THE AUDUBON BULLETIN 43 



The Appreciation of Nature in the School 



Program — A Memorial 



(The following Memorial from the Friends of Our Native Landscape, ad- 

 dressed primarily to the Board of Education of the City of Chicago, was 

 sent last September to all school officials of that city and to the heads of 

 school systems in various parts of the country) : 



The undersigned respectfully invite your attention to this memorial and 

 petition which is concerned with the promotion of a greater appreciation of 

 our heritage of natural beauty and with the bringing about of a greater ap- 

 propriation of its influence into the lives of the present generation and of 

 those to come. We beg to present certain considerations which seem to in- 

 dicate the importance of action at this time on the part of your Honorable 

 Bcdy looking to the accomplishment of such ends. 



Never more than today have our national ideals seemed so tangible 

 a possession. Every national asset, spiritual as well as material, is re- 

 ceiving thoughtful appraisement, and everywhere among our citizenship 

 jealous efforts are being made to guard against any word or deed that may 

 blunt or impair the national aspiration. The public mind is prepared as 

 hardly ever before to give consideration to spiritual values in citizenship 

 and in its training, and this would surely appear to be- a most opportune 

 time to give public appraisal of the value to our citizenship of a love of 

 out-of-doors. 



As, with the inspiration and the challenge of the present crisis upon us, 

 we look out upon the many industrial waste places within our city where 

 large numbers of our people have their homes, we might well quicken our 

 resolve to work for the upbuilding of a generation that will not permit the 

 smothering out of nature from its surroundings; a generation that will 

 the rather see to it that nature more and more invades the city, and that 

 outposts frcm surrounding prairie and woodland are maintained as signi- 

 ficant and beneficent possessions within areas of urban life. 



We cannot begin too soon to bend every possible energy toward a greater 

 diffusion of the sentiment for natural beauty and its preservation. The 

 multiplication of our small parks and, especially, the rapid development of 

 our forest preserve district, movements fraught with spiritual significance, 

 find us as a public ill-prepared to enter upon such inheritances. It is with 

 a certain amount of misgiving that the treasures of forest and country- 

 side and of winding watercourse, which obtain in the newly opened pre- 

 serves, are being thrown open to those to whom they rightly belong. Will 

 the people, invited to these scenes of sylvan loveliness, come unsympa- 

 thetic and as aliens, and with crudeness of taste begotten in harsh surround- 

 ings, mar and deface the landscape? Or will they come joyfully as into 

 a spiritual inheritance and cherish intimately and with reverence each of 

 the natural gifts opened up to them ? As with the increasing facilities for 

 transportation the rich territory environing our city becomes more acces- 

 sible to masses of its pecple — the duneland with its charm and variety, the 

 Skokie, the ravines of the North Shore, the forested uplands, the cliffs that 

 front the crescent shore of Lake Michigan — will the coming of our people 

 to these domains of natural beauty be a source of dread to these upon whom 



