January 2011

In the spring of 1969 thousands of Californians, warned by soothsayers that earthquakes impended, shut themselves up in their houses or fled to what they thought safe places, where they waited for disaster through a day and a night like nineteenth-century Millerites gathered for the Second Coming. The earth did not tremble and gape—the San Andreas fault is fairly unresponsive to soothsaying—but the gullible demonstrated one important human truth: we can be more frightened by fictions and phantasms than by the things that should really scare us to death. These frightened people huddled in houses that were sunk in air murky with poisonous smog; they should have sniffed panic with every breath they drew. Those who fled rushed past endless overcrowded subdivisions down freeways that roared with cars bumper to bumper, four lanes each way, at seventy or eighty miles an hour; they should have heard apocalypse rumbling before and beside and behind. Above the murk and the traffic the firmament split with sonic booms. The passing roadside showed them the devastated redwood groves of Eureka and Arcata.

No man ought to advertise in the midst of landscapes or scenery, in such a way as to destroy or injure their beauty by introducing totally incongruous and relatively vulgar associations. Too many transactions of the sort have been perpetrated in our own country. The principle on which the thing is done is, to seek out the most attractive spot possible —the wildest, the most lovely, and there, in the most staring and brazen manner to paint up advertisements of quack medicines, rum, or as the case may be, in letters of monstrous size, in the most obtrusive colors, in such a prominent place, and in such a lasting way as to destroy the beauty of the scene both thoroughly and permanently.

Once upon a time, over a century ago, there was a very different America from that which this issue portrays on pages 4–11, and whose problems Wallace Stegner so poignantly describes in the article just preceding this one. That America was just being opened up. That America did not mind the sound of the axe and the harrow; the stumps of trees did not offend its eye; its westering pioneers rejoiced all hearts. That America did not foresee an age when the frontier, the wild land, would ever run out.

It is perhaps instructive to revisit this era, and we can do it very well by recalling a talented yet simple-hearted English-born artist named George Harvey. In 1841 he published a slender book that he had annotated and illustrated himself, Harvey’s Scenes of the Primitive Forest of America, at the Four Seasons of the Year, Spring, Summer, Autumn & Winter . The volume was intended merely as Part I of a de luxe eight-part series, which Harvey grandly called a Superb Royal Folio Work of American Scenery. This he hoped would bring him fame.

At a town meeting in Needham, Massachusetts, last March, a motion was made that called for the widening of a street by twenty feet. A resident of the street stood up to protest, saying his property had one of the last trees on the block and that he did not want it destroyed just to accommodate more traffic. He wanted, he said, to preserve grass against concrete, elms and oaks against parking meters. It was a direct, clear plea for environmental common sense. The meeting accepted his appeal: the street-widening scheme was killed. The hero who saved the street is Hugh Burns, Jr., fifteen vears old.

A new 6,500-foot jet strip is now part of Lake of the Ozarks State I’ark, thanks to federal funds and the diligence of Missouri’s Democratic governor, Warren E.Hearnes … Strip mining is going on in Maryland’s Savage River State Forest … A four-lane divided highway is slated to go through New Hampshire’s Franconia Notch …A sale of Palisades Interstate Park land to private developers by New Jersey county officials was stopped only by court action and pressure from Secretary of the Interior Halter J. Hickel.

A wonderful bird is the pelican, His beak will hold more than his belican. He can take in his beak Food enough for a week, But I’m damned if I see how the helican.

With environmental problems taking on increasing political importance, conservationists, quite naturally, are becoming increasingly political. This year saw the creation of two new groups radically different from existing conservation organizations.

Friends of the Earth is a militant political action group with a small but vocal membership composed in the main of youthful and strident Sierra Club people. Friends of the Earth will support and oppose candidates in next year’s congressional races, a marked departure for a national conservation organization. It is headed by the dynamic former director of the Sierra Club, David Brower, who led the small hiking club into national prominence and who in the opinion of many has himself all the markings of a promising political animal.