State of the Union | Page 5

now, to build
them all within 5 years. This program will get them built within 5
years.
As our cities and suburbs relentlessly expand, those priceless open
spaces needed for recreation areas accessible to their people are
swallowed up--often forever. Unless we preserve these spaces while

they are still available, we will have none to preserve. Therefore, I shall
propose new financing methods for purchasing open space and
parklands now, before they are lost to us.
The automobile is our worst polluter of the air. Adequate control
requires further advances in engine design and fuel composition. We
shall intensify our research, set increasingly strict standards, and
strengthen enforcement procedures-and we shall do it now.
We can no longer afford to consider air and water common property,
free to be abused by anyone without regard to the consequences.
Instead, we should begin now to treat them as scarce resources, which
we are no more free to contaminate than we are free to throw garbage
into our neighbor's yard.
This requires comprehensive new regulations. It also requires that, to
the extent possible, the price of goods should be made to include the
costs of producing and disposing of them without damage to the
environment.
Now, I realize that the argument is often made that there is a
fundamental contradiction between economic growth and the quality of
life, so that to have one we must forsake the other.
The answer is not to abandon growth, but to redirect it. For example,
we should turn toward ending congestion and eliminating smog the
same reservoir of inventive genius that created them in the first place.
Continued vigorous economic growth provides us with the means to
enrich life itself and to enhance our planet as a place hospitable to man.
Each individual must enlist in this fight if it is to be won.
It has been said that no matter how many national parks and historical
monuments we buy and develop, the truly significant environment for
each of us is that in which we spend 80 percent of our time--in our
homes, in our places of work, the streets over which we travel.
Street litter, rundown parking strips and yards, dilapidated fences,
broken windows, smoking automobiles, dingy working places, all
should be the object of our fresh view.
We have been too tolerant of our surroundings and too willing to leave
it to others to clean up our environment. It is time for those who make
massive demands on society to make some minimal demands on
themselves. Each of us must resolve that each day he will leave his
home, his property, the public places of the city or town a little cleaner,

a little better, a little more pleasant for himself and those around him.
With the help of people we can do anything, and without their help, we
can do nothing. In this spirit, together, we can reclaim our land for ours
and generations to come.
Between now and the year 5000, over 100 million children will be born
in the United States. Where they grow up--and how will, more than any
one thing, measure the quality of American life in these years ahead.
This should be a warning to us.
For the past 30 years our population has also been growing and shifting.
The result is exemplified in the vast areas of rural America emptying
out of people and of promise--a third of our counties lost population in
the sixties.
The violent and decayed central cities of our great metropolitan
complexes are the most conspicuous area of failure in American life
today.
I propose that before these problems become insoluble, the Nation
develop a national growth policy.
In the future, government decisions as to where to build highways,
locate airports, acquire land, or sell land should be made with a clear
objective of aiding a balanced growth for America.
In particular, the Federal Government must be in a position to assist in
the building of new cities and the rebuilding of old ones.
At the same time, we will carry our concern with the quality of life in
America to the farm as well as the suburb, to the village as well as to
the city. What rural America needs most is a new kind of assistance. It
needs to be dealt with, not as a separate nation, but as part of an overall
growth policy for America. We must create a new rural environment
which will not only stem the migration to urban centers, but reverse it.
If we seize our growth as a challenge, we can make the 1970's an
historic period when by conscious choice we transformed our land into
what we want it to become.
America, which has pioneered in the new abundance, and in the new
technology, is called upon