Description

---

A Major History of Early Americans' Ideas about Conservation

Fifty years after the Revolution, American farmers faced a crisis: the failing soils of the Atlantic states threatened the agricultural prosperity upon which the republic was founded. Larding the Lean Earth explores the tempestuous debates that erupted between "improvers," intent on sustaining the soil of existing farms, and "emigrants," who thought it wiser and more "American" to move westward as the soil gave out. Larding the Lean Earth is a signal work of environmental history and an original contribution to the study of antebellum America.

About the Author

---

Steven Stoll studies the ways that people think about resources, capital, and how the economy of exchange functions within the larger economy of Earth. He is an environmental historian, but his work is related to geography, social ecology, and the political theory of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Most of Stoll's writing concerns agrarian society in the United States. He is the author of U.S. Environmentalism Since 1945 and The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth. Stoll is a regular contributor to Harper's Magazine and teaches history at Fordham University.

Praise For…

---

“[An] eye-opening and rousing chronicle of American agriculture and its industrialization.” —Booklist

“An engaging examination of the early proponents of restorative husbandry.” —Kirkus Reviews

“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

“[A] valuable act of reclamation.” —Bill Kauffman, The Wall Street Journal