The Green City

[Music] Heat. Heat. [Music] While only God can make a tree, ingenious man has invented the axe, the saw, and now the bulldozer. He makes concrete and steel, and creates housing developments, apartments, office buildings, highways. In the process, man changes the face of the earth. With great speed, he builds artificial surroundings and so destroys his natural environment. Occasionally, a stubborn tree puts up an argument, but the battle is unequal. The bulldozer always wins. [Music] [Music] Man's efforts to pave the earth have made great headway. 8 million people live in New York City, unless you include the suburbs. New York and northeastern New Jersey have 15 million [Music] people. But where New Jerseys suburbs end, Philadelphia begins. And many of its suburbs are just like the rest. Fostered by the real estate speculator, populated by more citizens whose only contacts with nature are crabrass and Japanese beetles. They call this cluster of cities Megalopoulos. Next stop, Baltimore. This extraordinary super city extends from Boston to Washington, has less than 2% of America's land, 37 million residents. These are the richest, best educated, best housed, best serviced people in the world. This is a new type of civilization where the farm disappears and the city attempts to satisfy every human wish. But much of the pleasantness is gone. The wood thrush, the chipmunk, the wild Aelia are no longer a part of everyday life. Suburbia. The comfort of your own home. Close enough and yet far enough away from the central city or the industrial complex. Curved streets unlike the mechanical cross-hatch grid of yesterday's cities. Nearby, the shopping center with its acres of paved parking. But think what might have been. This Maryland suburb near Washington once was a forest. The developer ruthlessly hacked it away. It was his decision, and apparently the zoners and county officials agreed that trees simply aren't worth the extra [Music] effort. However, here a developer has a different attack. Instead of the bulldozer, he's using what is called a back hole. It digs a narrow ditch for utility pipes, works within inches of living trees. In a few hours, a day or two at the most, the earth will be back in place, the trees still alive. It takes skill to preserve the landscape, to plant homes in the woods, so to speak. He reasons that it is not necessarily cheaper to knock down the trees and reorganize the terrain. Indeed, it can involve excessive costs to move earth that could stay in place, to reshape and stabilize, to plant grass and shrubs. Beginning with moderately rugged terrain, which many would say is unsuitable for development, the builder with the delicate hand has achieved his objective without turning the landscape upside down. And the real payoff comes when a naturel loving home shopper sees, approves, and buys. This is a community filled with residential amenities. Each house, each yard, each family has its own personality. The choice confronting America. Must we live in an urban lomeration devoid of natural beauty, decorated only by man's artificial methods? Or can we gradually develop a green city that combines the best of man and [Music] nature. But the developer of homes and his eager clients are not alone to blame. Let's start at the top with our federal government. The Lincoln Memorial graces Washington's famous mall. But the view from the top of the Washington Monument reveals some lesser edififices. Tempos they're called. Temporary buildings left over from World Wars one and two. They've been plunked right in the middle of some of America's most cherished parkland. Once there, they're next to impossible to uproot. Whether it is in Washington with the gigantic federal government or in Peoria, an open park is an invitation for invasion by the builder. And if the thing he wants to build can be made to appear in the public interest, it is hard to [Music] resist. But elsewhere in the federal city, similar influences are at work. Here in Rock Creek Park, highway officials have made repeated attempts to build a radial superighway for commuter traffic right through the park. So far, the park officials have successfully frustrated the idea. But every time a new route is suggested, property owners there protest and suggest the park again. Nearby Glover Archbold Park, another stream valley woodland, is similarly threatened. And in Washington, as in other large cities, the greatest development is taking place in the suburbs. Some of it is well planned, but in too many instances, speculators are willing to wreck the landscape with little or no thought about how their new development might fit into existing beauty. The stakes are high. A relatively small parcel of land may be worth a million dollars more if zoned for a denser use. The man who wants the extra million is avid and eager. The citizens who could use a park or open space are unorganized. When nature's beauty has been ravaged, there is no rebuilding it. This could have been a park or playground protected under a permanent conservation easement saved as a rugged beauty spot in a homeowner's yard or as part of an apartment development or any of a hundred other uses. But nature's franchise here was revoked on the basis of economic gain, not a deliberate consideration of the best land use and the public [Music] interest. Other cities have their open space problems. Just east of Coney Island lies a tip of land called Breezy Point. 1350 acres in size with 4 and a half miles of open beach. It's only 14 miles from Time Square. 10 million people live within 20 miles. It is the last major open space available in New York City. Since 1913, various efforts have been made to convert Breezy Point to a public park or beach. Nothing came of it. Now, a developer has bought 400 acres to build a large housing project. The citizens are organizing a final fight to save Breezy Point for the public. Save the dunes is the slogan along Lake Michigan these days. Already the Indiana Dunes State Park attracts thousands from Chicago and other communities in Illinois and Indiana. But look forward to the year 2000 as the recreation planners do and you see need for more available shoreline. The Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission points out that most public recreation lands are located where people aren't and suggests that additional natural recreational areas be preserved near big cities. In addition, the commission reported to Congress that a major portion of outdoor recreation is associated with water areas and swimming is one of the most popular sports. So, it is quite natural that Chicago area folks are interested in what is called the Battle of the Dunes. This is the proposed Indiana Dunes National Lake Shore. 5 1/2 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline, backed up by 9,000 acres of woodland, marshes, and gigantic sand dunes that actually wander slowly here and there. However, there's a raging controversy over developing the dunes. Conservationists want a national preserve for recreation and protection of the dunelands unique features of scenic and scientific interest for future generations. But industrialists want a harbor for deep draft shipping. And already several steel companies have bought most of the available land and plan to build steel mills. And many people in the area envision new cities, new jobs, new wealth, a broader tax base. Conservationists maintain there are other suitable harbor sites nearby and thus Indiana could have its park and its steel mills too. This is a classic controversy pitting recreation and conservation against what some would call progress. Who will prevail? Will the dunes become an industrial park for the benefit of a few or a national park for the benefit of all? [Music] 2,000 mi west, another great American city, San Francisco, and another national seashore in the making. Just 30 mi northwest of San Francisco lies Point Ray Peninsula, one of the most extensive, unspoiled stretches of seashore on our coasts. Congress has authorized acquisition of about 80% of the peninsula as a national seashore. The public use zone will make available for public enjoyment a 70-mile coastal area with many miles of sandy beaches interspersed with steep bluffs. Villagers and most of the ranchers can stay, but real estate development must stop. Oystering and fishing will continue. The herds of sea lions will be protected in sheltered coes, but practices such as logging, which recently destroyed 800 acres of forest, have ceased. The National Park Service evaluated the Point Rays project carefully and determined it to be in the public interest, estimating that by 1980 2 and a4 million people will visit every year. Some property owners are quite reluctant to sell, but Point Ray's land acquisition is proceeding without the rugged controversy that is generated in some other [Music] cases. 25 mi west of St. Louis lies a 30,000 acre forest preserve called Rockwoods Reservation. Here, students encounter a new educational experience as they climb a fire tower. Using the outofdoors as a laboratory for natural resource studies is on the increase in America today. The teaching ranges from elementary school level to university graduate courses. In this case, the cooperating schools of the St. Louis Suburban District and the Missouri Conservation Commission arrange these trips and devise a day study of forest management, land surveys, soil conservation, and forest fire control. All best mastered on the spot with field trips as an important supplement to classroom work. Certain teaching in and for the out ofdoors is now permanently rooted in the field of education. Everyone learns best by direct experience, but particularly today's city child. Often he's been deprived of direct contact with the land has become a spectator of nature instead of a participant. And so he particularly benefits from these organized and purposeful excursions into nature's own country. [Music] Everywhere conservation has an individual meaning depending on what nature has given and man threatens to take away. Every city has its potential. Near Tucson, Arizona, green space is really open space, sometimes attractively brown. But now, the growing city promises to surround and destroy its local, Tucson Mountain, with its splendid stand of sarro cactus, the largest and healthiest in the United States and hundreds of years old. Here, everybody is cooperating. Private donations founded the Arizona Sonora Desert Museum, a unique living museum with desert animals and plants. Pima County set aside Tucson Mountain Park and the Secretary of the Interior designated the area as a unit of the Sawarro National Monument of the National Park [Music] Service. In Los Angeles, there's a new term to describe some of today's burgeoning suburbs. They call them slurves. A slur is defined as a sloppy, sleazy, sllovenly slipshod semi [Music] city. Every day, California is richer by 1500 people. Every day, California is poorer by 375 acres of open farmland, often splendid orange groves. as the bulldozer blade makes room for them. By 1980, 3 million acres of California's bright open land will have [Music] disappeared. But in many urban areas, there are diligent men at work, the professional planners. Let's look in on the district supervised by the Maryland National Capital Park and Planning Commission, which includes most of the Maryland suburbs of Washington. This man is a park planner working to acquire and develop land for public use. He has too little money and so has devised ingenious methods of land acquisition. He has arranged with an apartment developer to contribute a relatively large area for a park. He has cooperated with the state of Maryland to create a state park along the Puxen River. He has bought a large tract on the installment plan. But this is all raw land. He actually visualizes his parks as active and useful, such as this neighborhood, Stream Valley Park, which adds pleasantness to nearby homes and schools, or this regional park, which serves a larger area in more varied ways. But his latest resource has come to him thanks to Uncle Sam. The federal government's new green spaces activity offers federal aid funds to assist states and local public bodies in acquiring predominantly undeveloped land for permanent open space use. All he has to do is make out a somewhat comprehensive application to justify his request to the Urban Renewal Administration of the Housing and Home Finance Agency and raise the local funds to match. At the moment, he has just received 2 million in federal money to go with his nearly 5 million to acquire an additional 4,000 acres of parkland. And then there is the community planner who has a broader role but an equally significant effect. He has just supervised his staff report on wedges and corridors based on the year 2000 plan for the nation's capital. He visualizes a new urban form, a new pattern of development which blends people and geography ingeniously. His radial corridor plan guides spokes of humanity out into the country. Between these corridor cities lie wedges of green space for recreation or farming. His plan contemplates no destructive urban sprawl, no excessive concentrations of population, just a reasonable balance between people and space. He is optimistic that these new techniques can solve today's baffling problems. But all of this technical excellence goes for not if the public and the lawmakers don't understand and support these new concepts. Across the river in Virginia, planners predict that all of Fairfax County will have been eaten up by urban sprawl in the next 20 years. This committee of citizens is worried about it. They got together and formed the Jeb Stewart Park Advisory Committee and here busy themselves with plans for their community park. So far, they've kept out an overanxious bulldozer and hastened park officials in acquiring the land. And future activities involve planning for tennis courts, hiking paths, and picnic facilities, preservation of woods, and the small stream that flows through it. This is the most important influence abroad in America in the green spaces movement, the interested and active citizen. In the broad sense, he joins conservation organizations to brief himself and support the general conservation movement. Locally, he participates in his citizens association and other action groups. And then too, he votes, in some cases approving bond issues, in others selecting officials whose policies he prefers. and he makes personal contact with official agencies which may otherwise bog down because of lack of adequate support. Protecting nature, preventing untidy, unjustified overdevelopment. This is the citizen's fight. Sometimes it seems that man is his own worst enemy. His personal eagerness for the new and the convenient, coupled with the profit motive, often obliterates more basic considerations, produces a churning, disoriented activity. The builder, who hacks up the landscape, disregarding the basic elements of conservation, isn't really the villain. His activities could be channeled slightly differently, and he could become the hero and still make a profit. No, the villain is the citizenry which doesn't notice, doesn't act, doesn't care. The despoilement of nature is everywhere to be seen. Here, soil conservation specialists look sadly at a lake filled with silt because their advice was not heeded. Whether the problem is erosion, water or air pollution, dust, urban blight, excessive concentrations of population, or whatever, the sensitive soul can notice not only the overt problems, but the gentle [Music] deficiencies. That green city we're dreaming about is a multitude of things, each appropriate in its place. A park, an unspoiled forest, a natural stream valley, a buffer strip between apartments, a beautiful lawn, even the tiny area between a gutter and a sidewalk. Big or little, each part adds up to a more delightful total impression of the place where you live. Over a hundred years ago, Henry David Thorough commented Riley, "If a man walks in the woods for love of them, for half his days, he is esteemed a loafer. But if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods, he is esteemed industrious and enterprising, making earth bald before its time." Each town, he said, should have a park, or rather a primitive forest where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession forever. [Music]