284 CONFERENCE ON NATURAL BEAUTY 



We found that 25 million acres of land unsuited for cultivation 

 were being cropped. 



We found that about two-thirds of the Nation's 12,700 small 

 watersheds needed project action beyond the ordinary means of in- 

 dividual landowners. 



Updating this kind of information, as we are now preparing to 

 do, will provide valuable help in planning and carrying out programs 

 that affect natural beauty. Similar surveys have been made, or are 

 underway, on the matter of timber resources in our national forests, 

 and on the water problems of our major river basins. They provide 

 the physical facts that tell us quite a bit about the status of natural 

 beauty. They tell us also what we must do to put our own land into 

 the condition that will make and keep it beautiful as well as pro- 

 ductive. 



There is yet another ingredient without which these rural beauti- 

 fication goals cannot be achieved. That ingredient is people. 



Literally thousands of organizations and countless thousands of 

 people in rural America are already at work to remove ugliness and 

 to enhance beauty. To ignore that fact would be to do them a grave 

 injustice, notwithstanding the large job ahead. 



There is, however, a great and growing need for closer working 

 relationships between these rural groups and the people in the city 

 and county governments who are engaged in the kind of regional 

 planning that results in a better ordered and more beautiful land- 

 scape. 



Soil and water conservation districts and the small watershed 

 projects, with which I am especially familiar, provide effective de- 

 vices through which the several segments of a community can work 

 together on common resource problems. We will help and en- 

 courage their leadership to give greater emphasis to natural beauty 

 in their programs and to participate actively in comprehensive plan- 

 ning that will make rural-urban cooperation more effective. 



The new Resource Conservation and Development projects, made 

 possible by provisions of the Food and Agriculture Act of 1962, and 

 carried out under provisions of the Soil Conservation Act of 1935 

 ( Public Law 46 ) , will provide an especially effective means of team- 

 work on a wide range of resource activities, including enhancement of 

 natural beauty. These projects, because they embrace larger geo- 

 graphic areas than the other conservation mechanisms I have men- 

 tioned, necessarily involve a wider range of both rural and urban 



