A View Across the Golf Links: Pastoralism in an Era of Declining Civic Engagement

I n January 1973 Oregon resort developer John Gray stood before an assemblage of members of the National Association of Home Builders in Houston and publicly endorsed the stringent new environmental laws passed in his home state. He admonished fellow builders to do likewise. Careful land stewardship, he told the crowd, would show “in the color of [the] ink” on the developer's balance sheet. Thus in the new Oregon, nature would “enjoy the loving solicitude of a vast majority” and not just the “few noisy ecological nuts whose efforts bring little lasting benefit.” ¹ Gray was not exactly sublimating his economic interest in this environmental rhetoric. Stabilized land use, after all, was a key component of the well-groomed landscape he envisioned as backdrop for his exclusive Oregon resorts. The nature he defended, in speeches like this and in the resorts he built, differed from the pastoral images of the 1950s and the wilderness ideals of the next decade, but his commercialized expression of natural harmony was shared by many in the 1970s.