SPACE, SUN, AND AIR 273 



tions on the question from writers not in government service, and less 

 specialized in their interests. To note a few: 



In 1935, Herbert Agar's Land of the Free, from which, at the head of 

 chapter 13, we have quoted; and Paul Sears' Deserts on the March, 

 described by Hendrik Willem van Loon as a new way of writing history. 

 In 1936, Stuart Chase's Rich Land, Poor Land; Arthur Raper's Preface to 

 Peasantry. In 1937 Erskine Caldwell and Margaret Bourke-White published 

 their terrifying collection of words and photographs, an album of dis- 

 possessed and hopeless hands and croppers, You Have Seen Their Faces. In 

 the same year, Gerald Johnson compressed Howard Odum's monumental 

 Southern Regions of the United States into a brisker, more personal study, 

 The Wasted Land, and Walter Prescott Webb, author previously of a 

 great and scholarly analysis, The Great Plains, relaxed into the mood of 

 an unreconstructed southern agrarian and issued a challenging book-length 

 pamphlet, Divided We Stand. In the same year, 1937, Paul Sears followed 

 his Deserts on the March with a broader popularization of ecology, This 

 is Our World, and in this work extended his previous argument. 



The pattern of lichens on rock, Sears says, the grazing habits of elk 

 in our remaining forests and mountain meadows, and the group behavior 

 of elks on picnics, and of all other human groups seeking comfort and sus- 

 tenance, are related growths. In 1938 there came DuPuy's The Nation's 

 Forests, Lord's Behold Our Land, A Southerner Discovers the South by 

 Jonathan Daniels, Roads to a New America by David Cushman Coyle, and 

 Richard Neuberger's Our Promised Land. In 1939 the city reviews were 

 appraising a variety of basic works on conservation such as Seven Lean Years 

 by T.J. Woofter, Jr., and Ellen Winston, Romances of the National Parks by 

 Harlean James, These Are Our Lives by members of the Federal Writers' 

 Project, George Leighton's brilliant study of Five Cities and their wasting 

 backgrounds, and, perhaps the most influential tract of all, though it is not 

 strictly speaking a reporter's book, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. 



Human Conservation . . . There was a time when foresters could not see 

 the people for the trees. This, perhaps, was a natural tendency at the 

 beginning of the present century when the American conservation move- 



