MOTHER EARTH II 
now one may live without knowing anything useful, if he only 
possess a few coins of the realm and have access to a depart- 
ment store. 
“Back to nature” has therefore become the popular cry, 
and vacations are devoted to camping out, and to “foraging 
off to the country’’ as a means of restoration. But for- 
tunately it is not necessary to go to the mountains or to the 
frontier in order to get back to nature; for nature is ever with 
us at home. She raises our crops with her sunshine and soil 
and air and rain, and turns not aside the while from raising 
her own. While we are engrossed with ‘“‘developing”’ our 
clearings and are planting farms and cities and shops, she 
goes on serenely raising her ancient products in the bits of 
land left over: in swamp and bog, in gulch and dune, on the 
rocky hillside, by the stream and in the fence row. There 
she plants and tends her cereals and fruits and roots, and 
there she feeds her flocks. Wherever we leave her an opening, 
she slips in a few seeds of her own choosing, and when we 
abandon a field, she quickly populates it again with wild 
things. They begin again the same old lusty struggle for 
place and food, and of our feeble and transient interference, 
soon there is hardly a sign. 
As forthe wild things, therefore,—the things that so largely 
made up the environment of the pioneer and the red man— 
we need but step out to the borders of our clearing to find most 
ofthem. Ifany one would sharein the experience of prime- 
val times, he must work at these things with his own hands. 
To gain an acquaintance he must apply first his senses and 
then his wits. He must test them to find out what they are 
good for, and try them to find out what they are like: he 
must sense the qualities that have made them factors in the 
struggle for a place in the world of life. Thus, one may get 
back to nature. Thus, one may re-acquire some of that 
ancient fund of real knowledge that was once necessary to 
