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Sierra Club Bulletin 



we can do in supporting demands for increased appropriations. But, 

 above all, our influence should be thrown toward keeping the parks 

 what they were meant to be — specimens of wild nature used but not 

 ''improved" by man. Our members should consider themselves, indi- 

 vidually, as so many guardians of the scenery of the west, collectively, 

 as an intelligent mass of public opinion ready to voice its protest when 

 the well-being of the parks or of areas that ought to be parks is in 

 question. We are nearly two thousand strong now. Double our num- 

 ber and we can more than double our work. M. R. P. 



Wild Flower The President of the American Museum of Natural 

 Destruction History asserts that nowhere in the world is Nature 

 being destroyed so rapidly now as in the United States. 

 California especially seems to be the victim of ignorance and selfishness 

 — because she has more than other States to attract the destroyer. Not 

 only are our peerless redwood forests vanishing away before the lumber- 

 men and the grape-stake cutters, but the less spectacular, though not 

 less beautiful, features of her flora are in imminent danger of practical 

 extinction. No shrubs of California are more sightly than the wild cur- 

 rant and the toyon, or Christmas-berry. The one in the springtime, the 

 other in the autumn have made our cafions and hillsides a paradise of 

 color. 



But now hordes of automobile vandals, penetrating all roads, are 

 spreading devastation everywhere. They slash, break, cut, and uproot 

 without thought of the future. Unless legal measures are taken speed- 

 ily, the next generation will know only by hearsay the loveliness of Cal- 

 ifornia's tanglebrush roadsides in autumn. An especially preventable 

 kind of destruction is caused by foreigners and others who go out from 

 towns in trucks to strip the roadsides for purely commercial purposes at 

 the holiday season. There is no more reason for allowing this class of 

 persons to enrich itself by robbing a community of its common wealth 

 of beautiful shrubs and plants than in allowing them to smother the 

 songs of robins and meadow-larks by slaughtering them for the market. 

 We punish the latter, as an act of injury to the community, and plant- 

 robbers for the market should be treated in the same manner. 



In the best parts of Europe it has long been customary to gauge the 

 level of a country's culture by the foresight with which it has fostered 

 and exercised the natural human instinct for landscape beauty. It was 

 found to be a law that seekers after landscape righteousness speedily 

 had other things added unto them. For tourists willingly brought their 

 tributes of gold to the fortunate cultivators of a beautiful environment. 

 True, we do not build Parthenons and preserve Yosemites and Sequoias 

 for the lining of our purses. Yet no community should overlook the 

 fact that the enhancement of its landscape beauty adds potentially to its 

 material wealth, and that the diminution of its outdoor art values en- 

 tails a double loss. W. F. B 



