Walter James (1896–1982), 4th Baron Northbourne, was a Kent landowner of many talents: Olympic rower, painter, translator, monetary reformer, spiritual philosopher and farmer. These last two callings were inseparable from each other, as Northbourne's approach to agriculture stemmed from his belief that humanity must treat God's creation with love and respect. He was centrally important in the early organic movement, presenting a lucid and concise overview of the case for the organic approach in Look to the Land (1940) and belonging to the Kinship in Husbandry, which during the 1940s disseminated organicist ideas. Northbourne had a foot in both camps, however, serving as Chairman of the Kent Agricultural Executive Committee from 1946 to 1957, and for many years as Chairman of Governors at Wye Agricultural College.
An orthodox Anglican during the first half of his life, Northbourne met the esoteric thinker Marco Pallis through having written Look to the Land and became an adherent of the Traditionalist or Perennialist school of religious philosophy, which maintains that there is an identical spiritual wisdom at the heart of all the major religious traditions, despite their differing doctrines. Northbourne's later books, Religion in the Modern World (1963) and Looking Back on Progress (1970), argue for the superiority, and truth, of this philosophy, as against the progressivist materialism which led, in his view, to the industrialisation of agriculture, with its associated ugliness and its rape of the natural world. Of the Land and the Spirit contains substantial extracts from all three books, as well as previously unpublished material on Christian symbolism and a moving ‘bequest’ or testament written two years before his death. In it, he reminds his descendents that they cannot fulfil their human duty as mediators between Heaven and Earth if they ‘pillage and pollute Nature’. There is also some interesting correspondence with the monk Thomas Merton, who shared Northbourne's concern about the destructive impact of technology on the natural environment.
For the rural historian, this anthology offers the opportunity to study the ideas of a remarkable landowner and key figure in the story of the organic movement. Given the intimate, centuries long relationship between religion and agriculture, and, also, given the fact that some of the most aggressive recent attacks on the organic movement have come from prominent secularists such as Lord Taverne, it is fascinating to read a contemporary reinterpretation of this relationship from first principles. Northbourne was a man of strong aesthetic sensibility, as his essay on the beauty of flowers demonstrates; but this characteristic did not prevent him from developing his arguments with an entirely unsentimental force of reason. Christopher James, the collection's co-editor, is the present Lord Northbourne, and contributes an introduction which adds personal depth to our knowledge of his father. The American farmer-writer Wendell Berry, in his foreword, is admiring although not uncritical. For Berry, the continuing value of Northbourne's work is to be found in his recognition that beneath Western society's approach to agriculture lies its neglect or denial of life's spiritual dimension.
