PET ArmA Uva Eas) Ngee sell 1a by Wal LN 27 
BOOK REVIEWS 
AMERICA THE RAPED. By Gene Marine. 312 pages. 
Simon & Schuster, New York. 1969. $5.95 
This is a particularly difficult book to review since almost every page con- 
tains a statement one longs to quote. 
It is brilliantly written. It is a hard-hitting work that hits in every 
direction. It pulls no punches. It names names, apparently indifferent to 
the peril of libel suits. 
One distinguished reviewer objected to the title the author (a senior 
editor of the magazine “Ramparts”) has selected, thinking it will “repel, 
rather than attract, the kind of readers its contents invites.” I do not agree. 
Today when the lessons of ecology are preached from every platform, 
stressed in every magazine and newspaper and flashed from every flicker- 
screen, any person too naive to not understand the placard “America the 
Raped” is probably incapable of ever becoming a valuable citizen. 
Marine’s potshots are aimed at almost everything. He even takes apart 
the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society for concentrating on remote 
areas for the enjoyment of those whose detractors call “bpack-packing 
snobs,” when they should be preserving entire ecosystems. The author 
demands that the force of devastating technology which has hogged the 
stage unhindered for the last hundred years be brought into chains and 
tamed to accommodate itself to man and his human needs. 
Not surprisingly the prime villain of his piece is the U.S. Army Corps 
of Engineers, but Marine claims that many projects of the Soil Conserva- 
tion Service of the Department of Agriculture are more devastating. Note 
their recent binge of “stream-straightening” which might better be called 
river-ruining, estuary-eradication, marshlands-massacring and America-the- 
Beautiful-busting. 
Among other shins kicked by the author are those of holier-than-thou 
industries across the country, charging that except for one city in the 
United States—one guess what that one is—the automobile is not the worst 
pollutant of the air. In his words: “Industry, including mining and manu- 
facturing, is almost completely without an ecological philosophy or concern.” 
In turn, Western grazing industries are attacked in a quotation from 
Michael Frome who cites “government hunters” of the Division of Sports 
Fisheries and Wildlife who killed 200,000 bobcats, coyotes, cougars, wolves, 
pocket gophers and prairie dogs for the presumed benefit of a minuscule 
segment of the population engaged in raising flocks of sheep and herds of 
cattle practically without any payment on land that the government — 
that is, all of us—owns. 
National Parks come in for vitriolic criticism because of its “road 
building mania” as in recent proposals in the Great Smokies and in Sequoia 
(access road to Disney’s Mineral King monstrosity). 
Referring again to industry, former Secretary of Agriculture Orville 
Freeman is quoted, “The growth of human masses (and) the concentration 
of industry in metropolitan areas are national idiocy.” 
“Engineering mentality” is characterized as the lowest symbol on 
technology’s totem pole. “Progress” is an overworked word, and may be 
