98 The Environmental Debate
this basis, a stable social adjustment could be
worked out for every part of the region, and for
every type of resource and activity. This common
ownership is not an objective in itself: it is merely
a means toward creating a system of dressing
and keeping the land as it must be dressed and
kept for an advanced civilization. Something can
indeed be done by education and public regula-
tion where the obsolete system of private own-
ership and control is preserved; but infinitely
more can and must be done by active authorities,
capable not merely of suggestion but decisive
action, capable of looking ahead over half a cen-
tury or more, and borrowing funds on the basis
of such long term action. A useful step toward
this system of common ownership consists in a
broadly applied scheme of land zoning: such as
that provided in the current English law which
“sterilizes” against change of use without public
permission all existing rural areas, or like that
worked out... in the Ruhr district before 1933.
A partial step in the same direction—restricting
marginal lands against inappropriate uses—has
been made in Wisconsin.Source: Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (New York:
Harcourt Brace, 1938), p. 329.Regional planning is essentially the effort to
apply scientific knowledge and stable standards
of judgment, justified by rational human values,
to the exploitation of the earth. Such knowledge
was deliberately flouted in the opening up of
the dry lands which have become the dust-bowl
of America, and the commonwealth has paid
dearly for that sacrifice to the demands of the
individual farmer and speculator. No commu-
nity can afford such luxuries of ignorance: the
function of science is to reduce the area of such
costly mistakes and finally wipe them out. With-
out the decisive control that rests with collective
ownership, in the hands of responsible public
administrators, working for the common good,
regional planning is an all but impossible task: at
best it must confine itself to weak admonitions,
partial prohibitions, various forms of negative
action: at most it can say what shall not be done,
but it has little power to command the forces of
positive action.
The common ownership of land would put
the division and supervision of the land in the
hands of the appropriate local and regional
authorities, who would map out areas of cultiva-
tion, areas of mining, areas of urban settlement,
as they now map out areas for public parks. On
Document 83: Lewis Mumford on Regional Planning (1938)
The cultural historian Lewis Mumford advocated strict zoning regulations, regional planning, and communal
land ownership as means to prevent inappropriate land development. He believed that a primary goal of the
design of buildings, cities, communities, and public and private space should be to tailor an appropriate fit
between humankind and the natural world. A generation later, Ian McHarg [see Document 110], a disciple of
Mumford, developed the concept of environmental impact.natives starved. Today, in years of shortage,
the French supply their dependent popula-
tions with seed from California. Arab farmers
in Mariout sometimes sell short to European
buyers and import seed grains from Pales-
tine. In a similar way changes are slowly tak-
ing place in more remote places. When new
barleys replace those grown by the farmers
of Ethiopia or Tibet, the world will have lost
something irreplaceable.
Source: H. V. Harlan and M. L. Martini, “Problems
and Results in Barley Breeding,” in U.S. Department of
Agriculture Yearbook of Agriculture, 1936 (Washington,
D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1936), p. 317.