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Look to the Land
Lord Northbourne (1896-1982) was a man of exceptional vision, who already in the 1940s diagnosed in detail the sickness of modern society as stemming from the severance of its organic links with the wholeness of life. A leading figure in the early organic farming movement, his writings profoundly affected such other pioneers as Sir Albert Howard, Rolf Gardiner, Ehrenfried Pfeiffer, and H. J. Massingham. His path led him on to a profound study of comparative religion, traditional metaphysics, and the science of symbols, which he employed in incisive observations on the character of modern society. His later writings exercised considerable influence on his younger contemporaries E. F. Schumacher and Thomas Merton, and in many ways anticipate the essays of Wendell Berry. The republication of this milestone ecological text will be followed by three volumes of Northbourne's later metaphysical and cultural writings.
128 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1940
About the author
Walter Ernest Christopher James, 4th Baron Northbourne was a British agriculturalist, author and rower who competed in the 1920 Summer Olympics.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 9, 2011
Without any "easing-in," Look to the Land begins with several pages describing soil. And then erosion. After 6 pages I was tempted to lay it aside in the "I'll have to get back to it when I'm in the right frame of mind" pile. I'm glad I didn't. There's so much all-encompasing philosophy of life in this short book, it would have been a shame to have delayed it. There's so much in fact, that I'm going to have go back and read through it again with a pencil, and maybe two or three more times after that.
Written in 1939, just half a century or so after the advent of mechanized agriculture, there's very little that's outdated. Lord Northbourne approaches almost all societal problems with an eye trained by a perrenial traditionalism (the common acquired and revealed wisdom common to the great societies and religions in relation to their creator) and even the most Christ-centered Catholic distributist would find no fault in his reasoning. He looks always towards the land and advocates solutions, radical as it may seem, based on love. In describing the disaster that is befalling mankind in both "farming" and "civilization," it seems as if it could have been written this year. Man is on the edge and is rapidly running out of time, if there is indeed time left. The bold proposal, the "theme" of the book, is that man must quickly get back to what is "normal." What people today call normal is nothing of the kind; it may be the "average" but it is anything but normal in the sense of how man and the earth (the soil) are supposed to relate to each other. There are very few people in the world who live within a semblance of normal anymore.
Lord Northbourne tackles every symptom of the illness of our modern impersonal society, from banking to government to business to history to anthropology to genetics to families, etc. with an eye towards real solutions but, again, having grasped only a fraction of the genius of the work, it's probably more useful now to simply paste some of Lord Northbourne's closing words here:
"...For we must farm or die. In undertaking farming we undertake a responsibility covering the whole life cycle. We can break it or keep it whole. We have broken it, but there is yet time to mend it; perhaps only just time.
"...'Give and you shall receive' is not sentimental idealism, it is a simple, practical rule. That which we can and must give to the land is work, and if that work is given in love it will not be drudgery.
"...If we are to succeed in the great task before us we must adopt a humbler attitude towards the elementary things of life than that which is implied in our frequent boasting about our so-called 'Conquest of Nature.' We have put ourselves on a pinnacle in the pride of an imagined conquest. But we cannot separate ourselves from nature if we would... There can be no quarrel between ourselves and nature any more than there can be a quarrel between a man's head and his feet. If such a quarrel is invented, it is the man who suffers, including both his head and his feet... We have come to regard nature as something primitive, terrible, and squalid. If she is so, it is we who have made her so.
"Nature is only terrible or squalid to those who do not understand her, and when misunderstanding has upset her balance. She is imbued above all with the power of love; by love she can after all be conquered, but in no other way. That has not been our way. We have attempted a less excellent way, and have upset the 'balance of nature,' so that she no longer appears to us in pleasant guise but in a guise in which the appearance of an opposition of forces - a 'struggle for existence' - predominates over the appearance of a balance of forces. So we have come to believe in a struggle for existence as the only possibility, and we infer that any such struggle is necessarily painful. It is painful now, and not only to ourselves. But it was not always so and need not always be so. We are the head and have the responsibility. We have tried to conquer nature by force and by intellect. It now remains for us to try the way of love"
Written in 1939, just half a century or so after the advent of mechanized agriculture, there's very little that's outdated. Lord Northbourne approaches almost all societal problems with an eye trained by a perrenial traditionalism (the common acquired and revealed wisdom common to the great societies and religions in relation to their creator) and even the most Christ-centered Catholic distributist would find no fault in his reasoning. He looks always towards the land and advocates solutions, radical as it may seem, based on love. In describing the disaster that is befalling mankind in both "farming" and "civilization," it seems as if it could have been written this year. Man is on the edge and is rapidly running out of time, if there is indeed time left. The bold proposal, the "theme" of the book, is that man must quickly get back to what is "normal." What people today call normal is nothing of the kind; it may be the "average" but it is anything but normal in the sense of how man and the earth (the soil) are supposed to relate to each other. There are very few people in the world who live within a semblance of normal anymore.
Lord Northbourne tackles every symptom of the illness of our modern impersonal society, from banking to government to business to history to anthropology to genetics to families, etc. with an eye towards real solutions but, again, having grasped only a fraction of the genius of the work, it's probably more useful now to simply paste some of Lord Northbourne's closing words here:
"...For we must farm or die. In undertaking farming we undertake a responsibility covering the whole life cycle. We can break it or keep it whole. We have broken it, but there is yet time to mend it; perhaps only just time.
"...'Give and you shall receive' is not sentimental idealism, it is a simple, practical rule. That which we can and must give to the land is work, and if that work is given in love it will not be drudgery.
"...If we are to succeed in the great task before us we must adopt a humbler attitude towards the elementary things of life than that which is implied in our frequent boasting about our so-called 'Conquest of Nature.' We have put ourselves on a pinnacle in the pride of an imagined conquest. But we cannot separate ourselves from nature if we would... There can be no quarrel between ourselves and nature any more than there can be a quarrel between a man's head and his feet. If such a quarrel is invented, it is the man who suffers, including both his head and his feet... We have come to regard nature as something primitive, terrible, and squalid. If she is so, it is we who have made her so.
"Nature is only terrible or squalid to those who do not understand her, and when misunderstanding has upset her balance. She is imbued above all with the power of love; by love she can after all be conquered, but in no other way. That has not been our way. We have attempted a less excellent way, and have upset the 'balance of nature,' so that she no longer appears to us in pleasant guise but in a guise in which the appearance of an opposition of forces - a 'struggle for existence' - predominates over the appearance of a balance of forces. So we have come to believe in a struggle for existence as the only possibility, and we infer that any such struggle is necessarily painful. It is painful now, and not only to ourselves. But it was not always so and need not always be so. We are the head and have the responsibility. We have tried to conquer nature by force and by intellect. It now remains for us to try the way of love"
January 18, 2016
An exceptional book from the 1940s that served as a foundation for the organic farming movement but that is too limited a claim. Lord Northbourne also foretells the focus on the importance of local scale of development and communities of Gar Alperovitz as well as the pastoral, agrarian spirituality of Wendell Berry. Anyone interested in non-industrial agriculture, the environmental, a third way for the economy should spend a few hours reading this book.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews