Scenic Florida | Preserving Florida

Judge Ackerman

"Those who live in an urban megalopolis are no strangers to the jungle of signs which daily compete for their attention. ... [A] municipality may perceive that a plethora of signs of a certain size, no matter how tasteful, can have an undesirable cumulative effect upon the well-being of the entire community."

Ansel Adams

"As the fisherman depends upon the rivers, lakes and seas and the farmer upon the land for his existence, so does mankind in general depend upon the beauty of the world about him for his spiritual and emotional existence."

Win Adams

"As a commissioner, this [the billboard industry] was the only industry that tried to, basically, buy my vote.  And I refused to give it to them."

Dennis Altman

"After 30 years of creating advertising for some of the world's largest corporations, I can say without fear of contradictions:  Outdoor advertising ought to be banned.  It is unnecessary, unattractive, inefficient and, in any strategic main-thrust campaign, usually indefensible."

"Almost everywhere you drive in the United States, outdoor advertising has been propped up to block the sight of sunsets, prairies, mountains, valleys, lakes, rivers and our greatest natural treasure:  trees.  And when a number of billboards are seen at once, a sickening synergy occurs, which lends an unmistakeable junkyard motif to what used to be pristine natural vistas."

Christopher Barbieri

"Vermont's national appeal has been significantly improved by the absence of [billboards]. . . You don't need billboards to attract people who are looking for a scenic alternative to urban America."

Bermuda Department of Tourism

"Bermuda Shorts:  An Island So Beautiful We Don't Allow Billboards."

William Blake

"The tree which moves some to tears of joy in the world is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. ... But by the eye of a man of imagination, nature is imagination itself."

Justice Louis Brandeis

"The young people as well as the adults have the message of the billboard thrust upon them by all the arts and devices that skill can produce.  In the case of newspapers and magazines, there must be some seeking by the one who is to see and read the advertisement.  The radio can be turned off, but not so the billboard or street car placard.  These distinctions clearly place this kind of advertisement in a position to be classified so that regulations or prohibitions may be imposed upon all within the class."

"Billboards, street car signs, and placards and such are in a class by themselves.  * * * Advertisements of this sort are constantly before the eyes of observers on the streets * * * to be seen without the exercise of choice or volition on their part.  Other forms of advertising are ordinarily seen as a matter of choice on the part of the observer.  * * * The radio can be turned off, but not so the billboard * * *."

Judge Bronson

"[W]e do not think the right to advertise a business is such that a businessman may appropriate common airspace and destroy common vistas."

Pat Brown

"When a man throws an empty cigarette package from an automobile, he is liable for a fine of $50.  When a man throws a billboard across a view, he is richly rewarded."

William F. Buckley, Jr.

"Billboards are acts of aggression against which the public is entitled, as a matter of privacy, to be protected."

Chief Justice Warren Burger

"Pollution is not limited to the air we breath and the water we drink; it can equally offend the eye and the ear."

President George Bush

"In my travels throughout the country, I see so many new suburbs utterly denuded of trees; ironic since the new owners' first instinct is to plant as many trees as possible.  My advice, leave the original trees.  It's good for business and very good for the environment."

President Jimmy Carter

"From Santander, along the northern coast of Spain, we meandered west and then southward, finally returning to Madrid, a total distance of about 1,400 miles as the crow flies.  ... The entire Castilian region in which we traveled has the 'big sky' appearance of Montana, with constant vistas of 20 or 30 miles.  We'd never realized before how beautiful is the absence of billboards!"

Chinese Proverb

"No shade tree?  Blame not the sun, but yourself."

Judge Clark

"We find it hard to conceive that our constitutional founders believed that visual blight and ugliness were a fundamental aspect of our national heritage or that our state and local governments were to be powerless in protecting the beauty and harmony in our human as well as our natural environments."

"[I]t is common knowledge that uncontrolled display of billboards and signs can distract travelling motorists and thereby create hazards to vehicular traffic and to pedestrians."

"'There are areas in which a discordant site is as hard an economic fact as an annoying odor or sound.'  United Advertising Corp. v. Metuchen, 42 N.J. 1, 198 A.2d 447, 449 (1964).  Thus it has been held that the aesthetic impact of billboards is an economic fact that might bear heavily upon the enjoyment and value of property."

Judge Clifford

"Consideration of aesthetics in municipal land use and planning is no longer a matter of luxury and indulgence. ... The development and preservation of natural resources and clean, salubrious neighborhoods contribute to physiological and emotional stability and well-being as well as stimulate a sense of civic pride.  We therefore hold that a zoning ordinance may accommodate aesthetic concerns."

Irene Davis

"I have been in the billboard business for 25 years. ... [I] see billboard companies becoming their own worst enemies. ... Why can't the industry regulate itself and be proud of each sign it owns?  In fact, we may find that money spent on lobbyists might go further by spending it on landscaping and cleaning up the locations."

Justice Douglas

"The concept of the public welfare is broad and inclusive ... [T]he values it represents are spiritual as well as physical, aesthetic as well as monetary.  It is within the power of the legislature to determine that the community should be beautiful as well as healthy, spacious as well as clean, well balanced as well as carefully patroled."

Justice William O. Douglas

"I hope to be remembered as someone who made the earth a little more beautiful."

Judge Finch

"A city might well conclude that it is more likely to attract commercial enterprises and permanent residents if it improves its appearance; that its residents will gain financially by such an improvement; or that the elimination of distracting and annoying billboards will add to the physical and mental well-being of its inhabitants. ... The billboard eyesore is in many ways akin to annoying sounds and undesirable odors which undoubtedly can be prohibited.  Although such restrictions may be more desirable in residential areas, nevertheless, their extension to business districts cannot be termed unreasonable."

Robert Frost

"The trees in the streets are old trees
    Used to living with people.
  Family trees that remember your grandfather's name."

Judge Fuld

"It has been said that billboards can be as destructive of the beauties of the countryside as a plague of locusts and that, consequently, aesthetic considerations alone are enough to sustain enactments restricting and regulating the erection of advertising devices."

Howard Luck Gossage

"Outdoor advertising is peddling a commodity it does not own and without the owner's permission:  your field of vision. ... [D]oesn't everything visible violate one's airspace?  Not at all.  Visibility is not the only consideration.  The Taj Mahal, street signs, the Golden Gate Bridge, a maze of telephone wires, even a garbage dump -- however they may intrude on the eye -- are not where they are merely to waylay your gaze; they have other functions as well.  A billboard has no other function, it is there for the sole and express purpose of trespassing on your field of vision.  Nor is it possible for you to escape; the billboard inflicts itself unbidden upon all but the blind or the recluse."

"I'm afraid the poor old billboard doesn't qualify as a[n] [advertising] medium at all; its medium, if any, is the scenery around it and that is not to give away.  Nor is a walk down the street brought to you through the courtesy of outdoor advertising."

Ray Hankamer, Jr.

"Numerous billbards along the roads leading to a hotel are a form of visual pollution.  Not only are they costly, but they have been rendered obsolete by new approaches to marketing."

Robert Hart

"One day even human beings will discover that beauty is a biological necessity."

Thomas Jefferson

"Communities should be planned with an eye to the effect on the human spirit of being continually surrounded by a maximum of beauty."

Lady Bird Johnson

"There were a great many rebuilding projects undertaken in our country in the sixties -- not just in the old terms of freeways ripping through established neighborhoods and parks, or of drab public housing so all-alike that it reminded one of Gertrude Stein's phrase 'There's no there there.'  The challenge was not whether to build, but how to do it with beauty and a passion for life and its fulfillment.  The environment is where we all meet; where we all have a mutual interest; it is one thing that all of us share.  Whatever its condition, it is, after all, a reflection of ourselves -- our tastes, our aspirations, our successes, and our failures.  Fortunately, if we want to badly enough, we can do much to change what is not pleasurable to the eye and spirit.  Even in the poorest neighborhoods you can find a geranium in a coffee can, a window box set against the scaling side of a tenement, a border of roses struggling to live in a tiny patch of open ground.  Where flowers bloom, so does hope."

"Green oases and neighborhood parks within cities offer a promise.  If people in humdrum jobs, in drab buildings, surrounded by noise and confusion, know they can move out of all that into areas of serene beauty and quiet, even for a brief time each day, they can better cope with conditions that may bring them to the breaking point."

"In one southern community, a bank paid for a mile of landscaping at the city's entrance.  The banker told me that no billboard, no radio or television advertising campaign had ever won him the daily applause he received for this project from his customers.  The bank was in the process of trying to get permission from the city to let it do the same thing at the city's three other entrances.  So many city fringes present the worst face of the town, a hodgepodge and a scrabble of flashing signs.  I remember thinking that the green entrance to that community said, 'Welcome' to me."

"Will Rogers once remarked that the two towns in America with the most personality were New Orleans and San Antonio.  Today both towns enjoy a booming tourist trade.  At various points in their past, they refused to let their personalities be devoured by the onslaught of so-called progress -- the metro dollars increased as a result.  Commerce capitalized on the natural gift of waterfronts and the natural heritage of many bloodlines.  At Hemifair in San Antonio, the planners built a great, modern exposition area, but thirty old buildings nearby were lovingly preserved and restored, and they are among the most colorful punctuation marks at the complex."

"Though the word 'beautification' makes the concept sound merely cosmetic, it involves much more:  clean water, clean air, clean roadsides, safe waste-disposal, and preservation of valued old landmarks as well as great parks and wilderness areas.  To me, in sum, beautification means our total concern for the physical and human quality we pass on to our children and the future."

Carol King

"The travel industry needs to be progressive, both in marketing, and in protecting what is really at the heart of a state's appeal.  We want a billboard-free landscape, and that is what vacationers say they want when they flock here.  You won't find a travel industry person in the state who doesn't agree with them."

Charles Kuralt

"There will always be a huckster."

"I have been to the place (Roanoke Island) often.  As you arrive from the South through the Cape Hatteras National Sea Shore Park, you see nothing but sand and surf and sea oats and water birds in great profusion and your impression is of the "Goodliest Land Under the Cope of Heaven."  If you arrive from the North, through Kitty Hawk and Nags Head, which is the way most people arrive, you pass through a clutter of clapboard and a forest of billboards, none of them, thank God with my name on it, and a chaos of hotdog stands and tee-shirt shops and strip malls and amusement parks.  These two environments collide at the Mobil Station at Whalebone Junction.  North of the gas station, nothing but scenic discord which depresses people.  South of it, all natural harmony which elevates people.  I think of that Mobil Station as the fulcrum upon which is balanced the worst nightmare and the best hope of all of us in this room tonight.  Two Americas meet there:  the ugly one and the beautiful one.  And of course, Americans of their own free will created them both.

We have to believe that place by place, mile by mile, we can preserve Scenic America and even reclaim ugly America.  I haven't a doubt from all these years of wandering that Americans want to do that.  And from all our history there is ample evidence that we can."

"I know that everywhere in America we are still tearing down the familiar and erecting the monstrous.  I know most of our cities still are, as John Steinbeck described them 35 years ago, 'like badger holes ringed with trash.'  I have been to the ugliest parts of Los Angeles, so I know what is prevalent, but I have been to Senator Jefford's state, too, and I know what is possible, therefore.  Those of us who care about this - I've already said I don't know much about it, but I do care about it - and I know we can't afford to be cynical.  If we believe nothing is ever going to change, nothing ever will."

"I think we've grown smarter.  I believe we are going to see the mountain billboards fall and the vistas of the Blue Ridge Parkway newly protected and new initiatives taken against the acid rain from the west that is the new threat to the trees and lakes.  It's given the soil on the top of Mount Mitchell, our highest hill and the highest one east of the Mississippi, it's given that soil a pH halfway between lemon juice and battery acid.  I think that's going to change, never again will an ugly condominium be built on one of those mountain ridges because now it's against the state law.  One could go on and on listing the determined efforts going on in a hundred, a thousand American places.  We do need legislation.  But the way it's really going to have to be done is place by place and one place after another by the people who live there."

"America does not belong to the franchisers and the developers and spoilers who do not give a damn about their country.  The land is ours.  Ordinary Americans, I am persuaded of this with all my heart, ordinary Americans want a beautiful country."

Louis L'Amour

"The trail is the thing, not the end of the trail.  Travel too fast and you'll miss all you are traveling for."

Madelker and Ewald

"For street graphics to communicate effectively, they must be neither too large nor too small, neither too numerous nor absent altogether, neither too garish nor too bland.  The principle of less is more, applies here.  A smaller number of well-designed street graphics that are properly related to the activities to which they pertain do a better job of indexing or selling than a plethora of gaudy graphics that compete for the viewer's attention ... When the environment becomes overloaded with graphic display ... the cumulative is negative.  The viewer actually sees less, not more."

"Another factor contributing to visual pollution is the lack of landscaping along many streets and highways, especially the often raw shoulder in the right-of-way.  Well-placed groups of appropriate trees and shrubs and orderly surface treatment can improve the appearance of almost any area -- particularly those vast expanses of asphalt given over to the automobile for parking, service (garages and gas stations), and display (used car lots).  It is recommended that at least one-fourth of any paved area larger than 5,000 square feet be shaded.  This shade can be created by planting trees or by erecting a canopy or some other structure.  The object is to create a park like environment or an architectural form in an area that otherwise is a wasteland.  Landscaping is a particularly important consideration in shopping centers, where enormous parking lots are potentially the great open spaces of the suburban landscape."

"Imagine the change in the view of America if signs and billboards spoke to us separately instead of screaming at us en masse.  If the overhead utility cables were buried out of sight.  If public rights-of-way (and parking lots) were landscaped.  Consider what it would be like if you could find and read street names and house numbers easily, if symbols and roadside radio signaled to drivers 'where to find what' -- instead of the all-too-common verbose signs we have now."

"In this automobile-oriented society, there is probably nowhere that the vision of America can be improved more swiftly, less expensively, or as extensively as from our streets and country highways.  The no-man's land within public rights-of-way where private and public interests meet is where one can read the character of a community or a state."

"If the question is whether aesthetics may play a part in a zoning judgment, the subject is hardly new.  There are areas in which aesthetics and economics coalesce, areas in which a discordant sight is as hard an economic fact as an annoying odor or sound.  We refer not to some sensitive or exquisite preference but to concepts of congruity held so widely that they are inseparable from the enjoyment and hence the value of property."

Edward T. McMahon

"The more a community comes to resemble 'Anyplace, U.S.A.', the less reason there will be to visit."

"It is not enough to simply put up a sign saying 'Scenic Highway,' we must protect the character of the land and buildings along the road.  If we don't, one thing is certain:  What is scenic today won't be tomorrow."

"In an effort to attract business, merchants often engage in a destructive competition to see who can build the biggest, tallest, most attention-grabbing signs.  Ironically, in such competition both the merchants and the town lose.  When there is an overabundance of competing signs, the message of each is lost.  One city planner explained it this way:  'When everyone shouts, no one can be heard; when all speak softly, each voice is distinct.'"

"A good sign code is pro-business, since an attractive business district will attract more customers than an ugly one.  Moreover, when signs are controlled, merchants do a better job of selling, and at less cost."

Margaret Mead

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it's the only thing that ever has."

John Miller

"In an age in which advertisers propose rocketing billboards into orbit to illuminate the night sky, it is no coincidence that litter and graffiti are on the rise.  The proliferation of litter and graffiti increases exponentially in a society willing to tolerate, if not encourage, advertisers intent on commercializing all public space, including outer space."

"To maintain sanity, the public anesthetizes itself.  We participate in and comply with the defacement of public space and the negation of our right to privacy by our willingness to desensitize ourselves to these excessive assaults upon our sensibilities.  We become oblivious to our immediate environment, sort of functionally unconscious.  In compensation, billboards get bigger, litter gets deeper, graffiti becomes more outrageous."

Ogden Nash

"I think that I shall never see
A billboard lovely as a tree.
Indeed, unless the billboards fall,
I'll never see a tree at all."

David Ogilvy

"Billboards represent less than two per cent of total advertising in the United States.  I cannot believe that the free-enterprise system would be irreparably damaged if they were abolished.  Who is in favor of them?  Only the people who make money out of them."

"As a private person, I have a passion for landscape, and I have never seen one improved by a billboard.  Where every prospect pleases, man is at his vilest when he erects a billboard.  When I retire from Madison Avenue, I am going to start a secret society of masked vigilantes who will travel around the world on silent motor bicycles, chopping down posters at the dark of the moon.  How many juries will convict us when we are caught in these acts of beneficent citizenship?"

Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

"It seems to me that the earth may be borrowed but not bought.  It may be used but not owned.  We are tenants, not possessors, lovers, and not masters."

Mayor Joe Riley

"To achieve excellence should be a struggle."

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt

"Government cannot close its eyes to the pollution of waters, to the erosion of soil, to the slashing of forests any more than it can close its eyes to the need for slum clearance and schools."

President Theodore Roosevelt

"Here in the United States we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy forests, exterminate fishes, birds, and mammals -- not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisments."

St. Petersburg Times

"The outdoor advertising industry has had doors slammed in its face all over Florida the last few years as residents grew tired of a landscape marred by towering signs and urged their local governments to ban billboards.  But in those hallowed halls in Tallahassee where our state legislators work, the billboard industry has found the doors wide open and the red carpet rolled out."

William Shakespeare

"The earth has music for those who will listen."

Judge Sharp

"Earlier in the 20th century aesthetics was deemed by some courts as a suspect or second-rate basis for the exercise of the police-power.  But urban living has become increasingly complex and has produced problems of crowding and blight unforeseen in those simpler times.  Those changes have brought about an expanded view of the police power, and most courts in this decade recognize aesthetics as a valid part of the general welfare for the preservation of which, the police power may legitimately be exercised."

"We question whether only beautiful or unblighted communities should be allowed to exercise their "police powers" to accomplish aesthetic goals.  Once marred, should a community be forever condemned to ugliness?  Attracting the influx of new business or residents bears just as important an impact on a city's economic welfare as maintaining an already established tourist trade."

Justice Stevens

"As is true of billboards, the esthetic interests that are implicated by temporary signs [political campaign signs on public property] are presumptively at work in all parts of the city, including those where the appellees posted their signs, and there is no basis in the record in this case upon which to rebut that presumption.  These interests [aesthetic interests] are both psychological and economic.  The character of the environment affects the quality of life and the value of property in both residential and commercial areas."

"Here, the substantive evil - visual blight - is not merely a possible by-product of the activity, but is created by the medium of the expression itself."

Judge Tauro

"If it is reasonable totally to prohibit billboards in Concord, ... and to prohibit billboards in residential areas, ... we cannot say that it is arbitrary and unreasonable for Brookline to exclude billboards from its community.  We believe that it is within the scope of the police power for the town to decide that its total living area should be improved so as to be more attractive to both its residents and visitors."

"Whether an area is urban, suburban, or rural should not be determinative of whether the residents are entitled to preserve and enhance their environment.  Urban residents are not immune to ugliness."

"[T]o conclude that an area is too unattractive to justify aesthetic improvement would be both unreasonable and illogical."

Henry David Thoreau

"In Wilderness is the preservation of the World.  Every tree sends its fibers forth in search of wild.  The cities import it at any price. ..."

"Shall that dirty roll of bunting in the gunhouse be all the colors a village can display?  A village is not complete, unless it have [these] trees to mark the season in it.  They are important, like the town clock.  A village that has them not will not be found to work well.  It has a screw loose, as essential part is wanting.  ... Of course, there is not a picture-gallery in the country which would be worth so much to us as is the western view at sunset under the elms of our main street.
... A village needs these innocent stimulants of bright and cheering prospects to keep off melancholy and superstition."

Judge Tobriner

"Because this state [California] relies on its scenery to attract tourists and commerce, aesthetic considerations assume economic value.  Consequently, any distinction between aesthetic and economic grounds as a justification for billboard regulation must fail."

"[T]o hold that a city cannot prohibit off-site commercial billboards for the purpose of protecting and preserving the beauty of the environment is to succumb to a bleak materialism."

Mark Twain

"We take stock of a city like we take stock of a man.  The clothes or appearance are the externals by which we judge."

Stewart L. Udall

"America today stands on a pinnacle of wealth and power, yet we live in a land of vanishing beauty, of increasing ugliness, of shrinking open spaces, of an overall environment diminished daily by noise, pollution, and blight."