The Quiet Crisis. Stewart L. Udall
Copyright © 1963 by Stewart L. Udall.
Copyright © 2016 by Tom Udall.
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New York, NY 10163
ISBN: 978-1-632460-20-2 (ebook)
For Lee
PREFACE
MY FATHER, Stewart Udall, was a true son of the West. He grew up in the small ranching and farming community of St Johns, Arizona, where he was close to the land and learned to appreciate nature and the environment. An instinctive ecologist, Stewart believed that we are all part of the community of life.
Elected to Congress in 1954 as a liberal Democrat from an increasingly conservative part of the country, he found in Washington a “big tent on the environment” and became rightly celebrated as a visionary statesman of the modern conservation movement. His legacy as Secretary of the Interior from 1961 to ‘69 is marked by such accomplishments as the creation of four national parks, six national monuments, eight seashores and lakeshores, twenty historic sites and fifty wildlife refuges. He changed the way we think about conservation and the value of public land by freeing us from the idea that it’s only purpose lay in what could be extracted from it.
In 1963, the year after the publication of Rachel Carson’s classic, The Silent Spring, Stewart wrote The Quiet Crisis, in which he expanded on Carson’s work to chronicle America’s conservation efforts and take the broader view, beyond Carson’s condemnation of the effects of chemical pollution, to the more encompassing effects of progress on the total environmental. He elevated the work of Aldo Leopold and his “land ethic” into public policy discussion. He dealt with urban environments, as well as wilderness, with the need for legislation and individual action. He warned Americans against the overuse of natural resources, and cautioned us to be mindful of clean air and water. He was, indeed, an environmental pioneer, part of the transition from conservation to activism. Many of the significant environmental protection laws of the 1970’s and 80’s reflect his influence and commitment.
Caring for the world around us was how Stewart lived his life. As he wrote in a letter to his grandchildren, “cherish sunsets, wild creatures and wild places. Have a love affair with the wonder and beauty of the earth.”
Although it has been over fifty years since its initial publication, The Quiet Crisis still speaks to us. It has informed my years in pubic service and I believe it will inform your life as well. Read and enjoy.
SENATOR TOM UDALL
New Mexico
April, 2016
FOREWORD
ONE WEEK last fall, two events came to my attention which seemed to sum up the plight of modern man: the first was a press report which indicated that T. S. Eliot, the poet, was a victim of London’s latest “killer fog” and lay gravely ill; the second was a call from a preservation-minded citizen of New Hampshire who informed me that Robert Frost’s old farm—fixed for all time in memory by the poem “West-running Brook”—was now an auto junk yard.
The coincidence of these two events raised questions in my mind: Is a society a success if it creates conditions that impair its finest minds and make a wasteland of its finest landscapes? What does material abundance avail if we create an environment in which man’s highest and most specifically human attributes cannot be fulfilled?
Each generation has its own rendezvous with the land, for despite our fee titles and claims of ownership, we are all brief tenants on this planet. By choice, or by default, we will carve out a land legacy for our heirs. We can misuse the land and diminish the usefulness of resources, or we can create a world in which physical affluence and affluence of the spirit go hand in hand.
History tells us that earlier civilizations have declined because they did not learn to live in harmony with the land. Our successes in space and our triumphs of technology hold a hidden danger: as modern man increasingly arrogates to himself dominion over the physical environment, there is the risk that his false pride will cause him to take the resources of the earth for granted—and to lose all reverence for the land.
America today stands poised on a pinnacle of wealth and power, yet we live in a land of vanishing beauty, of increasing ugliness, of shrinking open space, and of an overall environment that is diminished daily by pollution and noise and blight.
This, in brief, is the quiet conservation crisis of the 1960’s.
It is not too late to repair some of the mistakes of the past, and to make America a green and pleasant—and productive—land. We can do it if we understand the history of our husbandry, and develop fresh insight concerning the men and the forces that have shaped our land attitudes and determined the pattern of land use in the United States.
This book is an attempt to outline the land-and-people story of our continent. It is dedicated to the proposition that men must grasp completely the relationship between human stewardship and the fullness of the American earth.
STEWART L. UDALL
Washington, D.C.
July, 1963
INTRODUCTION
THE HISTORY of America, is more than that of most nations, the history of man confornted by nature. Our story has been peculiarly the story of man and the land, man and the forests, man and the plains, man and water, man and resources. It has been the story of a rich and varied natural heritage shaping American institutions and American values; and it has been equally the story of Americans seizing, using, squandering and, belatedly, protecting and developing that heritage. In telling this story and giving this central theme of American history its proper emphasis and dignity, Secretary Udall puts us all in his debt.
From the beginning, Americans had a lively awareness of the land and the wilderness. The Jeffersonian faith in the independent farmer led the foundation for American democracy; and the ever-beckoning, ever-receding frontier left an indelible imprint on American society and the American character. And Americans pioneered in more than the usual way. We hear much about “land reform” today in other parts of the world; but we do not perhaps reflect enough on the extent to which land reform, from the Northwest Ordinance through the Homestead Act of the Farm Security Administration and beyond, was an American custom and an American innovation.
Yet, at the same time that Americans saluted the noble bounty of nature, they also abused and abandoned it. For the first century after independence, we regarded the natural environment as indestructible—and proceeded vigorously to destroy it. Not till the time of Marsh and Schurz and Powell did we begin to understand that our resources were not inexhaustible. Only in the twentieth century have we acted in a systematic way to defend and enrich our natural heritage.
The modern American record in conservation has been brilliant and distinguished. It has inspired comparable efforts all around the earth. But it came just in time in our own land. And, as Mr. Udall’s vivid narrative makes clear, the race between education and erosion, between wisdom and waste, has not run its course. George Perkins Marsh pointed out a century ago that greed and shortsightedness were the natural enemies of a prudent resources policy. Each generation must deal anew with the “raiders,” with the scramble to use public resources for private profit, and with the tendency to prefer short-run profits to long-run necessities. The nation’s battle to preserve the common estate is far from won.
Mr. Udall understands this—and he understands too that new times give this battle new forms. I read