The capital sign of the early settlements beyond the seashore was
the clearing; and since the great majority of newcomers lived by
agriculture, the forest itself appeared merely as an obstacle to
be removed. The untouched woods of America were all too lush and
generous, and if an occasional Leatherstocking loved them, the new
settler saw only land to clear and wood to burn. In the New England
village, the tradition of culture was perhaps applied to the land
itself, and elsewhere there are occasional elements of good practice,
in the ordered neatness of boulder-fences. For the most part, however,
the deliberate obliteration of the natural landscape became a great
national sport, comparable to the extermination of bison which the
casual western traveler devoted himself to at a later date.
The stripping of the Appalachian forest was the first step in our
campaign against nature. By 1860 the effect was already grave enough
to warn an acute observer, like George Perkins Marsh, of the danger to
our civilization, and to prompt him in Earth and Man, to remind his
countrymen that other civilizations about the Mediterranean and the
Adriatic had lost their top-soil and ruined their agriculture through
the wanton destruction of their forests.
In the meanwhile, a new factor had entered. If before the nineteenth
century we cleared the forest to make way for the farm, with the
entrance of the industrial pioneer we began to clear the farm to parcel
out the city. We have called this process the settlement of America,
but the name is anomalous, for we formed the habit of using the land,
not as a home, a permanent seat of culture, but as a means to something
else--principally as a means to the temporary advantages of profitable
speculation and exploitation.
James Mackay, a charitable Scotch observer in the middle of the
nineteenth century, explained our negligence of the earth by the fact
that we pinned our affections to institutions rather than places, and
cared not how the landscape was massacred as long as we lived under the
same flag and enjoyed the same forms of government. There is no doubt a
little truth in this observation; but it was not merely our attachment
to republican government that caused this behavior: it was even more,
perhaps, our disattachment from the affiliations of a settled life. The
pioneer, to put it vulgarly, was on the make and on the move; it did
not matter to him how he treated the land, since by the time he could
realize its deficiencies he had already escaped to a new virgin area.
“What had posterity done for him?”
The pioneers who turned their backs on a civilized way of life in
order to extend the boundaries of civilization, left us with a heavy
burden--not merely blasted and disorderly landscapes, but the habit of
tolerating and producing blasted and disorderly landscapes. As Cobbett
pointed out in his attempt to account for the unkempt condition of the
American farm, the farmer in this country lacked the example of the
great landed estates, where the woods had become cultivated parks, and
the meadowland had become lawns. Without this cultivated example in the
country, it is no wonder that our cities have been littered, frayed at
the edges, ugly; no wonder that our pavements so quickly obliterate
trees and grass; no wonder that so many towns are little more than
gashes of metal and stone.
Those who had been bred on the land brought into the city none of that
disciplined care which might have preserved some of its amenities. They
left the smoke of the clearings, which was a sign of rural “progress”;
they welcomed the smoke of the towns, and all that accompanied it.
It is scarcely a paradox to say that the improvement of our cities
must proceed inwards from the countryside; for it is largely a matter
of reversing the process which converts the farm into incipient blocks
of real estate. Once we assimilate the notion that soil and site
have uses quite apart from sale, we shall not continue to barbarize
and waste them. Consider how the water’s edge of lower Manhattan was
developed without the slightest regard for its potential facilities for
recreation; how the Acropolis of Pittsburgh, the Hump, was permitted to
turn into a noisome slum; how the unique beauty of Casco Bay has been
partly secured only by Portland’s inferiority as a shipping center.
Indeed, all up and down the country one can pick up a thousand examples
of towns misplaced, of recreation areas becoming factory sites, of
industries located without intelligent reference to raw materials or
power or markets or the human beings who serve them, of agricultural
land being turned prematurely into suburban lots, and of small rural
communities which need the injection of new industries and enterprises,
languishing away whilst a metropolis not fifty miles away continues to
absorb more people, who daily pay a heavy premium for their congestion.
I have already drawn attention to the waste of local materials in
connection with our manufacture of buildings, our concentration of
markets, and our standardization of styles. It is plain that our
architects would not have to worry so painfully about the latest
fashion-page of architectural tricks, if they had the opportunity to
work more consistently with the materials at hand, using brick where
clay was plentiful, stone where that was of good quality, and cement
where concrete adapted itself to local needs--as it does so well
near the seashore, and, for a different reason, in the south. Wood,
one of our most important materials for both exterior and interior,
has suffered by just the opposite of neglect: so completely have our
Appalachian forests been mined, and so expensive are the freight
charges for the long haul from the Pacific coast, that good housing
in the east depends to no little extent upon our ability to recover
continuous local supplies of timber throughout the Appalachian region.
(It is characteristic of our mechanical and metropolitan civilization
that one of the great sources of timber waste is the metropolitan
newspaper: and one of the remoter blessings of a sounder regional
development is that it would, perhaps, remove the hourly itch for the
advertising sheet, and by the same token would provide large quantities
of wood for housing, without calling for the destruction of ten acres
of spruce for the Sunday edition alone! I give the reader the privilege
of tracing the pleasant ramifications of this notion.)
To see the interdependence of city and country, to realize that the
growth and concentration of one is associated with the depletion and
impoverishment of the other, to appreciate that there is a just and
harmonious balance between the two--this capacity we have lacked.
Before we can build well on any scale we shall, it seems to me, have
to develop an art of regional planning, an art which will relate city
and countryside in a new pattern from that which was the blind creation
of the industrial and the territorial pioneer. Instead of regarding
the countryside as so much grist doomed to go eventually into the
metropolitan mill, we must plan to preserve and develop all our natural
resources to the limit.
It goes without saying that any genuine attempt to provide for the
social and economic renewal of a region cannot be constrained to
preserve vested land-values and property rights and privileges;
indeed, if the land is to be fully loved and cared for again we must
recover it in something more than name only. The main objection to
keeping our natural resources in the hands of the community, namely,
that private capital is more zealous at exploitation, is precisely the
reason for urging the first course. Our land has suffered from zeal in
exploitation; and it would be much better, for example, that our water
power resources should remain temporarily undeveloped, than that they
should be incontinently used by private corporations to concentrate
population in the centers where a high tariff can be charged. The
number of things that are waiting to be done--the planting of town
forests, the communal restoration of river banks and beaches, the
transformation of bare roads into parkways--will of course differ in
each region and locality; and my aim here is only to point to a general
objective.
The beginnings of genuine regional planning have already been made
in Ontario, Canada, where the social utilization of water-power has
directly benefited the rural communities, and given them an independent
lease on life. In the United States, Mr. Benton Mackaye has sketched
out a bold and fundamental plan for associating the development of a
spinal recreational trail with an electric power development for the
whole Appalachian region, along the ridgeway; both trail and power
being used as a basis for the re-afforestation and the re-peopling
of the whole upland area, with a corresponding decentralization
and depopulation of the overcrowded, spotty coastal region. Such a
scheme would call for a pretty thorough dislocation of metropolitan
values; and if it is slow in making headway, that is only because its
gradual institution would mean that a new epoch had begun in American
civilization. At the present time it is hard to discover how tangible
these new hopes and projects may be: it is significant, however, that
the Housing and Regional Planning Commission of the State of New York
was called into existence by the necessity for finding a way out of our
metropolitan tangle; and it is possible that a new orientation in power
and culture is at hand.
In a loose, inconsecutive way, the objectives of regional planning
have been dealt with by the conservation movement during the last
century; and if the art itself has neither a corpus of experience
nor an established body of practitioners, this is only to say that
it has, as it were, broken through the surface in a number of places
and that it remains to be gathered up and intelligently used. When
regional planning starts its active career, it will concern itself to
provide a new framework for our communities which will redistribute
population and industry, and recultivate the environment--substituting
forestry for timber-mining, stable agriculture for soil-mining, and in
general the habit of dressing and keeping the earth for our traditional
American practice of stripping and deflowering it. Architecture begins
historically when the “Bauer” who plants becomes the “Bauer” who
builds; and if our architecture is to have a substantial foundation, it
is in a refreshened countryside that we will perhaps find it.