When many people think of beauty, they imagine personal attractiveness. L’Oreal’s advertising slogan, BEAUTY FOR ALL!, isn’t about the places where we live, it’s about selling cosmetics and enhancing personal image. In a sense, marketing has not only constricted our idea of beauty, but it’s also made many of us cynical about the concept in general. Some post-modernists have even claimed that beauty is a distraction from the important work we need to do for justice and equity. I don’t think so, and neither does Harvard philosopher Elaine Scarry who, in On Beauty and Being Just, argues that beautiful surroundings make people kinder, more tolerant, more generous and more interested in fairness.
Moreover, numerous studies, including Gallup’s Soul of the Community survey, document the ways in which beauty enhances our sense of wellbeing and our attachment to the communities we live in. Beauty, in the form of easy access to nature and green space, is also a powerful balm for human health, as the new Parks RX movement in the United States has shown. Just a short time spent in a beautiful natural setting can appreciably reduce stress, especially for urban children. As Vienna transportation planner Hermann Knoflacher pointed out to me, beautiful surroundings also provide a substitute for consumerism and encourage more sustainable behaviors such as walking or biking to work or taking public transportation.
I am currently directing a new film about America’s champion of beauty in public policy. Stewart Udall was Secretary of the Interior during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. As such, he was the lead advocate for many of the most important environmental laws we now take for granted: the Clean Air and Water Acts; the Wilderness Act; the Land and Water Conservation Fund; the Pesticide Reduction Act; the Mining Reclamation Act; the Endangered Species List; the National Scenic Trails Act and the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, among others. Through his efforts, 60 units were added to our National Park System. He stopped power dams from being built in the Grand Canyon.
Udall’s belief was that all Americans had a right to both justice and beauty. He fought to end segregation at the University of Arizona in the 1940s, forced the Washington Redskins football team to integrate in 1962, approved Martin Luther King’s March on Washington on National Park lands in 1963, and re-shaped the Bureau of Indian Affairs to give greater self-determination to Native Americans. He traveled to the Soviet Union with poet Robert Frost on a peace mission in 1962. And he persuaded Lady Bird Johnson to launch her famous national “Beautification” campaign in 1964 with a focus on Washington DC’s poorest African American communities. He brought artists and musicians and other creatives to perform at the White House and for members of the Cabinet.
He was the first public official to warn of global warming, in the mid-1960s, and sounded the alarm throughout his life. He represented victims of environmental injustice such as the Navajo uranium miners who got cancer from their work and the “downwinders” who got theirs from atmospheric nuclear testing in the Nevada desert, and he fought against the Cold War government secrecy that led to cover-ups of these injustices.
By John de Graaf