LANDSCAPE ACTION PROGRAM 481 



comprise the landscape forests and water, conifer and hardwood 

 trees, fields and roads, wilderness and developed areas, and differing 

 kinds of land uses. Other professional people in other agencies of 

 government at all levels, and a good many private owners of land, 

 have similar experience and comparable levels of knowledge regard- 

 ing mixing land uses in a manner that is aesthetically pleasing. But 

 this knowledge is not being interchanged. 



A very desirable program to come out of this conference would 

 be a plan to arrange for interchange of information on effective ways 

 in which problems have been solved in planning for land use and 

 beauty. This could be by means of seminars, joint meetings of 

 different professional societies, and publications. I am sure both 

 foresters and landscape architects could benefit immensely from 

 talking together in a joint national meeting of the Society of Ameri- 

 can Foresters and the American Society of Landscape Architects. 

 There are other such combinations for which joint meetings could be 

 of immense benefit to the President's programs. 



Professor McHARG. I believe that the primary concern of this 

 conference is not Natural Beauty but rather the place of man in 

 nature and the place of nature in the environment of man. 



Nature has been erased from the city of man which spreads in- 

 exorably into the countryside its image the bulldozer, hot dog stand, 

 gas station, diner, billboard, sagging wire, split-level, rancher, asphalt 

 and concrete. Contemplate the prospect of New York adding 1,500 

 square miles of sterilising smear in the next 20 years, consider the 

 55 million acres of presently rural land in the United States which 

 will be transformed during the same period to urban anarchy and 

 despoliation. 



Yet the paradox and tragedy of urbanization and growth is that, 

 while based upon a profound and pervasive desire for more natural 

 environments, it destroys its own objectives. The American dream 

 recedes with each annular ring of suburbanization to a more distant 

 area and a future generation. For this is the sad pattern by which 

 those who escape to the country are encased with their disillusions 

 in the enveloping suburb. It is a Utopia only for those who make 

 it and profit thereby insensitive beings, despoilers, acute only to 

 money. 



We cannot indulge the despoiler any longer. He must be identified 

 for what he is, as one who destroys the inheritance of living and un- 

 born Americans, an uglifier who is unworthy of the right to look his 



