Agricultural History Review, Volume 66 Part 1 (2018), p. 159

Dan McKanan’s book is a welcome surprise for those interested in the sub-genre of agricultural history that concerns itself with organic farming. Welcome because it deals with a problem that has until now received little detailed attention from scholars: how significant were the ideas and practice of biodynamic cultivation for the organic movement’s progress between the 1930s and the 1980s? More specifically, was the influence of Rudolf Steiner’s disciples in the English-speaking world greater than that of Sir Albert Howard and those who adopted his Indore Process of composting? And Eco-alchemy is a surprise, because one might have expected such questions to be addressed by agricultural historians rather than a Senior Lecturer at Harvard Divinity School.

That this book’s author holds such a post does in fact make sense, as Rudolf Steiner’s teachings – known as anthroposophy – are a form of esoteric Christianity. They have spread to many countries since their formulation during the first quarter of the twentieth century, influencing agricultural and educational practices, and have played a significant role, directly and indirectly, in the growth of environmentalism.

McKanan describes his stance as ‘neutral with regard to the spiritual practices and worldview that are unique to anthroposophy’ (p. xv): a stance which is a thoroughly sound position from which to write about a controversial set of ideas. ‘My judgment,’ says McKanan, ‘that environmentalism has been enriched by anthroposophy is pragmatic, focused on the effects of anthroposophically inspired initiatives’ (p. xv). He is not an evangelist for Steiner’s ideas; equally importantly, he is not a secularist enemy of them, eager to carry out a demolition job. Instead, McKanan has visited many anthroposophical projects, spent three summers in a Steinerian community, and is fully aware of the various criticisms that can be levelled at anthroposophy, particularly with regard to its historical links to Nazism, of which he gives an illuminating account.

As an important strand of his argument that anthroposophy has enriched environmental activism, McKanan examines the influence of Steiner’s biodynamic methods of cultivation on the organic movement’s growth in Britain and North America. He maintains that they were much more significant than has hitherto been recognized. McKanan therefore lays emphasis on the roles played by Steiner’s follower Ehrenfried Pfeiffer and by Lord Northbourne, author of Look to the land (1940), who experimented with biodynamic methods on his East Kent estate, and held a conference there in 1939 at which Pfeiffer was one of the main speakers. Regrettably, McKanan perpetuates the myth that Northbourne coined the term ‘organic agriculture’, which Northbourne explicitly denied (see p. 71 of my book, The development of the organic network, for details). McKanan interprets the term as a translation of the biodynamic ideals that Northbourne learned from Pfeiffer, but the phrase ‘organic husbandry’ was in use more than two years before Look to the land appeared.

In order to play up the importance of the biodynamic movement in organic history – and the chapter entitled ‘Roots’ provides much valuable evidence of its quickening influence – McKanan has to play down the role of Sir Albert Howard. He even speculates that without biodynamics there might have been no organic movement at all, since ‘Howard was no movement builder’ (p. 41). It so happens that February this year has seen the publication of Gregory Barton’s The global history of organic farming, a book drawing on hitherto undiscovered papers of Howard and his wives Gabrielle and Louise, and describing what Barton sees as the central role of these three figures in the rise of organic agriculture. At the time of writing this review, I have not yet been able to study Barton’s book; it will be fascinating to contrast his ideas with those of McKanan.

The evidence which McKanan marshals to demonstrate the influence of biodynamic activists on the wider organic movement should certainly cause those who, like myself, see Howard as the key figure in the British and North American organic movements, to stop and re-consider. In Britain, Pfeiffer impressed not only Lord Northbourne, but leading organicists Viscount Lymington (later the Earl of Portsmouth) and Eve Balfour; while in America he contributed for many years to Jerome Rodale’s journal Organic farming and gardening. Rodale also promoted Howard’s ideas, but Howard was thoroughly sceptical about Steiner’s cosmic theories. McKanan describes Howard as having a ‘secularizing’ approach (p. 53) and being without ties to any spiritual movement. In fact, he was closely associated with the ‘Christian sociologists’ who ran the New English Weekly and with the Council for the Church and Countryside. Certainly, he was more than ready to meet other agricultural scientists and farmers on their own ground, and the pages of the agricultural press in the 1930s and 1940s demonstrate that he rallied many farmers behind him in the cause of observing the ‘rule of return’ of wastes to the soil.

McKanan provides useful detail on late twentieth-century developments in environmentally minded forms of cultivation. He notes the part played by the soil scientist Herbert Koepf, who succeeded Pfeiffer as the leading promulgator of biodynamics. The anthroposophist establishment Emerson College in Sussex provided tuition for Sue Coppard, who founded WWOOF (Working Weekends on Organic Farms – now Worldwide Opportunities on Organic Farms), and for Patrick Holden, who became Director of the Soil Association.

The organic movement has always been closely associated with initiatives promoting economic reform, and McKanan believes that Community Supported Agriculture is one aspect of the new economy which anthroposophy can claim as its intellectual property, since it was the anthroposophical banks and the biodynamic movement that introduced the idea during the 1980s. He examines how this came about in Germany and in the USA. More broadly, McKanan shows how anthroposophy has changed from a ‘self-reinforcing’ movement to one that is ‘self-dispersing’: increasingly open to those sympathetic to its environmentalist ideas without subscribing to its esoteric philosophy.

For the agricultural historian, Eco-alchemy offers a thought-provoking perspective on the organic movement’s origins and development. For environmental historians, it provides a fair-minded, wide-ranging account of the ways in which anthroposophy has percolated into the mainstream of a worldwide campaign.