THE VALUE OF NATURAL SCENERY 



By J. HORACE MacFARLAND, President American Civic Association 



Address Delivered at the White House Conference, May 14, 1908 



I URGE this august and influential as- 

 sembly to consider the essential value of 



one of America's greatest resources — her 

 unmatched natural scenery. 



It is well that we should here take full 

 account of the peril to our national pros- 

 perity, indeed to our very national existence, 

 which lies in further wasteful disregard of 

 our waning resources of forest and mine, 

 of water and soil. By the possibilities of 

 conservation here discussed, the mind is 

 quickened, the imagination fired. But the 

 glory of the United States must rest and 

 has rested upon a firmer foundation than 

 that of her purely material resources. It 

 is the love of country that has lighted and 

 that keeps glowing the holy fire of patriot- 

 ism. And this love is excited, primarily, by 

 the beauty of the country. Truly inspired 

 is our national hymn as it sings — 



"My native country, thee, 

 Land of the noble, free. 



Thy name I love ; 

 I love thy rocks and rills. 

 Thy woods and templed hills : 

 My heart with rapture thrills 

 Like that above." 



Paraphrasing a recent utterance of Mayor 

 McClellan upon city beauty, I insist that 



"The country healthy, the country 

 wealthy, and the country wise may 

 excite satisfaction, complaisance and 

 pride, but it is the country beautiful 

 that compels and retains the love 

 of its citizens." 



We cannot destroy the scenery of our 

 broad land, but we can utterly change its 

 beneficial relation to our lives, and remove 

 its stirring effect upon our love of coun- 

 try. We can continue to convert the fair- 

 est land the sun shines upon into a desert 

 of ugliness. Indeed, we are abundantly able 

 to outdo the Sahara itself in' desolation, for 

 that vast waste, so singularly like the United 

 States in contour and extent, and once, 

 geologists insist, as well wooded and watered 

 as was o\ir favored land a century ago, has 

 somber dignity in its barrenness — a dignity 

 completely absent from our civilized Saharas 

 of culmbank and ore-dump, from timber 

 slashing and filth-filled river. 



Scenery of some sort will endure as long 

 as sight remains. It is for us to decide 

 whether we shall permanently retain as a 

 valuable national asset any considerable por- 

 tion of the natural scenery which is so 

 beneficently influential upon our lives, or 

 whether we shall continue to substitute for 

 it the unnatural scenery of man's careless 

 waste. Shall we gaze upon the smiling 

 beauty of our island-dotted rivers, or look 

 in disgust upon great open sewers, lined with 

 careless commercial filth, and alternating be- 

 tween disastrous flood and painful drought? 

 Are we to consider and hold by design the 

 orderly beauty of the countryside, or permit 

 unthinking commercialism to make it a 

 horror of unnecessary disorder? Is the 

 Grand Canyon of the Colorado to be really 

 held as nature's great temple of scenic color, 

 or must we see that temple punctuated . and 

 profaned by trolley poles? Shall we hold 

 inviolate all the glories of the Yosemite, or 

 are we to permit insidious corporate attacks 

 upon its beauty under the guise of question- 

 able economics? Shall the White Moun- 

 tains be for us a great natural sanitarium, or 

 shall they stand as a greater monument to 

 our folly and neglect ? 



It is certain that there has been but scant 

 thought given to scenic preservation hitherto. 

 I remember the contempt with which a 

 lawyer of national renown alluded to the 

 absurdity of any legislation by Congress in 

 preservation of scenery, when, in its wisdom, 

 that body chose to give a measure of tem- 

 porary protection to a part of Niagara's 

 flood. 



Indeed, one of the potent forces of ob- 

 struction to the legislation now demanded 

 by the country in scant protection to the 

 almost destroyed mountain forests of the 

 East has expressed itself in a contemptuous 

 sneer at national expenditures for the pres- 

 ervation of scenery! 



We meet in a historic place, in a historic 

 city. The Father of our .Country was not 

 only greatest in war and in statesmanship, 

 but one of the greatest of his time in esteem 

 of natural beauty, and in the desire to create 

 urban beauty in what he wisely planned as 

 the Federal City. George Washington loved 

 dignified beauty, and the wisdom of his plan 

 has resulted in making a national capital not 

 only admirable in its adaptation to the pub- 

 lic needs, but destined, as his plans are car- 

 ried out, to be beautiful beyond compare. 



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