But the resources of the earth must be available to man for
his use and this necessarily means a modification of the original
scenery. Some pieces and kinds of scenery are above all economic use and
should be kept wholly in the natural state. Much of it may yield to
modification if he takes good care to preserve its essential features.
Unfortunately, the engineer seems not often to be trained in the values
of scenery and he is likely to despoil a landscape or at least to leave
it raw and unfinished.

On the other hand, there is unfortunately a feeling abroad that any
modification of a striking landscape is violation and despoliation; and
unwarranted opposition, in some cases amounting almost to prudery,
follows any needful work of utilization. Undoubtedly the farmer and
builder and promoter have been too unmindful of the effect of their
interference on scenery, and particularly in taking little care in the
disposition of wastes and in the healing of wounds; but a work either of
farming or of construction may add interest and even lines of beauty to
a landscape and endow it with the suggestion of human interest. If care
were taken in the construction of public and semi-public work to reshape
the banks into pleasing lines, to clean up, to care for, to plant, to
erect structures of good proportions whether they cost much or little,
and to give proper regard to the sensibilities of the communities, most
of the present agitation against interference with natural scenery would
disappear. One has only to visit the factory districts, the vacation
resorts, the tenement areas, the banks of streams and gorges, to look at
the faces of cliffs and at many engineering enterprises and at
numberless farmyards, to find examples of the disregard of men for the
materials that they handle. It is as much our obligation to hold the
scenery reverently as to handle the products reverently. Man found the
earth looking well. Humanity began in a garden.

The keeping of the good earth depends on preservation rather than on
destruction. The office of the farmer and the planter is to produce
rather than to destroy; whatever they destroy is to the end that they
may produce more abundantly; these persons are therefore natural
care-takers. If to this office we add the habit of good housekeeping, we
shall have more than one-third of our population at once directly
partaking in keeping the earth. It is one of the bitter ironies that
farmers should ever h