306 CONFERENCE ON NATURAL BEAUTY 



is when you have a national park and you get an excrescence of cheap 

 amusement facilities, backed up against the gateway of the park, one 

 you can see for perhaps 30 or 40 miles. I can think of one such 

 place right now. 



Whether you can get action at anything higher than the county 

 level, I don't know. This is why I said what is politically impossible 

 at the moment should be politically practicable in the relatively 

 near future. 



Mrs. MORSE ERSKINE. I speak definitely from the point of view 

 of a frustrated citizen. I want to know why we shouldn't head into 

 the question that has been so successful in the northern countries of 

 Europe, the question of greenbelt zoning. In this, agricultural zoning 

 is placed upon areas around cities that should be preserved for that 

 use alone. The owners are left in possession of the land, but they 

 are compensated if necessary. It is a zoning that cannot come from 

 a local level. It must come from either Congress or State. Without 

 that, citizens at my level are perfectly helpless to fight all sorts of 

 decisions that are made in the belief that urban use is a higher use 

 and agricultural lands must give way to it. 



I don't have to go into it. You know far more about it than I 

 do. This is help for the citizens. 



Mrs. J. LEWIS SCOTT. The colleges and universities with strong 

 departments in ecology should be consulted on natural resource man- 

 agement. Diversity of vegetation and animals will help insure a 

 beautiful landscape. Pesticides should be biologically selective with- 

 out any food-chain or environmental damage. 



Dr. GRAHAM. Someone asked for an answer to the previous ques- 

 tion. The question, it seemed to me, was whether or not local 

 zoning, which means in this case county zoning, is sufficient, whether 

 or not we don't need, in fact, statewide zoning, or possibly some kind 

 of Federal zoning. 



As I understand it, there are very few counties actually in the 

 United States that have zoning ordinances. Hawaii, I suppose, is 

 the only State that has statewide zoning. I am not sure there is Fed- 

 eral zoning, but this is something that we don't desire ; we can handle 

 it some other way. Am I not right? 



Dr. DARLING. You spoke of northwest Europe. In Britain we 

 had the Town and County Planning Act of 1947, which froze land 

 values at the 1939 levels. This was a very good brake on develop- 



