Well, I don't know.
The countryside I hope remains the same, but I don't think it will.
I think the city is going out to the countryside.
I feel that it's just going to keep going out further and further until there won't be any countryside left.
Obviously, increasingly it's going to become urbanized and it's getting even harder and harder to do for that has open spaces.
You have to drive further and further.
The tract homes are just eating up all the countryside.
The business comes first apparently.
I should like to see around Chicago such a thing as has happened in London where they've set the five mile green belt around London, which is all farms today.
Couldn't very well tell you what would happen.
America is a very big country.
What difference does it make really if a few corn fields become subdivisions? Land close to big cities is too valuable to be occupied by cows and crops.
At least that seems to be our attitude.
The farmers can always move farther out and when their land value skyrockets, farmers are usually ready to sell out and move on to greener pastures.
A good example is California, which once had eight million acres of arable farmland.
Two million of those acres have been urbanized.
If present trends continue, another 750 ,000 will be urbanized by 1980.
Farmland thus developed is virtually gone.
Who could afford to tear up a city to plant corn on the site? Many people say that's no problem.
We won't need the land anyway.
Since 1948, we have cut in half the land being farmed.
We now produce the same amount of crops on half the land.
There are many indications, however, that the pesticides and inorganic nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers, which account for this productivity, are a dead end street.
The agronomists will tell us that yes indeed we're putting back as much nitrogen fertilizer as we take out in the form of crop.
But then if you look for the rest of the removal of nitrogen from the soil, you find that it's not only leaving in the crop, but is also leaching out into surface waters where in fact it contributes to the pollution of these waters.
And that's an example of the fact that we aren't really in natural balance.
We talked a lot about this product called Treflant.
It hasn't been on the market in very many years.
From Barry Cominer's point of view, the chemical farming methods we have developed are ecologically unsound and will have to be abandoned sooner or later.
We may desperately need the farmland we are losing to urbanization.
The landscape is an intricate fabric of plant life and animal life.
Traditionally, our development has torn this fabric apart, and once it is gone, it is usually gone for good.
If present trends continue, by the year 2000 we will have doubled our man -made environment.
We will build another New York, another Los Angeles, another Chicago.
Chicago, for example, will grow outward, as will Indianapolis, Gary, Milwaukee, forming one giant, metropolitan region around Lake Michigan.
Will we make the same mistakes? Will we destroy the ecological systems that lie on our path? Intrinsic values such as the wetland patterns, water patterns, or we call this a marsh here in Wisconsin.
In southern Illinois we call it a swamp.
It's a pattern in the land that I think most people do appreciate.
It's a pattern that we would like to protect as a form determinant to guide the urban fabric of tomorrow.
Now these wetlands are very important.
They're the basic habitat of many of our birds and wildlife.
It also serves as an aquifer recharge area that permits our surface waters to penetrate down into our underground storage systems so that we will have a future water supply for the cities tomorrow.
Water gets into the underground storage system by seeping into the ground until it reaches an impermeable layer in the earth's crust which it cannot penetrate.
Then, groundwater behaves like water in a glass being filled, rising as long as there is supply from above to fill it.
This underground system is called the aquifer, which means water bearer.
Water to recharge the aquifer may be rainwater, or it may be water that seeps down from lowlands or swamps, which funnel it into the underground storage system.
Filling in, bathing over, and urbanizing lowlands thus reduces the available water supply.
It's very unique to find these types of systems right in the heart of the city, and this happens to be right in the heart of the capital city here in Madison.
Earlier inhabitants had the foresight to protect it and enhance it.
And what we'd like to do on the fringe areas of most cities that are going to double in size in the next 20 years, what we'd like to do is to protect these important systems and use these patterns to guide the patterns of man.
Tired of fighting rush hour traffic, tired of soaring urban crime rates, tired of integrated schools, then why not investigate the beauty, splendor, and gracious living waiting for you now in surprising Grand Canyon Estates.
Yes, Grand Canyon Estates, located in the booming southwest and soon to be the site of the deepest artificial lake in the entire world.
That's right, the developers of Grand Canyon Estates are transforming what was once a useless hole in the ground into the most unique community you'll ever be fortunate enough to invest in.
Beside the Leacher Time Fund spent on the waters of Grand Canyon Lake, you'll also enjoy the miraculous 20 ,000 acre Jungle in a Desert, the largest collection of plastic vegetation ever assembled in one place.
And that's not all.
Imagine if you can, sitting on the patio of your new home and gazing on one of the most beautiful ships ever built, the aircraft carrier Ticonderoga, purchased from the Navy and transported intact to Grand Canyon Estates.
There it will rest beside the original Brooklyn Bridge, soon to be reconstructed over Grand Canyon Lake.
So, if you're interested in a truly unique land investment, why not build your new home in surprising Grand Canyon Estates? To identify the values that exist in the land, landscape architects like Phil Lewis analyze the various patterns that compose it.
Wetlands, marshes, rivers, lakes and adjacent land are one such pattern.
Prime farmland is another.
Steep land and forests are two more.
These four systems, they believe, are among those features that should not be disrupted, corrupted or urbanized.
To do so is to damage our life support system, the intricate fabric that supplies to us water, food, oxygen and other amenities.
Here we see a little bit of rolling topography and steep topography for the middle west at least.
And where we have steep topography, we normally have vegetation because man has found it difficult to build here or found it difficult to farm.
Many of us in the field of landscape architecture would like to see these natural systems of steep topography protected and enhanced and used again as farm determinants.
Washington, D .C., like other big cities, continues to explode outward.
In this map, black represents the existing city.
The grid area fills in projected growth over the next 25 years.
If present trends continue, the urban blanket will be drawn indiscriminately across the landscape, house by house, shopping center by shopping center.
The basic values of the land thus overrun will be lost.
The process Phil Lewis urges is to exclude essential value patterns from urbanization, subtracting the wetland pattern, farmland, steep slopes and other features from the landscape.
Subtracting these leaves a residual open pattern, the grid area, where building can take place in harmony with natural systems.
For big cities like Washington, D .C., however, many urban experts urge a more drastic measure, a green belt, to encircle a city and inhibit further growth.
They think our biggest cities are already much too big.
A city must be surrounded by a green belt in order to keep sufficiently contained, in order to have the open spaces and nature sufficiently accessible.
You shouldn't have to spend an hour in a car in order to find nature.
I've often thought that really space, three -dimensional space, is the most neglected resource that we have.
Now here we are going up through a narrow corridor, where you have these narrow restricted walls, and then we get into these glorious open rooms that could be almost like the Plaza of Venice, where space opens up again.
It offers a natural foil in the urban landscape that provides change in variety from the urban streets to this natural scene.
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Cities are not the only source of impact on the natural world.
Another major impact is the highway, particularly big interstates.
Typically, highways are constructed at the shortest distance between two points, with an effort to minimize the dollar cost.
But dollars are not the only cost.
There is also the cost of what is lost in the landscape.
Landscape planning and design is moving quite rapidly with new technology.
Up to the present, we've depended upon maps where we can plot the outstanding natural systems.
But today we can now turn to the computer that can store and print out a map in three seconds of thousands of bits of information about the landscape.
Here we were utilizing these thousands of bits of information to align I -57, a new ribbon of concrete, laying out a highway that would make the least impact on these many natural systems.
Here we see the many different alignments arrived at by the computer.
Each alignment represents a different policy.
For instance, the green alignment is over here through the ecological system.
This is the farmer's alignment.
The farmer would like to see the highway off of the Class A farmlands.
The other hand, the alignment of lease cost is the shortest distance and shares a common right -of -way corridor with an existing highway.
The interesting thing about this study is that for the first time in history we have stored literally millions of bits of information about this total landscape.
And for the first time we've been able to tell the public of Wisconsin that it's just not the cost of the concrete to build a highway, but for the first time we're able to demonstrate all of the thousands of different value patterns that have to be traded off for this highway system.
We think it's a very constructive tool in guiding impact of any kind in the future more in harmony with these systems.
Music Music Space technology offers yet another new tool for environmental management.
Sound of rocket launch In July 1972, the United States launched a new breed of satellite called ERTS, Earth Resources Technical Satellite.
It will photograph every part of the planet and update those photographs every 18 days.
Information from ERTS will tell us precisely what is happening to the Earth.
Infrared photographs, for example, can pick out a single sick tree in a forest.
Infrared is sensitive to heat differences.
Disease trees have a different temperature from healthy ones.
Infrared can also pinpoint and trace certain types of pollution.
Another device is the multispectral scanner, which analyzes reflected light and can pick out one kind of agitation from another by the wavelengths of the light reflected.
Information like this, analyzed and stored in computers, will give us a living memory of the state of the landscape and the world's resources.
We will know accurately the effect human interventions will have on the natural world.
Will we use this information wisely to guide the course of future development? From the camera's eye in space, the land is one fabric.
From a man's point of view on Earth, the land is a jumble of private ownership and governmental jurisdictions.
Total land use planning would step on a lot of toes.
Yet, men like Phil Lewis think that the Earth's natural resources are not enough.
We think that this shift in our way of doing business is going to be necessary.
From the top of the hill here, we can also see the urban pattern beginning to encroach upon these natural systems.
I think this indicates some of the major problems that we face in America.
We've been so concerned about growth and GNP that we haven't really been considering how to fit this growth that we will have more in harmony with the system.
Now this truly requires total land use planning in this country.
Total land use planning would mean zoning all land, both rural and urban, to preserve its inherent values.
Farmland, for example, would be zoned for that purpose.
Such an approach would be a complete departure from current land use controls, which have changed little since they were drafted in the U .S.
Department of Commerce under Secretary Herbert Hoover in 1923.
These laws treat land as a commodity and view the highest and best use as whatever brings top dollar.
Today we need new laws that recognize the land as a limited natural resource.
Land use is a fundamental thing.
The fact that we've ignored it, that we've treated the land as though it could be appropriated intelligently by private individuals seeking only their individual gain, their individual opportunities, is a betrayal of public trust.
Land and all its resources really belongs to the people of the United States.
The simplest strategy of all is to buy it up at the earliest possible moment as a reserve of land, some of it to be permanently in reserve if it is necessary for agricultural or recreational uses, some of it in time to be wisely planned for the sake of building new communities.
Both things are necessary and there's no difficulty about it.
If our government doesn't step in and do this, the great corporations with their enormous surpluses of capital will step in and do it instead for their own private purposes, as is already happening in many parts of the country.
And now, a WOMP -TV editorial.
For some time now, land speculation practices have been raging through our community like fire through a dry forest.
We think it's about time that someone put it out.
After all, Mr.
Speculator, we're not going to let you down.
Enough is enough.
This has been a WOMP -TV editorial.
And now, WOMP -TV presents a reply to a recent editorial.
Speaking in rebuttal, Mr.
Clyde Scourge, attorney for the United Speculators of America.
Mr.
Scourge.
Many people wonder why land purchased at $200 an acre should be resold to the public for $25 ,000 an acre.
Well, I wonder if these same people realize just how much it costs to prepare a site for residential or industrial use.
Take, for example, our newest development, Babylon Gardens.
Why, when we purchased this land, it was worthless! Cluttered with trees, marked with small and slightly hills, plagued with wild animals and insect life.
Why, before we could sell this land to the public in good conscience, we were forced to go to great expense to approve it.
So the next time somebody complains about the cost of land, you tell them that that flat, paved land they see wasn't put there by nature.
Somebody had to pay for it.
This has been a reply to a recent WOMP -TV editorial.
So what most of us in the fields of environmental planning and design are encouraging is a second look at our value systems in this country.
If we continue to allow this population to grow as we are, those additional feet that make the impact upon these natural systems destroy them for future generations.
Some growth seems to be inevitable.
Even if our birthrate were to recede to a two -child family now, theoretically a replacement birthrate, the United States population would not level out until the year 2037, when our population would reach 266 million.
This is because there are now more children than adults, children who have not yet reached childbearing age.
Since at least an additional 60 million Americans seem to be on the way, it seems wise to plan for them in a way compatible with the natural systems that support us.
That means much more stringent land use planning.
Beyond that is the question of growth altogether.
Dr.
Dennis Meadows, who directed the controversial computer study called Limits to Growth, believes that we must begin now to move toward global equilibrium.
We see that there is no conceptual possibility of current growth trends in population and in the consumption of virgin resources being continued for another 100 or 150 years.
Population, as you know, doubles now every 32 years.
The rate of doubling is increasing.
We double the amount of natural resources which we consume every 20 years.
We double the amount of electricity which we consume in the United States every 10 years.
One has only to extend those doublings out five or ten more times to reach numbers which are absolutely inconsistent with our current system.
So in one way or another, population growth and the material consumption are going to come to a stop.
The question is not whether they will stop, for they certainly will, but whether they stop because we as a society recognize our limits and begin to move towards an orderly accommodation with those limits, or whether we simply ignore them and wait until natural forces, starvation, the depletion of resources, or some other factor, forces to stop.
In the latter case, we'll probably find ourselves in a situation which is not very desirable.
While the population of the United States is not large compared to the rest of the world, our environmental impact is extraordinary.
At present rates, an average American baby born today will require, among other things, 26 million gallons of water, 52 tons of iron and steel, 1200 barrels of petroleum, 13 ,000 pounds of paper, and 50 tons of food.
Only 6 % of the world's people, Americans consume each year nearly 50 % of the world's consumed resources.
In terms of resources, U .S.
population is the most critical of all.
The earth we live on is finite.
Land is limited.
So are virgin resources.
We have reached a watershed point in history.
We can see the dark at the end of the tunnel.
We can see that our numbers and the impacts of our technologies can conceivably swamp the capacity of the earth to support us.
On a lesser scale, our traditional ways of doing business daily eat away at the natural systems that support us.
Perhaps it is time to reconsider.
