America Down The Drain

This may be the era and the generation and perhaps even the very year that the United States of America, in all its natural glory, goes down the drain. The more I see, the more I am forced to conclude that from New York to California, from Florida to Alaska, much of what is lovely, rich and real about the U.S. is scheduled for wholesale destruction or defacement. Almost everywhere America the beautiful is becoming America the ugly, the wasted, the blasted and the blighted, the home of the neon sign, the superduper highway (leading from no place to nowhere), the billboard ("Billboards are the art gallery of the public," purrs Burr L. Robbins, president of the General Outdoor Advertising Co., Inc.), foaming detergents, the used-car lot, the useless dam, the monotonous housing tract, the hot dog stand and stinking pollution galore. Indeed, according to a recent book by Peter Blake, the U.S. can now lay proud claim to the title of God's Own Junkyard. We have, in short, become a nation of pigs. Hello, pigs.

Practically all the carnage going on is being conducted in the name of some kind of alleged progress. If this "progress" were true progress, no one could have cause for complaint. But, in fact, "progress" has come to stand for stupidity, greed, graft, malice and moral debasement. We have imperiled the charms of our cities; now the countryside is to be laid waste. The culprits are everywhere: highway builders, conscienceless real estate dealers, fast-buck artists, contractors, ignorant state governments, the Federal Government, the Bureau of Reclamation, the Army Corps of Engineers ("the lobby that can't be licked"), gutless politicians of all stripes, breeds and parties, power interests (public and private), industry, labor unions and even conservationists, who, by lack of unity and purpose, have permitted much of the wreckage to occur.

It is true that Congress, in wisdom assembled at its last session, passed the Wilderness Bill, but such legislation—by no means perfect—has next to no effect on the bulk of 190 million Americans. As William H. Whyte, the author of The Organization Man and now an associate of the American Conservation Association, remarked in The Exploding Metropolis, "The fact that there will remain thousands of acres of, say, empty land in Wyoming is not going to help the man living in Teaneck, New Jersey." Indeed, there are many times when a Midwesterner or Easterner gets the sick feeling that the Federal Government does not give a hoot about him at all, except at income tax time. For some odd reason, Westerners fall heir to the important administrative posts and congressional chairmanships concerning natural resources, and all federal eyes seem to be focused on Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and the other desert, mountain and prairie states. Thus, in respectable Washington parlance, the Department of the Interior is known seriously as the Department of the West. And thus, too, the late Senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma, the king of the pork barrel, who was wont to denounce what he called "ass-thetics," was able to get Congress on the road to spending more than $1 billion to turn a burg known as Catoosa, Okla. into a major port, even though it is 516 miles from the Mississippi.

Above and beyond self-serving politicking, many Westerners seem to have an ingrained loathing for the East. They not only hate " Wall Street" and the so-called eastern "Establishment." they have an actual physical dislike for the eastern landscape, city or country. It looks "different," it looks "strange," it is "too green." This feeling affects both conservatives and liberals. Barry Goldwater once said, "Sometimes I think that this country would be better off if we could just saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea." And Stewart Udall, the Secretary of the Interior and a fellow Arizonan, is so "depressed" by New York that he finds it all but impossible to spend the night there. On one occasion Udall packed up and left the Waldorf-Astoria for Washington because he was undone by the man-made "canyons." Not that all this has helped the West much, for it is starting to match the East, power line for custard stand.

In many ways it is strange that the dismemberment of the U.S. continues, for significant numbers of influential Americans are concerned about it. Their concern is presented in various ways. It is expressed by Edward Durell Stone, the architect, who recently said, "If you look around you, and you give a damn, it makes you want to commit suicide." It is expressed by the public interest in such books as Blake's God's Own Junkyard, Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the late Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Udall's own The Quiet Crisis. It is expressed by numerous biologists who are appalled by the plunder and waste. Unfortunately, if they happen to be in federal or state employ, they speak only "off the record" to an interested reporter. They know from experience that, should a biologist say too much publicly, he will suffer retaliation from politicians, power interests, highway men or cannery owners, any one of whom can reach into the civil service or even a university to damage a career.

This concern over the desecration of the landscape is also expressed by angry amateur nature lovers, such as the New Mexicans who sawed down billboards on the highway leading from Santa Fe to Los Alamos. (An unknown Canadian, who calls himself the Poetic Carpenter, has gone the New Mexicans one better. Last summer he cut down five billboards along a scenic highway near Kelowna, B.C., leaving behind each time a copy of Ogden Nash's poem: "I think that I shall never see/A billboard lovely as a tree./Perhaps, unless the billboards fall,/ I'll never see a tree at all."*)

The concern displays itself in countless emergency groups that have been organized all over the country to meet specific threats—a highway, a dam, a "sanitary landfill" of a life-giving marsh. All too often, however, their efforts are too little and too late. Yet the shocking fact is that where the effort is strong, it still has little effect. Somehow representative government seems to have broken down. In instance after instance, politicians, government bureaus and courts ignore the demands of citizens while they grant a curious immunity to money-grabbers and polluters of the most despicable sort even when the grossest violation of law or precedent is involved.

Last year, for instance, the National Parks Association, a private group, went to court to try to stop the flooding of Rainbow Bridge National Monument in Utah. The association carried the fight to a U.S. District Court, which dismissed the case on the grounds that the association was acting on the behalf of only "the public generally." The U.S. Supreme Court refused to review the decision. When the association protested against the wholesale poisoning of fish in the Green River in Colorado and Wyoming—a poisoning which, predictably, got out of hand—it prepared to print a report on the subject. But, as Anthony Wayne Smith, president and general counsel of the National Parks Association, was "troubled" to report to his trustees, the "manuscript submitted for publication in the [National Parks] Magazine on the Green River poisoning was withdrawn under pressure from the Park Service." The Park Service contended the manuscript included material developed under a research grant from the Service which contained a clause prohibiting "disclosure without permission."

Evasion follows suppression. Take, for instance, the six-lane superhighway that would wipe out 46 acres of land and pretty little Crum Creek on the campus of Swarthmore College outside Philadelphia. This admittedly is a small piece of ground, but worthy of thought inasmuch as it is one of the few open spaces for miles. The president of Swarthmore, Courtney Smith, attaches such importance to this land that he mentioned its impending destruction last June at commencement exercises attended by Lyndon Johnson. "For eight years," Smith said, "the college has fought a case which is really that of every college and university. For the controversy over the Midcounty Expressway, which links so dramatically the causes of conservation and a college's need for land, is being followed with concern by colleges and universities all over the country, which see in this threat to land preserved for educational purposes an alarming precedent as the federal interstate road-building program proceeds. Nearly a year ago the Federal Bureau of Public Roads told the state that it must 'shift its alignment for the route in order to avoid affecting Swarthmore College property to the maximum extent possible.' But the Pennsylvania Department of Highways has shown no disposition to make significant changes to meet the condition imposed by the Federal Bureau."

Perhaps the best (or worst) case of the breakdown of representative government concerns the scheduled destruction of an 18-mile stretch of the Beaver Kill and its tributary, Willowemoc Creek, in the Catskills for a four-lane superhighway. These are the two most famous trout streams in the country—in fact, the nation's original dry-fly streams—but the New York State Department of Public Works has declared that it will not only run the highway along the banks of the streams but will crisscross them 12 times with cement bridges. The Milquetoast state conservation department approves. Several thousand residents of the area, many of whom are dependent upon tourists for their livelihood, have signed a petition requesting that the highway be built on a natural bench higher up in the valley, thus sparing the streams. So far, the petition has elicited no response whatever from the politicians, and the highway men contend such a route would cost an additional $1.9 million. Even if their figure of $1.9 million is correct (and it is open to question), the extra cost would be well worth it, because these two streams could not be duplicated for 20 or even 200 times that price. Moreover, the voters in New York State have approved recent referendums appropriating $100 million for the purchase of desperately needed recreation lands. Doubtless the legislature will try to make amends for ruining the streams by buying the estate of some out-of-office pol pal, and turning it into a park.