January 2011

Sir:… To show that strip mining need not ruin the landscape, you might take a look at Pennsylvania. To my knowledge this is the only state that requires complete restoration of coal-stripping operations. Since the passage of our bituminous strip-mine law in 1963 coal operators have had to restore their operations to original contour concurrent with mining, prevent the discharge of acid water, and successfully plant the restored land.

These requirements are being carried out on mountain slopes as well as on rolling farmland. Our experience is that total restoration is both economically and technically feasible. The law is strongly enforced. …

Sir:… In southern and central Illinois, for example, a “New Land” program has long been sponsored by the United Electric Coal Companies, now a subsidiary of General Dynamics. Since 1938 U. E.G. has actively sought to improve the land from which coal has been extracted. Today, there are some eighteen thousand acres of New Land with forests, pastures, orchards, and over two hundred lakes. Some of the areas are wildlife preserves for deer, quail, rabbits, beaver, and wild game. Others are grazing ground for cattle or forests for future timber. The orchards produce twenty-seven thousand bushels of apples as well as a crop of peaches. …

Typical of the New Land policy has been reforestation. Recognizing the need for a timber crop that could be harvested within a man’s lifetime, seedlings of southern pine were imported. Despite criticism that the area was too cold and rocky and the competition from the native hardwoods too severe, these pines today are seeding themselves and helping to create attractive lake and forest areas. …

On the high, treeless plains of central Montana this summer the Department of the Interior, the nation’s principal conservation agency and custodian (through the National Park Service) of all national historic monuments, will play host to an estimated 275,000 visitors. They will come, as have millions before them, to see and walk “the very ground” upon which occurred what must be the most memorialized single event in American history: the battle fought on Sunday, June 25, 1876, between some four thousand Indians and five companies of U. S. Cavalry—215 men in all—under the command of George Armstrong Custer. But this year’s visitors to the Custer Battlefield, unlike their predecessors, will have the chance to take home, for the price of $1.25, a remarkable new souvenir—a ninety-three page, paperbound handbook, prepared by the Park Service and printed by the U. S. Government Printing Office. It is one of the most striking examples of illustrated history to be published by anyone in some time.

A JOLT FOR HONEY HOLLOW

On the gently rolling hills of Bucks County in eastern Pennsylvania five high-tension towers up to 140 feet in height, carrying five hundred kilowatts of electricity to the urban centers of New Jersey and New York, will be set in a three-hundred-foot corridor cut through the carefully nurtured woods and fields of Honey Hollow watershed—a National Historic Landmark. The rich, productive soil of Honey Hollow’s six hundred acres has been continuously farmed since early in the eighteenth century. Substantial fieldstone houses and barns of that period still stand among the trim contourglowed strips of corn, hay, and barley, the wildlife hedges, the ponds and terraces that have been maintained ever since five farmers of Honey Hollow watershed joined forces in 1939 to demonstrate the then newly developed U. S. Soil Conservation Service practices.

In the election of November 3, 1936, Alfred Mossman London got 16,681,913 votes—compared with 27,751,612 for winner Franklin D. Roosevelt. While Roosevelt swept 523 electoral votes, London won only eight—those of Maine and Vermont. Small wonder that Maine and Vermont were thenceforth looked on as states and cases apart—and that London became a synonym for landslide.

“The nation has spoken,” London wired his victorious opponent. “Every American will accept the verdict and work for the common cause of the good of our country. That is the spirit of democracy. You have my sincere congratulations. ”

Even before there was an Everglades National Park, there was Clewiston. It is said to be the sweetest little city in America, having been sweetened by the United States Sugar Corporation, which raises cane and beef cattle there on 100,000 acres of flat Florida muckland. U.S. Sugar also owns the Clewiston Inn. In the southern comfort of the lounge, one can sit and admire the cane growers’ tribute to the Everglades. It is a large, free-flowing oil canvas snugged around the windows and door and behind the polished bar, a romantic rendering of wild birds gliding above a wet landscape of cypress and saw grass, of alligators wallowing in the everglade sloughs. “How much did it cost?” a stranger asks, for the dollar is of eminent concern in Florida. The bartender says it cost $35,000, “and that was way back in 1935.” He holds out a wine list. The prices of the liquor are on the front; on the back, keyed to the painting, the wild species are identified from left to right. “That’s the way it used to be around here,” says the bartender, gazing toward the window. “But it sure looks different now”

For years American folk art enthusiasts have been prowling inside attics and old barns to search out primitive objects from our creative past, yet all the time there has been another treasure outdoors, one often quite overlooked. It is the vast legion of imaginative folk figures that appear in our landscape as scarecrows, harvest figures, and snowmen, conceived in the best of folk art traditions. No two are alike; each projects its individual gesture and expression. And they rarely survive the season they are designed to celebrate. Every year tens of thousands of these fanciful effigies are manufactured by people totally unaware that they are participants in a contemporary, but seldom recorded, folk art tradition. The ones we show here are confined to New England, but others like them can be found almost anywhere.