America, the Beautiful

"We do not intend that our natural resources shall be exploited by the few against the interests of the many, nor do we intend to turn them over to any man who will wastefully use them by destruction and leave to those who come after us a heritage damaged by just so much." So spoke the conservationist President, Teddy Roosevelt. Last week, as his tenth successor addressed himself to the modern problems of natural resources, the situation had become more dramatic; what needs saving now is not just nature, but man himself.

In a special message to Congress on natural beauty, President Johnson highlighted the triumphs of progress that threaten to make the countryside invisible, the water undrinkable, the air unbreathable and the city unlivable. To put a stop to all this, Johnson indicated that memos will soon be flying, committees conferring and money sluicing, largely through the Land and Water Conservation Fund established by Congress last September, which will have approximately $1.450 billion at its disposal during the next decade.

National parks are still a major presidential concern; Johnson out-Teddied Roosevelt by proposing the establishment of twelve new national parks, totaling some 754,104 acres* to make "a Parks-for-America decade." He also noted that many thousands of the 28 million acres now used by the armed services would soon become surplus, and "much of the land has great potential for outdoor recreation, wildlife and conservation uses," to which end he had asked for an inventory from the Secretaries of Defense and Interior.

What the cities need is more open spaces, said the President; he proposed a series of matching grants to help municipalities open up with parks and plazas equipped for public rest and recreation. He also recommended federal demonstration projects to show how existing parks might be used better.

The Highway. Landscaping, said the President, should be required on all federal, interstate, primary and urban highways, "encouraging the construction of rest and recreation areas . . . and the preservation of natural beauty adjacent to highway rights-of-way." This means more restriction, for one thing, on outdoor advertising, for which Johnson plans to recommend more effective legislation to replace the present regulations, which expire in June. Also in for a sharp crackdown is a pet Johnsonian peeve--"unsightly, beauty-destroying junkyards and auto graveyards along our highways."

The litter of dead car carcasses is bothering more and more civic groups, such as the National Council of State Garden Clubs. Minnesota's Senator Eugene McCarthy has even urged the use of excise taxes on gasoline to subsidize the scrapping of cars. The trouble is twofold: 1) as population and incomes increase, more cars are made, and they have ever shorter lives; 2) the price of scrap metal has dropped as the steel industry has converted from open-hearth furnaces, which use up to 45% scrap metal, to oxygen furnaces, which use only 27% scrap. The price an auto wrecker gets for his scrap has fallen to around $10 a car, with the result that many wreckers have allowed car carcasses to pile up, in hopes of a rise in the market. One hopeful cure for this national eyesore was proposed this month by Interior Secretary Stewart L. Udall, who announced that the Bureau of Mines has developed a new process that uses scrapped autos to upgrade nonmagnetic iron ore and make it suitable for steelmaking.

Water & Air. The President announced that he will soon send Congress a bill to establish a "national wild-rivers system." The time has come, he said, "to identify and preserve free-flowing stretches of our great scenic rivers before growth and development make the beauty of the unspoiled waterway a memory." The President also put his weight behind efforts to clear Washington's own river, the Potomac, of unsightly debris--such as the rusty aquatic junkyard of gutted World War I ships at La Plata, Md. Water pollution from both sewage and industrial waste, said the President, has reached the point where effective authority is required to prevent it at its source, rather than rely on palliative measures to cope with detergent-filled lakes and rivers, virus-spreading streams, or mass fish kills caused by chemical waste and pesticides.

Breathing, too, is growing steadily more perilous. Said Johnson: "This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale," by gas, coal and oil fumes as well as by nuclear fission. The 1966 budget under the Clean Air Act will be $24 million--almost double what it was when the law was enacted two years ago. Even so, the President feels that the act needs strengthening to permit the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare "to investigate potential air-pollution problems before pollution happens."

In this respect, it is living cars rather than dead ones that are under scrutiny. Johnson served notice that he intends to institute discussions among auto industry officials and "other interested groups" about what can be done to eliminate the exhaust pipe's assault on the lungs (see SCIENCE).

President Johnson's conservation program will presumably get under way in mid-May at a White House conference on natural beauty under the chairmanship of Laurance Rockefeller, chairman of the New York State Council of Parks and citizen conservationist No. 1 (he has personally presented the nation with some 6,000 acres of national-park land).

The forthcoming conference, said the President, "will not be restricted to federal action," but will "look for ways to help and encourage state and local government, institutions and private citizens in their own efforts . . . We have not chosen to have an ugly America. We have been careless, and often neglectful. But now that the danger is clear and the hour is late, this people can place itself in the path of a tide of blight which is often irreversible and always destructive."

By the time the President was through, Secretary Udall was ecstatic. "For the first time," he declared, "we're mature enough as a nation to have beauty as a part of our national purpose."

* Assateague Island National Seashore, Md.-Va.; Tocks Island National Recreation Area, NJ.-Pa.; Cape Lookout National Seashore, N.C.; Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore, Mich.; Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore, Ind.; Oregon Dunes National Seashore, Ore.; Great Basin National Park, Nev.; Guadalupe Mountains National Park, Texas; Spruce Knob, Seneca Rocks National Recreation Area, W.Va.; Bighorn Canyon National Recreation Area, Mont.-Wyo.; Flaming Gorge National Recreation, Utah-Wyo.; Whiskeytown-Shasta-Trinity National Recreation Area, Calif.

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