Green fields: The agrarian conservation movement in America, 1890-1990

Agrarian conservation is an ongoing social and scientific movement, that arose around the turn of the twentieth century in response to a sense of loss then occurring in rural America. Two specific areas in which the agricultural and environmental sciences continually intersect involved attempts to preserve both soil and systems. The loss of topsoil was perceived as one of the earliest ecological and agricultural disasters. The other unifying theme between the agricultural and environmental sciences lay in the concept of systems. The scientific metaphors to describe agrarian conservation followed the contemporary environmental disciplines ranging from natural history to conservation to ecological succession and eventually systems biology.; Simultaneous with these scientific developments, there was also a strong social component that was helping to drive work in the field of agrarian conservation. Questions of the loss of soil and systems resonated among socially concerned agrarian conservationists who feared the decline of rural communities and their environment. Various agrarian life organizations arose in the early part of the twentieth century to attempt to "conserve" a farm lifestyle and the rural environment surrounding it. The Country Life Movement (1900-1920) and the Southern Agrarian movement (1930) were reactions to a fear that both the farm and a rural nature endemic to agriculture were being put in jeopardy. In the Depression years the Civilian Conservation Corps served a perceived need for conserving both the rural environment and the initiation experiences youths traditionally enjoyed on a farm. In the postwar years environmental concerns and the politics of ecology helped feed various agrarian conservation efforts such as the organic farming movement and the sustainable agriculture movement. All of these movements enjoyed a mixture of science, social reaction, and popularization. The social factors and the changing scientific paradigms of agrarian conservation are examined in parallel in this thesis. As with most issues of science and society, both the social and scientific components variously drove one another to expand the field.