America the Beautiful--and Its Desecraters

BY VANCE PACKARD

AFRIEND relates that while he was driving through a lovely stretch of forest in Maine recently, he saw the car ahead, full of people, slow down and a half-open cardboard box sail out its right rear window. Eggshells, beer cans, and scraps of sandwiches and paper were spewed out along the roadside.

Another friend, a minister, became offended by the sight of discarded liquor bottles while he was driving along the otherwise beautiful beach road leading into Edgartown, Massachusetts. He began to pick up the bottles nearest the road. By the time he had reached the edge of town he had piled so many bottles into the back of his sedan that they rose above the level of the seat. People in this area who own homes along the seashore report they must, as a fairly frequent chore, scoop up and bury the oil-soaked remains of sea gulls drowned and immobilized by waste oil dumped just offshore by commercial boats.

These evidences of rampant slobbism, I must confess, do not surprise me. I live near a stretch of lonely road in Connecticut that edges the Silvermine River. A 200-year-old waterfall attracts many motorcars bearing romance-minded couples. Every few weeks I, or one of my children, as a regular task, go along this road with a bushel basket picking up the sacks of beer cans and other refuse that have been tossed into the bushes.

Last summer, to cite another case, I went strolling barefoot on a magnificent beach on Martha’s Vineyard and found myself watching a father and his ten-year-old son amuse themselves. Father was photographing the terns; the son was hurling stones at bottles which he had set up in the sand. When I protested the bottle smashing, the father seemed surprised by my vehemence but suggested that his son find other amusement. I cleaned up the broken glass as best I could.

These instances are thoughtless manifestations of a spreading desecration of the American landscape today which threatens to make a cruel jest of the phrase “America the Beautiful.” Refuse, even broken glass, can be cleaned up. And I suppose that the careless boobs who toss it about are so fixed in their habit patterns that we can do little to reform them. But some of the more serious man-made desecration being committed upon the U.S. landscape, often for profit, is beyond retrieval.

I have just completed a journey which took me into seventeen states. In the West my wife, Virginia, an artist, accompanied me, and we traveled by car because we were eager to get our first close look at many areas which have in years past been acclaimed for their spectacular natural beauty. Most of our excursions left us feeling frustrated and depressed. It was evident that, just in the past decade, many of these places had become so scarified by man that the natural beauty of the landscape, once breath-taking, was largely lost.

Our drive up the California coastline from Los Angeles to San Francisco was a case in point. Some of the stretches are still delightful. The lovely rolling countryside north of Buelllon gives one a sense of the original West at its best. Then you approach Santa Maria. The setting is spectacular, with wildly upheaved mountains in the background. But they arc difficult to see through the maze of billboards. The first mile or so of Santa Maria — the new part — is a jungle of neon signs, trailer parks, used-car lots, and look-alike development houses packed tightly together. Farther north, the once-famed El Camino Real approaching San Francisco has now become just another aisle through a gaudy, seemingly endless mart. It is lined with vendors of seat covers, ice cream, gasoline, and gifts, To the visitor, it is indistinguishable from New Jersey’s Route 17, Florida’s Route 1 above Fort Lauderdale, or Southern California’s Long Beach Boulevard. There is one short stretch of this once-royal road north of Palo Alto where beautiful eucalyptus trees line an uncommercialized section. A friend who pointed this out to me said wistfully: “This will give you an idea of how it used to be.”

Each perceptive American probably has his favorite candidates for the worst desecraters of our landscape. I would like to advance here five of my own. I will cite first those whose desecrations could be most readily corrected by an aroused citizenry, since the scars they have created are temporary or removable.

AUTO JUNK YARDS

First I would nominate those who clutter up the areas along scenic routes with the remains of castoff motorcars or blocked-up trailers or parking lots. The state of New York spent many millions of dollars on a scenic throughway up into the Catskills. A visitor there now sees three motorcar junk yards while traveling one five-mile stretch of the road. If you take an excursion to the worldfamed falls of Watkins Glen at the foot of Lake Seneca, New York, you cannot avoid seeing an auto junk yard within a few dozen yards of one of the falls. Or if you motor up the Penobscot River into rural Maine, you will find a titanic auto graveyard, covering many acres, near Old Town.

Perhaps the worst squalor created by motorcars that I have ever seen is along the supposedly scenic Route 10 crossing Northern Idaho. There, near a lovely lake outside Coeur d’Alene, one passes within a few hundred feet of a junk yard containing at least a thousand carcasses of motorcars, piled four and five high. As you continue east into the mountainous mining communities, the junked motorcars are no longer gathered together systematically into yards. They simply lie abandoned, often upside down, beside the road.

The gaudy blocked-up metallic trailers, which are starting to appear in the United States in phenomenal numbers, qualify as desecrations, I believe, when they are mass-packed in scenic areas, as they are along the shore of Lake Keuka, New York, or when they are installed singly in shocking juxtaposition on empty lots beside fine Early American homes, as is happening in a number of otherwise delightful New England communities. Some trailer owners who decide to expand their homes create startling appendages. The owner of a blocked-up trailer near New Bedford, Massachusetts, has added a two-car garage.

BILLBOARD ADVERTISING

Outdoor advertisers who shrewdly decide that their billboards will have maximum impact in lovely rustic settings are the second group of desecraters I would nominate. Thousands of miles of rural scenery in the United States have been ruined by the jarring presence of commercial signs. The signs, of course, can be taken down if enough citizens make their anger felt.

A few of the nation’s great scenic highways have been preserved from the billboard desecraters. The Merritt Parkway in Connecticut is an excellent example. On the other hand, some types of billboards have started appearing in open country along the costly Massachusetts Turnpike. In New York, the new throughway into the Catskill Mountains is in some sections virtually lined with billboards. I counted fifty-one billboards in one seven-mile stretch above Middletown. New York’s advertising lobbyists were even able to prevail upon the borough of Manhattan to trim the tops off trees planted in Duffy Square, so that, as author Edward Higbee put it, the “towering billboards could be seen in their four-story splendor.”In Louisiana a beer advertiser employing billboards sought to ease the hostility of local drys by adding to the sign a message urging viewers to attend the church of their choice.

The new 41,000-mile interstate, highway network which the federal government is helping the states construct threatens to become a billboard slum unless many more state legislatures act to prevent it. This past spring, legislators in many states found themselves caught between the pressures of the massive and affluent billboard lobby and a moderately tempting offer of free booty from the federal government. The U.S. Congress, after it was advised of a general tendency for new and expensive scenic highways to become quickly lined with commercial billboards, offered states a one half per cent bonus in federal funds for highway building if the states would agree to control billboards on the highways to be built. For New York state, for example, the bonus would amount to $2 million. It is a grim commentary on our political life that state governments must be offered cash bounties to protect their own historic and scenic attractions from desecration.

As the deadline for qualifying approached, a handful of state legislatures — in Maryland, Connecticut, Kentucky, New York. North Dakota, West Virginia, Wisconsin, and Washington, among others — managed to enact presumably acceptable legislation.

One advertising firm has developed a titanic new kind of billboard for use in states that do enact restrictive legislation. Called the Land-Mark HiSign, it is twenty-four times as big as a conventional twenty-four-sheet billboard. The sign itself, a hundred feet wide by eighty feet high, hangs from a suspension bridge built between two great aluminum towers and can be read by motorists a third of a mile away. One such sign structure is standing at Romulus. Michigan, outside Detroit.

Roadside desecration takes forms other than billboards. In the attractive rolling country near Vacaville, California, motorists are confronted with the question “WHERE’S HARVEY’S?” spelled out in thirty-foot-high letters on a grassy hillside. Cows graze among the letters. A few hundred yards further down the road you learn the answer from another great sign blocked out on a verdant hillside: Harvey’s is on Highway 50, near Lake Tahoe. It apparently has not dawned upon those responsible that these signs are atrocities in an otherwise beautiful region. Or to cite another example, a factory outside the pleasant rustic village of Monson. Massachusetts, is crowned by a vastly enlarged toilet seat. The display features this slogan: “Best Seat in the House.”

It is becoming difficult to escape commercial placards in one form or another. If you journey for vacation purposes to the great public beach in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, you find that hundreds of the benches facing the ocean have small billboards attached to their backs. And just offshore you will frequently see an old airplane roar by, flying low, towing a fluttering advertisement.

Meanwhile, the Unexcelled Chemical Corporation has been demonstrating to interested marketers in various parts of the country a marvelous magic lantern called the Skyjector that can project messages hundreds of yards long against mountaintops and clouds. And, worse, two advertising journals have headlined the news that Lockheed engineers are now reasonably confident that a space-writing satellite can be developed which can spell out messages hundreds of miles long in orange letters against the evening sky.

Since the U.S. outdoor advertising industry seems incapable of more than token restraint, legislation appears to be the only hope. The federal government should flatly ban all billboards from new scenic highways built with the help of federal funds. And the states that hope to save themselves from being overwhelmed by billboards everywhere should start requiring that all persons seeking to erect billboards, in nonurban areas at least, be required to present a convincing justification to a citizens’ commission attached to the state highway commissioner’s office or to a special outdoor advertising board.

ELECTRONIC ACCESSORIES

Another group of desecraters I want to cite are the people who plant utility towers or television towers or a jungle of large television aerials in settings that have been cherished for their beauty or charm. Such mechanical obstacles intruding upon scenic panoramas were a fairly constant source of frustration during our drive up the California coastline. Usually there was a utility line — and often two of them — between the highway and the nearby ocean. If the utility lines had to follow the highway, why couldn’t they at least be placed on the interior side?

Let us grant that our modern way of life demands the existence of such technological accessories. But usually a little thought, and little, if any, extra cost, could produce a disposition of such accessories that would make them a less dominant part of the landscape. One frequently gets the impression that the officials locating their poles and towers are totally oblivious to, if not hostile to, aesthetic considerations.

As we approached Lake Mead from Nevada, our first sight of the lake midst brilliantly colored, starkly barren mountains was through the wires of a giant power line. This line and its towers, in fact, blocked the view for more than a mile. The pylons supporting cross-country power lines scarify an otherwise lovely landscape. They are massive. And they slash straight across the countryside, instead of following natural contours. At this writing, a power company is pressing a proposal to erect a series of high towers across the lovely countryside in the Sudbury-Wayland area of Massachusetts, once dear to Thoreau.

In Santa Barbara, California, one of the historic landmarks is the Santa Barbara Mission, located high up on the hillside behind the town. Monks work about the grounds. Their view of the bay and the Santa Cruz Island beyond was once awe-inspiring. Now monks and visitors alike must see this vista through a maze of four-tiered television aerials — many of them twenty-five feet high, and each with at least half a dozen guy wires — which jut up from recently built houses on the hillside just below the mission. Santa Barbara has its own television station (which would require only a very small aerial), but most of the residents build tremendous aerials upon their rooftops in order to try to coax in telecasts from Los Angeles, nearly a hundred miles away. These thousands of aerials give a harsh look to what has long been considered to be one of the nation’s loveliest cities. Let us hope that soon our electronic wonderworkers will apply some of their vaunted ingenuity to finding less intrusive ways of bringing in television signals.

PLANNED EYESORES

Community planners surely must be held responsible for much of the ugliness being created in our towns and cities. They have been dodging their responsibility to guide growth in a way that will make a community fully satisfying and stimulating, rather than merely habitable. These planners often seem more interested in any scheme that will give the town treasury or the town’s business community quick added revenue.

The planners, in approving subdivision plans of the big developers, allow them to impose their hardly objective views on the shape the new massproduced community is to take. The result has usually been a layout containing the maximum number of housing units that the zoning laws permit, grouped around a shopping center (which the developer leases out on stiff terms, since he can offer merchants a virtually captive clientele). The amenities of good living that ordinarily have gone with a community in times past, such as parks, playgrounds, libraries, schools, churches, and museums, are included, if at all, only grudgingly and in spots that will interfere least with the revenueproducing objectives of the developer.

In recent decades, planners have rarely given much thought to creating a psychologically satisfying focal point or heart for their city, town, or neighborhood. One night recently, I thought back over eighteen European towns and cities I visited three years ago. In every instance, the European metropolis remained vivid in my mind, because it was built around a square or a monument or a fine boulevard or a park, with public buildings usually prominent in the concept.

Americans in earlier centuries built their communities around a focal point. Witness Boston, with its Common and its Public Garden. Most New England towns and cities still have a clearly perceived heart, and many of the smaller, olderfashioned Midwestern towns such as Woodstock, Illinois, still do, too (and so do a few larger cities, such as Indianapolis). But in the majority of American cities, the heart of downtown typically is the street intersection where the largest bank faces the largest department store. Downtown Dallas, Oklahoma City, Los Angeles, Sioux City, Des Moines, Milwaukee, Birmingham, and Winston-Salem seem a blur of almost indistinguishable commercial buildings.

One also misses in the typical U.S. city a sense of graciousness or greenness. Acquisition of new parkland has not kept pace with population growth, and in many cities the planners have been stealing land from existing parks for projects with higher priority, such as superhighways and parking lots. The newer the metropolitan area, the more likely it is to be short of a decent minimum of greenery. I suppose Los Angeles has a park somewhere, but I have never seen it.

Much of Denver’s beauty comes from trees that were planted and parks that were established more than forty years ago. I would say, on the basis of having very recently viewed some of the jampacked, look-alike houses now springing up on the north side of Denver, that not much is being done to make the city beautiful forty years hence.

WATER POLLUTION

The most damaging desecrater of all is the polluter. Raw sewage floats in the Potomac right past the monuments to Lincoln, Washington, and Jefferson. More than five thousand U.S. communities dump raw or inadequately treated wastes into the nation’s waterways and are utterly indifferent to the needs and sensibilities of their downstream neighbors. Thousands of industrial plants, with equal indifference, dump their foulsmelling and often poisonous wastes into rivers. Oil is dumped into the Great Lakes, and radioactive material has been discharged into the Tennessee River. Rivers in the Idaho mining country often have a milkish appearance from pollution.

Perhaps the most befouled of all U.S. rivers is the mighty Missouri, which has aptly been called a thousand-mile-long sewer. Cities and packing houses alike have been discharging their untreated wastes into the river. According to one report, Public Health Service engineers have told of seeing floating excrement and other sewage solids. And they noted that the juncture of the Floyd and Missouri rivers “appeared almost clogged with untreated packing plant wastes. Where the water was not red with bloody wastes, it was gray with decomposing organic wastes.”

The nation’s aquatic wildlife has been finding our inland waters increasingly unbearable. Some months ago, ten thousand scarce canvasback and redhead ducks were destroyed on the Detroit River by the release of untreated sewage. Thousands of dead fish have turned up in the Passaic River, from which several Northern New Jersey communities had been drawing their drinking water. Fish can no longer survive in parts of New Hampshire’s Merrimack, once famed for its fishing. Many of the salmon runs of the Northwest are being disrupted by the fact that the fish, in their relentless migrations up to the headwaters of streams, perish in badly polluted stretches of these streams. The Public Health Service reports finding in many parts of the country that fish taken alive from waters downstream from sewer outfalls have been sickly or dwarfed. And it reports finding hundreds of cases of complete fish kills. By “complete,” it means that every fish, in stretches of water up to nineteen miles long, has perished.

Drinking water in many areas is not escaping the impact of all the waste in rivers, despite massive chlorination. Oklahoma Senator Robert Kerr states that U.S. cities now tolerate twice as much sewage in their drinking water as was considered safe only a half-dozen years ago. One specific problem which is causing concern is the widespread appearance in drinking water of a sewage-born microscopic worm called the nematode. It appears often to be able to survive ordinary chlorination and gives tap water an earthy, musty odor. U.S. health officials found in one sampling that nematodes turned up in drinking water drawn from thirteen out of fourteen rivers.

Many cities have been indifferent to pleas from downstream neighbors to clean up water before they discharge it back into the river. Selfishly, many have seen no gain to themselves in building expensive sewage treatment plants that only benefit downstream neighbors. When Saint Joseph, Missouri, residents turned down a bond issue referendum for a proposed sewage treatment plant, a newspaper hailed the voters for their “pioneering independence” of Washington “bureaucrats” who had been demanding that Saint Joseph stop befouling the Missouri. The U.S. government has since brought suit against the city.

Industrial pollution discharged into the nation’s waterways has increased 1000 per cent in this century. Many industrialists maintain that use of rivers for dumping waste is a part of their American heritage and that they should be expected to clean up their discharged water only when it is “economically feasible.” The National Association of Manufacturers has often opposed proposals that would permit the federal government to act against pollution of the nation’s waterways. It wants decisions left to state and local governments, which tend to be far more responsive to the wishes of local industries.

With the great growth in leisure-time activities, millions of Americans are turning to water sports: fishing, swimming, water skiing, and skin diving. Clean water exhilarates and relaxes. The relentless disappearance of safe beaches and inviting water may well bring about a greatly increased demand for pollution control.

For one thing, there is urgent need to develop more effective treatment techniques, especially in view of the many new, persistent chemicals draining into our waterways. Experts insist we actually have not progressed very much from the water purification methods used by the ancient Romans.

With the fantastic increase in demand for water that is projected for the future, we must keep pollution in check. It seems obvious that all users of public water — municipal and industrial users alike — should be required to return the water they have borrowed in as clean a condition as it was when they diverted it, or at least as clean as technically possible.

A society as prosperous and ambitious as ours should certainly act against the desecraters. Let us start in the schools, if not the homes, to bring up youngsters who will have a decent respect for this land of ours. Let us look to the eyesores in our communities, states, and nation, and by our protests to elected officials make a start toward reducing the desecration.

Certainly we can get the junk yards off our scenic highways, especially along the new highways being built. We can oppose the outdoorbillboard lobbyists in the many state capitals which must still take action to protect the new interstate highways from desecration by billboard. The Mexican government, in a burst of political courage, has flatly outlawed billboards as distractions from the picturesque countryside.

Let us also act firmly to protect our beauty spots from the building developers and parking lot entrepreneurs. And let us demand that power lines through scenic areas go underground.

Let us work to bring back a real love for our neighborhoods by seeing that they have the variety of centers for work, play, and contemplation that make them really inviting and distinctive.

And, finally, let us cherish and protect our few remaining areas of unspoiled wilderness, if only as reminders of how we are changing our land. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner made an observation many years ago that might well be pondered today. He said: “The Western wilds, from the Alleghenies to the Pacific, constituted the richest free gift that was ever spread out before civilized man. . . . Never again can such an opportunity come to the sons of men.”

Let us not further abuse this opportunity.