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   For reasons which become apparent later, pollution started with water. Rectifying the water position is the starting point for designing the elimination of pollution. The City Forest refers to a specific area of the remedy. As a first step, it is proposed that the filtered effluent from sewerage treatment works and other used waters of town and city, be delivered via pump and pipeline to selected areas of land and not to the rivers and the seas as it is today. On the selected land these waste waters would be re-used to grow forests in the likeness of Nature's rain forest. The growth stimulants of the effluents would stimulate the growth of the trees. The water would be cleaned and reconstituted in the natural processes of the forests and flow from the forest soil to join the common waters of the land and the seas as clear fresh water.

   While nothing which man has devised for either getting rid of water or for reconstituting used water approached the efficiency of the natural rain forests, the designed City Forest will far excel them in effectiveness for the purpose.

   This is the immediate action suggested for today's cities in order to partly offset the mistakes of the past and the problems of water pollution now. But because air, water and soil are the trinity of life and indivisable, this is also an attack on air and soil pollution.

   The prospects for tomorrow are brighter. A balance of the water budget in our take and return of good water would extend to balance and health in the total environment.

   Cities on their own cannot be made pollution free; the problem is continent wide and world wide. The City Forest and a Strip Forest for every farm, would be an integral part of the new landscape design for city, town and country. New cities can then be made pollution free and function with a degree of efficiency not now approached. The wide agricultural landscape can be redesigned economically and profitably in farmscapes with complete control of water, with trees planted to enhance and improve the land and with fertile soil to add the final elegance to the countryside. Instead of farming land being the greater polluter it is now, it would become the perpetual guardian of the health and balance of the environment.

   Even great industrial complexes and large mining enterprises can be designed to remain in balance with the landscape and not destroy and degrade it.

   Our Australia is a divergent land. It has landscapes and plant life and animal life which are unique. Those who have controlled its land polities and those also who have occupied so much of this land in the past, have not always discharged their responsibilities to it or to its peoples.

   Australia is a damaged land. There are places which few Australians have seen where the surface to several feet has been taken by wind from thousands of square miles.

   The tough land has proved to be a fragile land.

   The impaired landscapes can be recovered and made the most attractive land on earth both for Australians to live in and for the world's people to visit and enjoy. But all our landscapes have to be guarded and enhanced, because even now big business interests are planning the "development" of land where the destruction of all trees over vast areas, together with other orthodox agricultural practices, will inevitably lead to further wide landscape destruction.

   The acquisition of low priced land in Australia by overseas investors, has placed a value of a few cents in the dollar on our land, compared with similar land in their own countries. Already the areas lost in the North are than the states of Victoria and Tasmania combined. This is a form of pollution by the Establishment which needs to be reversed.

   I became involved with the problem of designing a healthy landscape when I bought 1,000 acres of poor land in a region of unreliable rainfall in 1943 and tried to farm it. The objective was to produce 1,000 acres of fertile soil in a landscape which was planned logically. I was singularly unsuccessful for a time. But eventually I found a quick way to convert very poor earths into fertile soil and a logical way to design a landscape.

   The relevances of these experiments and experiences on the land, which were recorded in my three earlier books and various papers, are many. For instance, the first special purpose landscape of man was the farm, where everyone lived on the land. It was not only the place where the food was produced, it was also the home of the arts and skills which were the foundation of the industries. Therefore, if the soil of the farm deteriorated and lost its fertility, or the land was wrongly designed or lacked design altogether, thus weakening the balance of the natural landscape, there was little chance that later and far more populous landscapes would be better. On the other hand, if the farming of land was right and the design of the farm was in balance, the wider landscapes of city, town and country could not be in such a plight today.

   THE FARM WAS AND STILL REMAINS THE CRITICALLY IMPORTANT LANDSCAPE OF MAN. However a healthy and well designed farm is almost as rare as the sensibly designed city--nevertheless it is on the farms where the problems of unhealthy soil and good landscape design must first be solved and where designs for health and balance must be integrated. Many of the arts and skills of good farming are important to the design and workings of the clean city.

   Fertile soil is a precious thing. it has also been found to very temporary; its fertility can be lost by faulty management in a few decades. But it will be shown that the process can be reversed and the impoverished soil be made more fertile and deeper than it ever was, and in a few years. The responses of the disordered landscape to good design and management can likewise be rapid. The redesign of the landscapes for health and efficiency can be approached with optimism.

   The professions have produced many masterpieces of design within the environment but for the landscapes of town and country, which should have been planned to last indefinitely, there is no logical basis of design. The best of cities appear to be Topsy planned--they just grew and grew out of a series of accidents into the malignancies they are now.

   There are two classes of landscapes. Class one is the Wide Enfolding Landscapes of Nature. Class two is the Special Purpose Landscapes of Man.

   The landscapes within class one are the larger of the two. They are the landscapes of the great mountain chains and river systems; of coastal plains and shore lines; of the great rain forests to the savannah type of grassland with its few scattered trees; of the wide grasslands of the continents of the world--the pampas, the great plains, the steppes and the prairies--of the marshes and the wet lands, of the semi-arid lands and the deserts.

   They are the landscapes of the geographer, the geologist and the anthropologist; the landscapes of the migrating birds, of our emu and kangaroo, of the elephant and the giraffe, of the lion and the leopard, and of the herds of the grasseaters.

   The landscapes within class two--the special purpose landscapes of man--have been imposed on the natural landscapes of class one and now appear to dominate them; even climates have been affected and land shape has been altered by great movements of soil and earth. These landscapes are the cityscapes and townscapes; they are the landscapes of the grazing properties and the farms, of the planted forests, of the rail systems and the roads, of the nature reserves and the parklands, and of the many smaller landscapes within them, down to the house block with the dog-house in the backyard.

   They are the landscapes of the city dwellers and townsfolk, of the farmers and the foresters; of the sociologists, the biologists and the doctors; of the industrialists and the miners; the golfers and the skiers; of the scientists and the artists--of all of us. This is our world.

   These are the landscapes of mismanagement which are offending Nature and polluting the planet.