NATURE —AND MAN

Hawke's Bay Tribune, Volume XXV, Issue 186, 25 July 1935, Page 11

NATURE —AND MAN

1 Need of Wilderness 7 FOR PEACE AND QUIETNESS [Edited by Leo Fanning.] 1 How oit one hears tho phrase, “This is the age of noise.” The craze for jazz was a reaction against real musi c r and a deliberate preference of noise, il Plenty of people have their radio sets t switched on all day and far into the 4 night—sometimes all night. It seems e that they would be uneasy, vaguely i. troubled with a sense of loss, unless 0 they have some kind of noise about r them. ® Many folk believe that the devil, '■ wandering through the world with his e temptations of men and women, carries e his hell with him. Science has made "" it possible for man to trail the world at his heel, hitch it to his house, and ® hear the noises of the continents and t the seven seas. This enables the devil to have a thought similar to Swinburne’s expression; ‘‘And Evil saith to “ Good: ‘My brother, my brother, I am J one with thee.’ ” TIED TO THE WORLD’S WHEELS. It is queer that so many millions of a people in the wide world dread a period , of quietness. The mere notion of quiet e thought would appal them. They do 4 not wish to read, unless the matter is , flimsily superficial or sensational, f A while ago I read a little newspaper - article headed “Don’ts for Girl Campers,” which contained this i passage:— 1 “Don’t forget that the up-to-date , camper includes a wireless set in the camp equipment. The aerial i s slung I between two trees.” j Could a more staggering sacrilege be perpetrated in the sylvan realm of j Pan? When he saw those girl campers 3 coming into his kingdom, Pan forgot about the up-to-dateness. Foolish 1 Pan I He thought that they had wearied of the worrying, hurrying . world, and sought peace tor a space i among the dryads and naiad# who . minister to man thought they are not visible to ordinary eyes. So he ordered j the fairies to put more music into the f little rills playing among the ferns and - mosses, and the trees were told to i give their immemorial melody—but the i up-to-daters preferred coon choruses and the queer cachinnation of the saxophone . . . But perhaps the girls decided to be out of date and declined to obey that “Don’t forget the wireless set.” A NECESSARY REACTION. This is not the world’s first era of ■ the compound life. The past two thousand years have seen many periods of the complex life, followed by the simple, which has to come in its turn, if life is to be worth living. One reads in certain parts of the papers that a patent food or drink can repair all the havoc brought by the confounding compoundness of things. That may be so, but the usual cure is in quietness, as Milton wrote:— “Wisdom's self Oft seeks to sweet retired solitude, Where with her best nurse, Contemplation, She plumes her feathers, and lets grow her wings. That, in the various bustle of resort, Were all too ruffled, and sometimes impaired.” A MOVE IN AMERICA. Some leading nature-lovers of the U.S.A., including Mr Robert S. Yard (secretary of. the National Parks Association) are organising the Wilderness Society to resist needless commercial or motor-roading invasions of certain wilderness areas and to stimulate public appreciation of the “emotional, intellectual and scientific values” of the primitive. In its platform the society presents the wilderness as a “natural mental resource having the same basic relation to man’s ultimate thought and culture as coal, timber, and other physical resources have to his material needs.” It is urged that the use of this resource should be considered a public utility and therefore its commercialisation should not be tolerated, AN ENLIGHTENED CIVIL SERVANT. Happily the promoters of that American Wilderness Society will have the strong support of a very important civil servant, Mr Harold L. Ickes, Federal Secretary of the Interior. Here is some of the wisdom which ho spoke at the opening of a convention of Civil Conservation Corps workers in State Parks:— “I am tremendously interested in parks, particularly in those sections of them which are wilderness. I think we ought to keep as much wilderness in this country of ours as we can. “I am not in favour of building any more roads in the National Parks than we have to build. I am not in favour of doing anything along the line of socalled improvements tdat we do not have to do. This is an automobile age, but I do not have a great deal of patience with people whose idea of enjoying nature is dashing along a hard road at fifty or sixty miles an hour. lam not willing that our beautiful areas should be opened up to people who are either too old to walk, as 1 am, or too lazy to walk, as a great many young people are who ought to b« ashamed of themselves. I do not happen to favour the scarring of a wonderful mountain side just so that we can say we have a skyline drive. It sounds poetical, but it may be an atrocity.”

A LESSON FOR NEW ZEALAND. There are some woodlands in New Zealand where the making of tourist roads may be justifiable, but there are certainly some areas of beautiful wilderness where such action would be the worst kind of stupid vandalism. Several proposals of that sort have been put up during the past year, and the spoilers will have their way unless the people in tho district&jioneerned make a powerful demonstration against the sacrilege. Some of the new roads into forest regions have been used by motorists not for the enjoyment of Nature’s charms but for the poaching of native pigeons. New Zealand’s people must insist on the strict preservation of scenic “zones of quiet,” where the body and innid can gain now strength and inspiration for life’s tasks.