III
The capital sign of the early settlements beyond the seashore was the clearing; and since the great majority of newcomers lived by agriculture, the forest itself appeared merely as an obstacle to be removed. The untouched woods of America were all too lush and generous, and if an occasional Leatherstocking loved them, the new settler saw only land to clear and wood to burn. In the New England village, the tradition of culture was perhaps applied to the land itself, and elsewhere there are occasional elements of good practice, in the ordered neatness of boulder-fences. For the most part, however, the deliberate obliteration of the natural landscape became a great national sport, comparable to the extermination of bison which the casual western traveler devoted himself to at a later date.
The stripping of the Appalachian forest was the first step in our campaign against nature. By 1860 the effect was already grave enough to warn an acute observer, like George Perkins Marsh, of the danger to our civilization, and to prompt him in Earth and Man, to remind his countrymen that other civilizations about the Mediterranean and the Adriatic had lost their top-soil and ruined their agriculture through the wanton destruction of their forests.
In the meanwhile, a new factor had entered. If before the nineteenth century we cleared the forest to make way for the farm, with the entrance of the industrial pioneer we began to clear the farm to parcel out the city. We have called this process the settlement of America, but the name is anomalous, for we formed the habit of using the land, not as a home, a permanent seat of culture, but as a means to something else—principally as a means to the temporary advantages of profitable speculation and exploitation.
James Mackay, a charitable Scotch observer in the middle of the nineteenth century, explained our negligence of the earth by the fact that we pinned our affections to institutions rather than places, and cared not how the landscape was massacred as long as we lived under the same flag and enjoyed the same forms of government. There is no doubt a little truth in this observation; but it was not merely our attachment to republican government that caused this behavior: it was even more, perhaps, our disattachment from the affiliations of a settled life. The pioneer, to put it vulgarly, was on the make and on the move; it did not matter to him how he treated the land, since by the time he could realize its deficiencies he had already escaped to a new virgin area. “What had posterity done for him?”
The pioneers who turned their backs on a civilized way of life in order to extend the boundaries of civilization, left us with a heavy burden—not merely blasted and disorderly landscapes, but the habit of tolerating and producing blasted and disorderly landscapes. As Cobbett pointed out in his attempt to account for the unkempt condition of the American farm, the farmer in this country lacked the example of the great landed estates, where the woods had become cultivated parks, and the meadowland had become lawns. Without this cultivated example in the country, it is no wonder that our cities have been littered, frayed at the edges, ugly; no wonder that our pavements so quickly obliterate trees and grass; no wonder that so many towns are little more than gashes of metal and stone.
Those who had been bred on the land brought into the city none of that disciplined care which might have preserved some of its amenities. They left the smoke of the clearings, which was a sign of rural “progress”; they welcomed the smoke of the towns, and all that accompanied it.
It is scarcely a paradox to say that the improvement of our cities must proceed inwards from the countryside; for it is largely a matter of reversing the process which converts the farm into incipient blocks of real estate. Once we assimilate the notion that soil and site have uses quite apart from sale, we shall not continue to barbarize and waste them. Consider how the water’s edge of lower Manhattan was developed without the slightest regard for its potential facilities for recreation; how the Acropolis of Pittsburgh, the Hump, was permitted to turn into a noisome slum; how the unique beauty of Casco Bay has been partly secured only by Portland’s inferiority as a shipping center. Indeed, all up and down the country one can pick up a thousand examples of towns misplaced, of recreation areas becoming factory sites, of industries located without intelligent reference to raw materials or power or markets or the human beings who serve them, of agricultural land being turned prematurely into suburban lots, and of small rural communities which need the injection of new industries and enterprises, languishing away whilst a metropolis not fifty miles away continues to absorb more people, who daily pay a heavy premium for their congestion.
I have already drawn attention to the waste of local materials in connection with our manufacture of buildings, our concentration of markets, and our standardization of styles. It is plain that our architects would not have to worry so painfully about the latest fashion-page of architectural tricks, if they had the opportunity to work more consistently with the materials at hand, using brick where clay was plentiful, stone where that was of good quality, and cement where concrete adapted itself to local needs—as it does so well near the seashore, and, for a different reason, in the south. Wood, one of our most important materials for both exterior and interior, has suffered by just the opposite of neglect: so completely have our Appalachian forests been mined, and so expensive are the freight charges for the long haul from the Pacific coast, that good housing in the east depends to no little extent upon our ability to recover continuous local supplies of timber throughout the Appalachian region.
(It is characteristic of our mechanical and metropolitan civilization that one of the great sources of timber waste is the metropolitan newspaper: and one of the remoter blessings of a sounder regional development is that it would, perhaps, remove the hourly itch for the advertising sheet, and by the same token would provide large quantities of wood for housing, without calling for the destruction of ten acres of spruce for the Sunday edition alone! I give the reader the privilege of tracing the pleasant ramifications of this notion.)
To see the interdependence of city and country, to realize that the growth and concentration of one is associated with the depletion and impoverishment of the other, to appreciate that there is a just and harmonious balance between the two—this capacity we have lacked. Before we can build well on any scale we shall, it seems to me, have to develop an art of regional planning, an art which will relate city and countryside in a new pattern from that which was the blind creation of the industrial and the territorial pioneer. Instead of regarding the countryside as so much grist doomed to go eventually into the metropolitan mill, we must plan to preserve and develop all our natural resources to the limit.
It goes without saying that any genuine attempt to provide for the social and economic renewal of a region cannot be constrained to preserve vested land-values and property rights and privileges; indeed, if the land is to be fully loved and cared for again we must recover it in something more than name only. The main objection to keeping our natural resources in the hands of the community, namely, that private capital is more zealous at exploitation, is precisely the reason for urging the first course. Our land has suffered from zeal in exploitation; and it would be much better, for example, that our water power resources should remain temporarily undeveloped, than that they should be incontinently used by private corporations to concentrate population in the centers where a high tariff can be charged. The number of things that are waiting to be done—the planting of town forests, the communal restoration of river banks and beaches, the transformation of bare roads into parkways—will of course differ in each region and locality; and my aim here is only to point to a general objective.
The beginnings of genuine regional planning have already been made in Ontario, Canada, where the social utilization of water-power has directly benefited the rural communities, and given them an independent lease on life. In the United States, Mr. Benton Mackaye has sketched out a bold and fundamental plan for associating the development of a spinal recreational trail with an electric power development for the whole Appalachian region, along the ridgeway; both trail and power being used as a basis for the re-afforestation and the re-peopling of the whole upland area, with a corresponding decentralization and depopulation of the overcrowded, spotty coastal region. Such a scheme would call for a pretty thorough dislocation of metropolitan values; and if it is slow in making headway, that is only because its gradual institution would mean that a new epoch had begun in American civilization. At the present time it is hard to discover how tangible these new hopes and projects may be: it is significant, however, that the Housing and Regional Planning Commission of the State of New York was called into existence by the necessity for finding a way out of our metropolitan tangle; and it is possible that a new orientation in power and culture is at hand.
In a loose, inconsecutive way, the objectives of regional planning have been dealt with by the conservation movement during the last century; and if the art itself has neither a corpus of experience nor an established body of practitioners, this is only to say that it has, as it were, broken through the surface in a number of places and that it remains to be gathered up and intelligently used. When regional planning starts its active career, it will concern itself to provide a new framework for our communities which will redistribute population and industry, and recultivate the environment—substituting forestry for timber-mining, stable agriculture for soil-mining, and in general the habit of dressing and keeping the earth for our traditional American practice of stripping and deflowering it. Architecture begins historically when the “Bauer” who plants becomes the “Bauer” who builds; and if our architecture is to have a substantial foundation, it is in a refreshened countryside that we will perhaps find it.