Abstract

Charles Frazier's award- winning, popular novel, Cold Mountain, expresses sharp criticisms of industrial, technological society and probes the ways the modern world might return to the land to fashion a culture and economy more sensitive to place. Unlike Aldo Leopold, who turned to wild nature for guidance on how people might live, Frazier looks to the small farm and to a land-based economy as the foundation for a new order. Frazier's normative thinking is largely woven into a story line featuring a young, highly cultured woman, Ada Monroe, who finds herself alone on a farm during the Civil War. So ignorant is Ada of nature and food systems she cannot feed herself, even in mid-summer. Into Ada's life comes her opposite, a young woman named Ruby, who is all nature and no culture. As he recounts the interactions of Ada and Ruby, Frazier comments on how American society might return to basics, as the two women did, to search for more lasting ways of blending nature and culture. As the story unfolds, Frazier offers multiple visions of how people might relate to the land. Ultimately he rejects the locally based, visions of plenty ideal sketched by Ruby, as well as a number of escapist and aesthetic alternatives, in favor of a more complex, cultured ideal that blends careful attentiveness to local nature with selective aspects of urban refinement. Frazier's novel stands as one of the most important agrarian conservation writings of the past half century. This essay is drawn from a new book, Agrarianism and the Good Society, which explores from various perspectives the cultural origins of our environmental and land-use predicament