A Green and Permanent Land

Dust storms and the migration of farmers from the southern Plains during the Great Depression caused soil scientists, ecologists, and government planners to meditate on the permanence of agrarian society. Soil finally became a "natural resource" worth preserving when experts realized that it could be lost to wind and rain and that the millions of people who subsisted [End Page 426] upon it could be endangered. "Permanent agriculture" emerged as a policy objective and one of the first ecological causes among a group of New Dealers that included Rexford Tugwell, Morris Cooke, and Hugh Bennett. Its constituency embraced readers of the prescient journal The Land, published by the Friends of the Land during the 1940s, among whose contributors were Henry Wallace, Stuart Chase, J. Russell Smith, Paul Sears, Aldo Leopold, and Russell Lord

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