The New Exploration: A Philosophy of Regional Planning
(A classic in many planning curricula, this is a 1991 repr...)
A classic in many planning curricula, this is a 1991 reprint of the 1928 work by the originator of the Appalachian Trail and a founder of The Wilderness Society. The New Yorker in a 1989 series by Tony Hiss-analyzing attempts to control growth and preserve the environment-called it "a long-lost classic." This edition includes the 1962 introduction by legendary social critic Lewis Mumford, a close MacKaye associate, and a foreword by planner David N. Startzell, executive director of the Appalachian Trail Conference since 1986.
Employment And Natural Resources: Possibilities Of Making New Opportunities For Employment Through The Settlement And Development Of Agricultural And Forest Lands And Other Resources
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Benton MacKaye was an American forester and regional planner.
Background
Benton MacKaye was born on March 6, 1879, in Stamford, Connecticut. He was the son of James Morrison Steel MacKaye, a dramatist and actor, and Mary Keith Medbery.
Because of the peripatetic nature of his father's theatrical activities, Benton spent his early years in several different places: Stamford and Ridgefield, Connecticut; Manhattan and Mt. Vernon, New York; Dublin, New Hampshire; and Washington, D. C.
During the late 1880's, his family purchased a summer home in Shirley Center, Massachusetts, where young Benton liked to visit and make exploratory jaunts to nearby woods, fields, and streams. Later his family wintered in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Education
MacKaye completed in the Latin School his preparatory education for college. In 1900, MacKaye received a B. A. from Harvard University, and in 1905, he received an M. A. from the Harvard Forest School.
Career
MacKaye's study at Harvard was much influenced by courses with geologists William Morris Davis and Nathaniel Southgate Shaler. Apparently motivated by Gifford Pinchot's crusade for forest conservation, he joined the U. S. Forest Service in 1905 and remained with this agency as a research forester until 1918.
In this position, he made field examinations of timberlands and watershed investigations of areas considered for acquisition as national forests under the Weeks Act of 1910, especially areas in the southern Appalachian Mountains and the White Mountains of New Hampshire. By 1916, he had begun also to study forests as recreation grounds. This study led to his interest in the preservation and enjoyment of wilderness areas.
During the period 1918-1919, MacKaye was a specialist in land colonization for the U. S. Department of Labor. Soon thereafter he became an instructor in the Harvard Forest School and began to develop plans for the Appalachian Trail, which he described as "a project in regional planning" and which Lewis Mumford later called "a dramatic social idea. "
The proposed trail was a footpath linking wilderness areas suitable for recreation and readily accessible to residents in the metropolitan areas along the Atlantic Seaboard. With the assistance of the Appalachian Trail Conference and its constituent hiking clubs, MacKaye during the 1920's, conducted a vigorous campaign for the trail, which was basically completed in 1937 and given federal-government protection in 1938. It then extended some 2, 000 miles along the crestline of the Appalachian Range from Maine to Georgia.
MacKaye was very proud of his role in the establishment of the trail and was pleased to be called "the father of the Appalachian Trail. " Meanwhile, he became more widely engaged in regional planning activities. Beginning in 1923, he worked with Lewis Mumford, Clarence Stein, Stuart Chase, and other planners to organize the Regional Planning Association of America. He also met Patrick Geddes, the Scottish planner, and was impressed by his ideas on geotechnics.
From 1924 to 1928, he collaborated with Mumford in the preparation of special reports for the newly formed New York State Housing and Regional Planning Commission, and in 1925, he worked with Mumford to develop for Survey Graphic a special issue on regional planning, a landmark publication in the thinking of regional planners.
In 1928, he completed a statewide plan on park and forest development in Massachusetts for the Governor's Commission on Open Spaces.
In 1932, MacKaye resumed federal government service as a consultant for a planning study for the United States Indian Service on Indian reservations in South Dakota, New Mexico, and Arizona. From 1934 to 1936, he worked for the Division of Land Planning and Housing of the Tennessee Valley Authority in attempts to prepare a comprehensive regional plan for the Tennessee River basin.
Two years later, he was a planning consultant on flood control policies of the U. S. Forest Service. He ended federal government service in 1945 on the staff of the Rural Electrification Administration after preparing a study of possible regional development under a proposed Missouri Valley Authority.
Next, to his promotion of the Appalachian Trail, MacKaye was probably most proud of his role in the founding of the Wilderness Society in 1935 and in its earliest activities. He joined Robert Marshall, Aldo Leopold, and other prominent conservationists in organizing the society and was its first vice-president and its second president from 1945 to 1950.
He devoted most of this time to writing a synthesis of his life and philosophy of regional planning, which he hoped to publish under the title The Geotechnics of North America. The enormity of the task and failing health, however, permitted him to complete only a summary published in 1972, entitled A Two-Year Course in Geotechnics.
Achievements
MacKaye contributed importantly to formulation of its policies, which sought wider public support for the preservation of American wilderness areas. As honorary president from 1945 until his death, he lived to see the society become one of the most influential conservation organizations in the United States. On June 17, 2011 he was inducted into the Appalachian Trail Hall of Fame at the Appalachian Trail Museum as a charter member.
In this effort, and during a long career as a perceptive conservationist and planner, MacKaye was impressive as one who viewed all parts of the environment in their relation to organic habitability and human development. His ecological perceptions always seemed to motivate a search for what he called "a habitable globe. "
His early and essentially continuing ideas concerning regional planning were set forth in 1928 in The New Exploration, A Philosophy of Regional Planning, a book, declared Mumford, "that deserves a place on the same shelf that holds Henry Thoreau's Walden and George Perkins Marsh's Man and Nature. " In this publication MacKaye described a conflict in values between the urban industrial society and rural communal life.
He contended that the latter, an "indigenous" area of stable values, should be preserved for its own sake and as a refuge from the limitation and confusion of the city. The entire natural environment should be protected and managed with planning for society's best interests.
MacKaye made one of his most remarkable planning proposals in the New Republic, March 12, 1930. In an article entitled "The Townless Highway" he proposed a "highway built for the motorist and kept free from every encroachment, except the filling stations and restaurants necessary for his convenience. " This proposal, of course, represented an idea that developed into familiar beltways around municipalities of today.
Quotations:
"For we need this thing wilderness far more than it needs us. Civilizations (like glaciers) come and go, but the mountain and its forest continue the course of creation's destiny. And in this we mere humans can take part-by fitting our civilization to the mountain. "
"A period recourse into the wilds is not a retreat into secret silent sanctums to escape a wicked world, it is to take breath amid effort to forge a better world. "
"Wilderness is two things-fact and feeling. It is a fund of knowledge and a spring of influence. It is the ultimate source of health-terrestrial and human. "
"However useful may be the National Parks and Forests of the West for those affording the Pullman fare to reach them, what is needed by the bulk of the American population is something nearer home. "
"The problem of living is at bottom an economic one. And this alone is bad enough, even in a period of so-called "normalcy. " But living has been considerably complicated of late in various ways - by war, by questions of personal liberty, and by "menaces" of one kind or another. "
"One function, at least, of true wilderness is to provide a refuge from the crassitudes of civilization-whether visible, intangible, audible-whether of billboard, of pavement, of auto horn-all of these are urban essences; all are negations of wilderness. "
"My own doctrine of organization is that any body of people coming together for a purpose (whatever it may be) should consist of persons wholly wedded to said purpose and should consist of nobody else. If the purpose be Cannibalism (preference for Ham a la Capitalism) then nobody but a Cannibal should be admitted. There should be plenty of discussion and disagreement as to how and the means but none whatever as to ends. "
Personality
During much of the thirty-year period of his retirement, MacKaye lived mainly at the MacKaye family home at Shirley Center, Massachussets, and often spent winters at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D. C.
With a shock of hair framing a thin face, deep-set eyes, and a tall, lean figure, MacKaye had a considerably Lincolnesque appearance. His personal habits were simple and, in some respects, ascetic. He enjoyed solitude but cultivated friendships. He had a fine sense of humor and a gift for bold epithets. To persons who disagreed with his novel planning concepts, he admitted that he probably appeared "wild as a wolf and crazy as a loon. "
His life was remarkably long and full of activity. It ended in 1975 after a brief illness in his beloved boyhood community, Shirley Center, Massachussets
Connections
MacKaye married Jessie Belle Hardy on June 1, 1915.
Father:
James Morrison Steel MacKaye
6 June 1842 - 25 February 1894
Was a dramatist and actor.
Mother:
Mary Keith Medbery
Sister:
Hazel Mackaye
24 August 1880 - 11 August 1944
Wife:
Jessie Belle Hardy
1876 - April 18, 1921
Was president of the Milwaukee Women's Peace Society.
