The Flight from Folly

Essence of winter sleep is on the night, The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight I got from looking through a pane of glass I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough And held against the world of hoary grass.

Frost's After Apple-Picking

I hurry amain to reach the plain, Run the rapid and leap the fall, Split at the rock and together again, Accept my bed, or narrow or wide, And flee from folly on every side . . .

Lanier's Song of the Chattahoochee

Nature has no human inhabitant who appreciates her. The birds with their plumage and their notes are in harmony with the flowers, but what youth or maiden conspires with the wild luxuriant beauty of Nature? She flourishes most alone, far from the towns where they reside. Talk of heaven! ye disgrace earth.

Thoreau's Walden

Today the apple orchard behind the New Hampshire homestead where Robert Frost lived for eleven years is a graveyard for junked cars. Sidney Lanier's Chattahoochee River is now one of the two most polluted streams in Georgia. And Walden Pond has a bathing beach surrounded by hot-dog stands and a trailer camp. From sea to shining sea, the inevitable growth of U.S. humanity and industry has crushed grass, leveled trees, blasted out mountains and dammed off rivers. Interior Secretary Stewart Udall calls such dimming of America's beauty "the quiet crisis."

Is it so quiet? Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas cries out in his newest book,* to be issued this week, that "wilderness has values greater than any price that can be placed on the resources it contains." The President of the United States agrees. "Natural beauty," he said this spring, "is more than a rich source of pleasure and recreation. It shapes our values, molds our attitudes. It feeds our spirit, and it helps to make us the kind of men and women we finally become. And the kind of men and women we finally become in turn makes this great nation." With such voices crying out for the wilderness, the U.S. is now, as never in its history, alive with projects to roll back blight--with some hits, some misses (for examples of both, see color pages).

Last week alone, the Senate Public Roads Subcommittee reported bills to curb billboards, to screen or remove junkyards and to landscape federal-aided highways. A House Public Works Subcommittee wound up hearings on similar bills. The entire House voted to preserve 35-mile-long Assateague Island, off the coast of Maryland and Virginia, as a National Seashore. As an amendment to the farm bill, Wisconsin's Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson proposed paying farmers to maintain idled crop land as recreation areas for hunters and fishermen. And Lady Bird Johnson, in Grand Teton National Park for a joint meeting of the American Forestry Association and the National Council of State Garden Clubs, said that "history will judge us not by our abundance or by our mighty arms or vast influence, but by our people, their values, their wisdom, their skill and their happiness. In this scale of ultimate judgment, beauty will weigh heavily."

T.R.'s Start. The idea of beauty preservation in the U.S. did not always carry such weight. In the beginning there was so much untamed territory that early Americans could hardly imagine getting through it all, much less ruining it. President Grant, who established the first national park at Yellowstone in 1872, acted not so much to conserve as to foil a group of land speculators. The real father of conservation is considered to be John Muir, a California naturalist, who in 1890 persuaded the Federal Government to take over the Yosemite Valley and the lands around it.

It was not until the turn-of-the-century Administration of outdoor-loving Teddy Roosevelt that the country got into preservation in a big way. Influenced early in life by Muir and later by Gifford Pinchot, McKinley's chief forester, Roosevelt began by pressing for water conservation in the arid West. He won the power to establish the nation's natural and historical treasures as national monuments, then ingeniously outflanked an attempt to wipe out many of the nation's national forests. Faced with a forest-eliminating rider to a bill for much-needed funds, Teddy responded with wilderness-bred cunning. In the ten days before signing the funds bill, he simply proclaimed the establishment of 16 million new acres of national forest. He sat up nights until dawn with Pinchot poring over topographical maps, deciding which lands looked wooded and worth preserving.

They got masses of grazing land that way, but today, thanks to Teddy, the Government is the nation's largest single owner of forest land (see map, after color pages).

L.BJ.'s Concept. After Teddy, however, preservation went into an eclipse best expressed by the "not a cent for scenery" attitude of Uncle Joe Cannon, House Speaker from 1903 to 1911. Various nation al parks and monuments were dedicated and several Presidents took a lively interest in natural beauty, but it was not until President Kennedy took office that the Federal Government again began thinking about conservation on a scale approaching Teddy Roosevelt's. J.F.K. brought in outdoorsy Stewart Udall as Interior Secretary, in 1962 called the first White House Conference on conservation since the T.R. years.

Lyndon Johnson added his own concept to that of preserving the nation's existing riches: rebeauti-fication of already blighted areas. On the day after sending the first presidential message on natural beauty to Congress, Johnson told his Cabinet that they could fall asleep on page five of his balance of payments message, "but here is one you have to read. I take special pride in this one. If you will all pitch in and help my wife and Secretary Udall and others, we might do something we will all be proud of."

'65 Records. In 1964 Johnson signed his wilderness bill, which put more than 30,000 acres of federally protected wilderness permanently off limits to private enterprise. He also pushed through the Land and Water Conservation Fund bill, which provides moneys for purchasing public recreation and outdoor areas. So far this year, Johnson has signed two major water resources bills, which provide funds for research centers and en courage states to act together instead of piecemeal on the river basins that serve them all. Bills pending include one to protect rare and endangered species of fish and wildlife, another to establish a National Wild Rivers System. The first national riverway, along the Current and Jacks Forks rivers in Missouri's Ozarks, was established by a special act last summer. Johnson hopes to add the Rio Grande, the Suwannee and four others to the system this year.

The President and Lady Bird are hardly alone on the ramparts. Private preservation efforts have never been more widespread on both large and small scales. At the small end are one-shot campaigns waged by dedicated groups and individuals such as New York's Richard Pough and Washington's Sheafe Satterthwaite. One of Pough's current projects is to help preserve a 3,400-acre tract of Gulf Coast prairie land, one of the last nesting areas of the near-extinct Attwater's Prairie Chicken. So far, $70,000 has been collected; and $300,000 more is needed. Satterthwaite is working to block developers from filling in New Jersey's 3,000-acre Troy Meadows, the most important waterfowl refuge left in the state, and to prevent unspoiled Smith Island, off the coast of North Carolina, from becoming an industrial complex.

Broad-scale private conservation is best represented by the Sierra Club, with 33,000 members in 18 chapters located mainly in California but spreading as far south as New Mexico and east as New York. Founded in 1892 to help protect the newly created Yosemite National Park, its first president was the pioneering Muir. In 1952 it hired its first full-time professional conservationist, David Brower. Under Brower, the club now spends $1,300,000 annually on the conservation war.

The nation's most prominent individual conservationist is Laurance Rockefeller. Inheriting the interest from his father, John D. Jr.,* Laurance first became involved in wholesale preservation in 1949 when he carried through his father's wishes to turn 33,562 acres of the Jackson Hole Valley beneath Wyoming's Grand Tetons into a federal park. Since then he has helped to create the Virgin Islands National Park, has worked for the just-created national seashore on New York's Fire Island.

Currently chairman of the White House Conference on Natural Beauty, Rockefeller has long maintained that preserved areas should also be widely used and enjoyed. Last week he called upon the Federal Government and nonprofit foundations to "join hands" in planning lodges and other facilities to make the nation's parks more accessible to the visitor. The position is not wildly popular with stricter conservationists who shudder at the thought of herds of littering tourists.

Beauty v. Need. The atmosphere of conflict, both inside and outside the ranks, is as natural to conservation as the scent of balsam. For opposed to every conservationist cause there is always the need of those from whom the land is being saved. Steel manufacturers, for example, have discovered that the most efficient sites for their plants are near water transportation. One such location is the Indiana Dunes, a strip of glacier-formed beach, sand dunes and marshland running along Indiana's Lake Michigan coast from Gary to Michigan City. For 50 years conservationists have seethed as the dunes have been bitten away by steel companies. This year the Senate finally passed a compromise bill (House action is pending) incorporating ten unspoiled miles into a federal park and leaving the rest to the steel industry.

The ever-growing building industry must have lumber; conservationists cherish forests. Here also the outcome is a compromise--the Government allows selective lumbering in the national forests, the lumber companies replant trees. But in cases of truly virgin forest and the privately owned California redwood tracts, the savers and the cutters are at irreconcilable loggerheads. The Sierra Club and other conservationists insist, with reason, that there is no way to replant a 2,000-year-old redwood or a forest never before touched by human industry.

Dams are needed for hydroelectricity and to create water reservoirs. New York's Consolidated Edison Co. is seeking to build a storage facility on Storm King Mountain overlooking the Hudson 55 miles north of Manhattan; the Army Corps of Engineers has plans to dam Alaska's Yukon River at Rampart Canyon into a lake the size of New Jersey that could water the U.S. West Coast.

Conservationists claim that Storm King's outlets would destroy fish life and that a major portion of Alaska's wildlife would be flooded out by the Rampart dam. Outlook: unsettled, with storms.

Lady Bird's Must. Outdoor advertising is an obvious target for beautifiers. To oppose the billboard bills that Lyndon Johnson says he "must have for Lady Bird" is like supporting crime in the streets. Yet the major offense to the eye is the neon jungie of on-premise signs of used-car lots, drive-in restaurants and souvenir stands on the out skirts of most U.S. towns. The new bills leave these untouched. Instead, they call for elimination of all billboards for 660 feet on either side of a federal highway or primary roadway outside commercial or industrial areas.

Most affected, therefore, will be the outdoor advertising industry--and the proprietors of restaurants, motels, and other transient-dependent businesses that happen to lie away from the mainstream of traffic. Lady Bird's bill governing junkyards calls for the elimination or screening off of such ugliness within 1,000 feet of federal highways or primary roadways. It is a case where the battle between beauty and need (the U.S. junked 6,100,000 cars last year) again resulted in compromise.

Effluent Society. New battles flare up as fast as the U.S. grows. Each and every day, the average American disposes of four pounds of trash--a total of 540 million Ibs. throughout the nation. "The 'effluent' society," Justice Douglas calls it. The Interior Department warns that "if trends continue unchecked, in another generation a trash pile or piece of junk will be within a stone's throw of any person standing anywhere on the American continent."

Lake Tahoe between California and Nevada is losing its crystalline beauty to the spreading stain of sewage produced by thousands of tourists attracted to gaudy new hotels, casinos and roadhouses. Sewage is doing the same thing to upstate New York's Chautauqua Lake, the famous site of open-air lectures and summer artistry. In Appalachia, strip miners have ravaged the hills for ore and left behind a gutted horizon that, says one native, "makes my stomach turn." Thousands of acres of Atlantic coast marshland, home of waterfowl and spawning ground for oysters and clams, are being filled in by marina-minded resort builders.

Visitors to Niagara Falls have reported garbage spilling over the brink. Gettysburg, Pa., has safeguarded much of the historic battlefield, but the surrounding area crawls with souvenir hawkers and motels. In the Great Salt Lake, Antelope Island remains one of the last areas where buffalo roam freely in the U.S.; now the state wants to use the island as an amusement area.

Ultimate Solution. But the war is not without victories. Since Secretary Udall took office five years ago, he has overseen creation of the Ozark National Scenic Riverways and the nation's newest national park, Utah's Canyonlands. National Seashores have been set aside on Cape Cod, New York's Fire Island, California's Point Reyes and Texas' Padre Island. Protests from an aroused public stopped Maryland from installing a sewage disposal plant across the Potomac from Mount Vernon. Rainbow Bridge in Utah, the largest natural bridge in the world, would have had its underpinnings gnawed away by a dam-created lake had not conservationists made a case.

For the foreseeable future, the battles will increase, the crisis will become even less quiet. Litter must go somewhere. Highway businesses will expand. Cars and washing machines wear out but will not disintegrate. Pulp, paper and wood so far come only from trees. And an expanding population must have more power and more factories and more homes to live in.

Ultimately, the solution must come from science and technology. Conservationists cried over detergent foam-up in streams and rivers; science developed more easily broken-down ("biodegradable") detergents. Science has developed techniques for pretreating sewage and industrial waste so that it need not pollute the nation's waters. Science will find new ways to use growing stockpiles of scrap metal; it is developing acceptable substitutes for wood.

In the meantime, the conservationist has the often thankless task of discovering and denouncing ugliness and despoliation, and the not infrequent joy of victories won. For there now is proof that industrial progress and natural beauty can exist side by side.

*A Wilderness Bill of Rights; Little, Brown ($5.95). *Who donated much of the land for Maine's Acadia National Park, a 45,000-acre preserve near Bar Harbor

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