carefully selected and annotated by Zachary Michael Jack, this book offers a comprehensive introduction to Bailey's celebrated and revolutionary thinking on the urgent environmental, agrarian, educational, and ecospiritual dilemmas of his day and our own. Culled from ten of Bailey's most influential works, these lyrical selections highlight Bailey's contributions to the nature-study and the Country Life movements. Published on the one-hundredth anniversary of Bailey's groundbreaking report on behalf of the Country Life Commission, Liberty Hyde Bailey: Essential Agrarian and Environmental Writings will inspire a new generation of nature writers, environmentalists, and those who share with Bailey a profound understanding of the elegance and power of the natural world and humanity's place within it.

In his collection of Prairie essays, Roger Epp considers what it means to dwell attentively and responsibly in the rural West. We Are All Treaty People invites those who feel the pull of a prairie heritage to rediscover the poetry surging through the landscapes of the rural West, among its people and their political economy.

The Call of the Land is a sourcebook exploring positive pathways for food security, economic stability, environmental repair, and cultural renewal. This book shows how everyone can respond creatively to the challenges we face. From community gardens and locavore restaurants to urban farms and local food banks, this book is a survey and synthesis of the great transition that is underway.