Natural Resources: Beauty, Beauty Everywhere

None of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society inaugural promises produced such a glad commotion as his declaration that natural beauty should replace man-made ugliness in America.

Hundreds of letters have poured into the White House from garden-club la dies, Sunday drivers, bird watchers, country editors, city mayors, and all manner of green-thumb lobbyists. Residents of Wayland, Mass., held an art show to dramatize the need for cleaning up the town dump. Missouri's Governor Warren Hearnes offered prizes for the best dogwood-redbud plantings in a statewide prettification program.

United Auto Workers President Walter Reuther proudly announced that he and his neighbors in Detroit suburbs would plant 5,000 trees along a barren 25-mile creek bed. Three hundred volunteers waded into the polluted Potomac River one Sunday morning and dragged up 540 armloads of rubbish. Columnist Drew Pearson donated ten tons of manure from his Maryland dairy farm to Lady Bird Johnson's campaign for new plantings in Washington.

"Ugliness Is Bitterness." Last week the national face-lifting drive moved into even higher gear when 844 carefully selected delegates—including architects, urban-renewal experts, businessmen, Government leaders, conservationists—crowded into a Washington building auditorium for a White House Conference on Natural Beauty. Lady Bird, opening the affair, said: "Ugliness is bitterness, an eroding force on the people of our land. We are all here to try and change that." Laurance Rockefeller, conference chairman, briskly told the conferees: "Our task is to produce specific ideas and come up with solutions."

The delegates spent two days in discussions about various blots on the landscape and the villains who put them there. "Our enemy is the highway engineer," said a woman delegate from Nebraska, suggesting that all such engineers should be required to take a course in esthetics, including the reading of great poets. Najeeb Halaby, former Federal Aviation Agency chief, said that public officials "are not usually brave enough" to do what they must to preserve natural beauty.

Blasted hardest of all were junkyard owners, who sent their own representatives, tried desperately to defend themselves by defining their roadside eyesores as "a retail automobile-dismantling shop engaged in a business that is neither dishonest nor degrading." Harvard Law School Professor Charles Haar snapped back, "The only way to clean up these places is through strong legislation; voluntary actions on the part of junkyard owners are few and far between."