The Use and Misuse of Land

...We are not told how Pan American has reacted to this happy news...

...Midway Udall describes the personal debate between Gifford Pinchot, who was willing to compromise in the struggle to preserve wilderness land, and John Muir, who was not...

...as the work of a Secretary of the Interior it is an encouraging sign of administrative concern over the blight and decay which spread around us daily...

...Where Udall is panoramic and impersonal, Blake is abrupt and hortatory...

...His opening chapters are embellished with superb color photographs of the untouched land, and the subsequent historical account is lucid and succinct...

...Exemplifying the difficulties of current conservation programs, the Wilderness Bill, designed to give legislative protection to federal lands now administered as wilderness, has had a rocky time in Congress...

...They have nothing against wilderness, of course, just so long as they can continue to mine, graze cattle and cut down trees...

...A spaghetti of highways in Detroit...

...His is frankly an exercise in muckraking, a crusade against "the wholesale destruction of our countryside...

...He pleads with everybody—especially the powerful—to espouse the conservation cause and place a premium on beauty...

...Anyone who has lived long in this country and especially in California can compile his private scrapbook of scenic disasters, but Blake does a service by providing a nationwide collection...

...The bill's opponents pay lip service to its general intentions while attempting to amend it out of useful existence...

...Even the establishment of the Forest Service and national park system could amount only to a holding action for those many areas which had been ransacked for what they were worth and abandoned, their esthetic value and productive capacity alike permanently impaired...

...The issue is clear enough, really, though Aspinall and others have tried to obscure it in pseudo-Constitutional haze: are we to preserve some virgin land as wilderness, or are we to subject it all to "multiple use" (the current euphemism for commercial exploitation...

...it was killed in a House Committee whose chairman, Wayne Aspinall of Colorado, is its adamant foe...

...If we open public wilderness lands to the kind of competitive commercializing our economy fosters, we should not expect them to remain very attractive...

...God's Own Junkyard, by Peter Blake, is a useful companion to the Udall book...

...Udall is in favor of intelligent land management, yes, and he hopes the population will stop growing while there remains space to walk around in...

...In dealing with the present, however, Udall is less forceful and precise, and as he nears contemporary political issues he becomes predictably evasive...

...Introduced in the fifties, its Senate passage by seventy votes in 1961 was hopeful but nothing more...

...Enlightened leaders of the business community are already pointing the way," he reports optimistically...

...at the end of the first session the Senate bill was once more boxed in Aspinall's committee...

...Americans have rarely treated the land with care and intelligence, much less that Indian "reverence" Udall reminds us of...

...An untouched Sierra landscape...

...Much of Blake's attention is devoted to urban areas, which The Quiet Crisis largely ignores...

...Or later: "[the nineteenth-century lumber ty coons] set world records for waste, and their prodigal prosperity consumed the stored 'capital' of nature—which, by right, belonged to other generations...

...Real indignation seeps through the elegant prose: "Entwined with the tragedy of the buffalo was the tragedy of human blindness that depicted the national mood...

...The book is often shrill, but it contains more than enough truth to make the landscape of the future seem the most contemporary of concerns...

...Yet it still seems a pity that his sharpest attacks are reserved for legislators and executives safely in the past...

...but he never really grapples with the vexing problem of multiple use of forest land, and his treatment of current wilderness affairs is confined to a single wish ful paragraph...

...Stewart Udall's book is a brief, sobering history of land use in this country...

...The present Congress threatens to repeat...

...The book consists mainly of photographs (good ones...

...One mining geologist promised "restoration as near as practicable of the land disturbed," but as Representative John Saylor replied, "The mining industry has not been noted for its going in and attempting to restore anything...

...Whatever its shortcomings, The Quiet Crisis is a moving book...

...The chapter "Conservation and the Future" makes all the right points, but in a vague and wistful fashion...

...Only a handful of men spoke up to protest the slaughter, and, worse, the trustee of the people, President Ulysses S. Grant, cast his lot with waste and butchery...

...Nowhere does he hint that the wilderness system he advocates is embodied in a bill now before Con gress...

...National expansionism has meant reckless overgrazing and the crudest destruction of forests and wildlife...

...In his remarks on Hetch Hetchy, the beautiful California valley which was inundated to give San Francisco a cheap water supply, Udall seems to emerge as a Muir sympathizer...

...In his brief introduction Blake contends with some heat and uncomfortable accuracy that "just about the only factor that determines the shape of the American city is unregulated private profit...

...On all this Udall is very good...

...Such an omission is understand able: Udall does not want to make his book a political program or to offend those representatives in whose hands the bill rests...

...such companies as Lever Brother's, Johnson's Wax and the Connecticut General Life Insurance Company have demonstrated that a beautifully designed building is the most attractive form of advertising...

...Udall is well aware of the perilous state of the wilderness, but he does not probe current manifestations of that peril...

...Endless duplicate California homes...

...Land management and preservation came slowly and against the opposition of the many Congressmen Teddy Roosevelt outmaneuvered in his years as White House conservationist...

...The pictures form an admirable commentary: Park Avenue before and after the Pan-Am Building...