ustxtxb_obs_1969_07_18_50_00011-00000_000.pdf

Keep It Beautiful If America hired people for the job, it would take the largest sort of army to keep our country free of litter. But there’s no need to hire anyone. It’s a job we can do for ourselves. All of us. Every family that spreads a picnic lunch. Every boatman who cruises the lakes and waterways. Every motorist who uses cur roads and highways. It is the pleasure of the U. S. Brewers Association each year to give its fullest support to the Keep America Beautiful Campaign. Remember: Every Litter Bit Hurts. This is our land. Let’s treat it right. UNITED STATES BREWERS ASSOCIATION, INC. 905 International life Bldg., Austin, Texas 78701 For information on how you can help, write: Beautify Texas Council, Drawer CS, College Station, Texas 77840. Saving Our Open Space Los Angeles There is an open space movement, closely tied to private non-profit land conservation trusts, in New England. So far it has not spread to any appreciable extent into Texas, the Southwest, or the West. Its purposes generally are to receive gifts of, or buy, privately owned open space in or near cities or towns and conserve and maintain it permanently for public benefit and use. The land trusts also work with public conservation agencies and municipalities to save open space in urban or suburban areas for parks, nature and nature study, and “sheer visual amenity.” Evidently there is some principle at work in urbanization that city-dwellers’ need for open land will be defeated before they know it. The sense of space and freedom is not missed until it is gone. Then it is almost or altogether too late. For this reason, the open space and land trust movements ought to be extended into Texas, where it is not too late. As Sen. Paul Douglas’ National Commission on Urban Problems pointed out, Texas cities are not as densely packed, yet, as Eastern cities. The San Antonio Conservation Society, whose dedicated membership will strike dead, or at least half-dead, any politician or bureaucrat who glances askance at any of the few historic homes or landmarks left in their city, has resisted the penetration of Brackenridge iPark by traffic routes that would violate the park’s tranquility and bisect and thus disrupt its ecology. In Dallas there is a group of large membership within this general area of concern, but it is understood to concentrate mostly on zoning matters. The Arlington Conservation Council has been formed by a small group of people to preserve Arlington’s wooded areas and open spaces and encourage their development as parks, nature areas, bird sanctuaries, and green belts. But in general Texans have not organized to defend themselves against urban blight, crummy construction, and neonization and to use all the available tricks and devices to save what they can of the open space in and around their cities. The land trusts are private non-profit trusts or corporations that acquire open land and keep it open. They can negotiate quietly to buy this land. They can buy land beyond the jurisdiction of political subdivisions whose people are affected by its conservation. They can sell open land to government, requiring that the land be kept reserved for conservationist and recreational purposes and providing that it revert to the trust if faithless politicians try to use it for a city dump, a school, or something else. Receiving tax-free donations and sometimes income from the land maintain the land to whatever extent may be necessary. A GOOD PLACE to start in the literature of this subject is the book, Stewardship, by Charles Little, executive director of the Open Space Action Institute. This institute is a non-profit corporation financed in part by foundation grants \(Ford, Rockefeller, Taconic, and and subscriptions to its handsome magazine, Open Space Action. The institute counsels with private landowners, companies, and governments on the preservation of open space in and near cities. One basis of hope for open space in and near cities is the sense among the owners of such land of what Little calls their “stewardship.” Owners of land own it only for a time. We pass over it like nomads and are gone; the land continues. Those who own what is left of woods, fields, and streams in the urban regions, Little explains, have options for preserving it that “range from rational self-interest to outright philanthropy.” They can donate land for open space use to a park authority or, if they trust it more, a conservation organization, such as a land trust. They can reserve the right to live on the land for the rest of their lives. Or they can grant limited public right to it, or have it developed in ways that preserve open space values. Charles Little remarks that there is “an antique quality about the word stewardship, suggesting an ancient wisdom calling for the careful husbandry of ancestral acreage,” but that nowadays a more profound land ethic is required, recognizing “that land of itself . . . is important . . . to preserve natural processes, provide oppor July 18, 1969 11