On October 22, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Highway Beautification Act, a project long supported by Lady Bird Johnson, the first lady. She believed that cleaning up America's interstate highways by getting rid of ugly outdoor advertising, screening junkyards from view and planting flowers would make the nation both a better place to look at and a better place to live.
The bill was opposed by a number of business groups, but was supported by activists and a number of groups who were beginning to think seriously about the nation's poor environmental stewardship. (The Environmental Protection Agency was established in 1970 by President Richard Nixon.) Although the bill's enforcement was weak, it established the idea that nature, even along the roadside, was worth preserving.
I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree
And unless the billboards fall
I'll never see a tree at all.
-Ogden Nash
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