Visual Pollution Essay: It's Time to Stop Billboard Advertising

Like a yoyo on a string, mass advertising is closely bound up with our capitalist system of free enterprise. The right to peddle your product is an accepted and integral part of American culture. Advertising infiltrates every aspect of our lives, from buses to cereal boxes. But when does advertising, figuratively speaking, go too far and turn to the dark side? In my mind, billboard advertising is the point of no return. Roadside billboards are visually offensive and aggressive advertising tools that mar natural landscapes and urban beauty. Our national roadways no longer showcase America the Beautiful, but rather America: The Land of Excess Signage. There is sufficient legal precedent and enough effective alternatives to roadside marketing to justify eliminating billboard advertising altogether on national, state, and county roadways. The open landscapes of our great American highways need to be protected from visual clutter.

There is a saying that beauty is its own reason for being. Preserving the beauties of the open highway is reason enough for wanting to eradicate roadside advertising. Billboards are ugly. Billboards constitute visual clutter that complicates life. At least on the freeway, people should be able to escape the onslaught of mass advertising. How many people will argue that dancing hamburgers plastered on towering steel skeletons are more appealing than an old homestead nestled in the sage hills or a rainstorm over distant mountains? It is interesting to note that some of the most popular destinations in the country are places that have no billboards. States suc...

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Thus, Americans can consider it a right and a privilege to drive down the highway and witness views free from excess signage. Left unchecked, advertisers have pursed Americans out into the natural landscapes of the nation, spawning an epidemic of ugliness in the form of billboard advertising. Under our Constitution a system of checks and balances exists and the economic right to advertise is certainly justified as long as it doesn't infringe on the equally important aesthetic right to view scenery on the open road. Mass marketing and capitalism cause the world to turn and the nation to prosper, but beauty bolsters the soul. When it comes down to a choice between aesthetics and free enterprise, I'll take grazing cattle and a green gold sunset over a billboard anytime.