#1597 Arbor Day and the Seeds of Liberty

Listening to America

Guest host David Horton of Radford University discusses America’s trees and forests with Third President Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson said, “No sprig of grass grows uninteresting to me.” He told his friend Margaret Bayard Smith that any unnecessary cutting down of a tree should be regarded as silvicide, the murder of a majestic living thing. Jefferson wanted future cities to be planned in a checkerboard pattern with every other square permanent parkland. One of his last requests, just months before his death, was that the University of Virginia plant an arboretum. Jefferson’s protégé Meriwether Lewis was so startled by the treelessness of the Great Plains that he wondered if they could ever be settled. Later in the program, Clay and David talk about the origins of the Soil Conservation Service and FDR’s idea of a single endless shelter belt down the hundredth meridian from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico.