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Show Private Land Use Planning Will be An Important Future Step For Americans, the big question of the country's next 100 years may well be: How much can the government have a say in what a man does with his own property? So writes Peter T. White, analyzing how Americans are using and abusing the nation's land. His comprehensive account, ac-count, the result of a coast-to-coast survey, sounds the theme that fills much of the July National Geographic, an issue called This Land Of Ours. Answers to White's question ques-tion may be suggested in the remarks of others attempting to look into the nation's third century for the magazine. "Civilize and Destroy" N. Scott Momady, Kiowa Indian, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and English professor, profes-sor, writes that it is the Indian's "deep ethical regard for the earth and sky, (his) reverence for the natural world... that must shape our efforts to preserve the earth and the life upon and within it." He challenges "that strange tenet of modern civilization" that man must tame the wilderness, thereby destroying destroy-ing his environment. The future will change government views about land, says Richard F. Babcock, authority on planning and housing law. "I believe that by the year 2000 the states will have a significant voice in land-use policyand they should. "The states will take back significant parts of the power they granted to municipalities half a century ago." In another hundred years, he predicts, government will own land and trade in real estate, "not merely to control growth, but to control price and influence the market." Besides that, as the suburbs open to blue-collar blacks: "By the year 2076, unless we achieve a racially integrated society, you are going to see our big cities substantially all white." End of Suburbia The end of suburbia is forecast by Gerard Piel, publisher and writer on the impact of urban life on society, who says: "We're going to see the American people resettle in the city.. ..where life will become a cooperative enterprise." enter-prise." Piel says Americans can look forward to a stable life of zero population-and economic -growth, where people will work not for the accumulation of wealth, but for "their own satisfaction." To Buckminster Fuller, inventor in-ventor of the geodesic dome, national wealth today and tomorrow is a measure of energy and its production. "Of the vast quantities of energy being consumed by humanity," he says, "the amount that results in actual benefit to human beings is... perhaps as little as five percent." One energy source is almost finished, says city planner Edmund N. Bacon. "We've got to quit using petroleum fot our basic way of getting around," he says, describing future cities where no one has private vehicles and everyone uses electric buses or taxis. ' Revival of cities and the decline of suburbs would bring change in lifestyles. As Bacon sees it, "We would spend the workweek, perhaps four days ' in the highly social atmos' phere of the city." On the I weekend, "we would move i outward to the mountains and ' the sea and the farm." |
