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PERSEECTIVES ON CONSERVATION
N Essays on America’s Natural Resources
Fssays on America’s natural resources
by JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH, ERNEST S. GRIFFITH, LUTHER GULICK, EDWARD S. MASON,
THOMAS B. NOLAN, GILBERT F. WHITE
Bushrod W. Allin, Robert C. Cook, Harry A. Curtis, Samuel T. Dana, Charles M. Hardin, Henry C. Hart, Robert W. Hartley, Philip M. Hauser, Samuel P. Hays, Joseph L. Intermaggio, Minor S. Jameson, Jr.,
Robert E. Merriam, Sigurd F. Olson, Wilham Pincus, Paul B. Sears, Byron T. Shaw, Abel Wolman
PUBLISHED FOR
Resources for the Future, Inc.
mee oP ER CrIVES Yi, y
e om CONSERVATION
EDITED BY HENRY JARRETT
By The Johns Hopkins Press
BALTIMORE
RESOURCES FOR THE FUTURE, INC. 1755 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036
Board of Directors:
William S. Paley, Chairman, Robert O. Anderson, Harrison Brown,
Erwin D. Canham, Edward J. Cleary, Joseph L. Fisher, Luther H. Foster, Charles J. Hitch, Hugh L. Keenleyside, Edward S. Mason, Frank Pace, Jr., Laurance S. Rockefeller, Stanley H. Ruttenberg, Lauren K. Soth,
John W. Vanderwilt, P. F. Watzek.
Honorary Directors: Horace M. Albright, Reuben G. Gustavson,
Otto H. Liebers, Leslie A. Miller.
President: Joseph L. Fisher Vice President: Michael F. Brewer Secretary-Treasurer: John E. Herbert
Resources for the Future is a non-profit corporation for research and
education in the development, conservation, and use of natural resources.
It was established in 1952 with the cooperation of the Ford Foundation and its activities since then have been financed by grants from that Foundation. Part of the work of Resources for the Future is carried out by its resident
staff, part supported by grants to universities and other non-profit organizations. Unless otherwise stated, interpretations and conclusions in
RFF publications are those of the authors; the organization takes responsibility for the selection of significant subjects for study, the competence of the researchers, and their freedom of inquiry.
Director of RFF publications, Henry Jarrett; editor, Vera W. Dodds; associate editor, Nora E. Roots.
Copyright © 1958 by The Johns Hopkins Press, Baltimore, Maryland 21218 All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America
Originally published, 1958 Second printing, 1961 Third printing, 1966 Fourth printing, 1968
I9P76.-WHOLPOAS TEP
CONTENTS
Editor’s Introduction, vi
I. The First Fifty Years ERNEST S. GRIFFITH: Main Lines of Thought and Action, 3
SAMUEL T. DANA: Pioneers and Principles, 24 HENRY C. HART: The Changing Context of the Problems, 34 SAMUEL P. HAYS: The Mythology of Conservation, 40
II, Science, Technology, and Natural Resources THOMAS B. NOLAN: The Inexhaustible Resource of Technology, 49
BYRON T. SHAW: Technology on the Land, 67 ROBERT C. COOK: Malthus’ Main Thesis Still Holds, 72 HARRY A. CURTIS: The Barrier of Cost, 79
III. Resource Demands and Living Standards
JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH: How Much Should a Country Consume? 89
PHILIP M. HAUSER: The Crucial Value Problems, 100 PAUL B. SEARS: Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Balance of Nature, 106
IV. Urban Growth and Natural Resources
PUTHER GULICK: The City’s Challenge in Resource Use, 115
vi Contents
JOSEPH L. INTERMAGGIO:
Some Problems in City Planning, 138 SIGURD F. OLSON: Our Need of Breathing Space, 144 ABEL WOLMAN: Selective Opportunism, the Surest Way, 150
V. Some Determinants of Resource Policy
EDWARD S. MASON: The Political Economy of Resource Use, 157
ROBERT W. HARTLEY: The Broadening Base of Resource Policy, 187
MINOR S. JAMESON, JR.: Policy Criteria for Petroleum, 191
BUSHROD W. ALLIN: The Waning Role of Laissez Faire, 196
VI. Organizing for Conservation and Development GILBERT F. WHITE: Broader Bases for Choice: The Next Key Move, 205
CHARLES M. HARDIN: Can We Still Afford a Separate Resources Policy? 227
ROBERT E. MERRIAM: The Plus Side of the Record, 233 WILLIAM PINCUS: The Federal Responsibility for Leadership, 240
Index, 249
EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION
The use and enjoyment of natural resources is everybody’s concern. Enough food, clothing, materials to make things with, energy for homes, factories, and transportation, pure water, fresh air, elbow room in natural surroundings for sport or contemplation, and other resource products sustain life and make it worth living. Everyone wants enough of these good things for his own family and those who will come after. Also, at least in a democracy, the ultimate decisions on how to use resources are everybody’s responsibility.
In exercising their responsibility, however, the people more often than not have to rely on specialists of various kinds. There are com- plex technologies of forestry, mining, oil and gas extraction, water de- velopment, and other fields that largely determine how much of a resource product is available and how it can be used. There are com- plicated economic factors that influence production and consumption and help determine who pays the costs and who reaps the benefits. There are other important, sometimes highly technical, considerations including those of political and social organization and population growth.
Specialist and layman are mutually dependent in the modern world and have a lot to learn from each other, particularly, it sometimes seems, in the field of resource conservation and development. In no field, certainly, is there greater need of bringing the two together.
The aim of this book, as of the Resources for the Future Forum on which it is based, is to bring expert opinion to bear upon a few re- source problems of wide interest and significance. The informed sec- tion of the general public to which the essays are addressed is itself a large and diverse group, for in this age of specialization the authority in one field is the layman in another. Specifically, the book seeks to
Vii
Vill Editor’s Introduction
shed light on some of the resource conservation problems of the next fifty years from the vantage point of a critical review of the past fifty.
Reckoning from 1908 when Theodore Roosevelt convened the first Governors’ Conference to consider resource problems, the idea of conservation has been a strong influence in the national life for half a century. The origins of the movement are much older than that. In the earlier years of Roosevelt’s presidency there had been a spreading ferment and some notable accomplishments; and these, in turn, had been preceded by a chain of developments running well back into the nineteenth century. But it was at the time of the Governors’ Confer- ence that the conservation idea emerged fully and unmistakably as a conscious, widely recognized force in American thought and action. It has remained so ever since.
Nineteen hundred and fifty-eight, therefore, is a golden anniversary year. Through a happy coincidence it is also the one hundredth anni- versary of the birth of Theodore Roosevelt. This is not, however, a commemorative volume of the conventional wreath-laying variety. Neither is it an exercise in historical analysis for its own sake. The main purpose is to examine the record of the past fifty years for the lessons that may contribute to the understanding and solution of present resource problems and those of the next fifty years. We are concerned here not with a chapter that has closed, but with a con- tinuous set of dynamic developments that is still unfolding. This, after all, is the most fitting commemoration of T.R. and the other early giants of conservation, and the one they would have understood best: continued critical inquiry into the problems they saw as so important and absorbing.
William Howard Taft once remarked that conservation was such an abstruse subject that many people were for it no matter what it meant. There was, and still is, a good deal of truth in the tart joke. The essays in this book do not suggest any one best set of answers; many of the contributors, in fact, pointedly avoid any definitions of the key word. Some see the central problem in terms of the good life, some in terms of technology or economics, some from intermediate positions. Yet clearly the core of what they are talking about is some-
Editor’s Introduction 1x
thing real that they can communicate to each other and to any reader willing to meet them halfway.
Perhaps when President Taft made his jaundiced observation he put his finger on a major strength as well as a minor weakness of the conservation idea. England and America have been well served by their peoples’ highly developed genius for knowing when to rise above strict definitions, logic, and consistency in going about the public busi- ness. One of the costs of this pragmatic knack is that it enhances the importance—and the difficulty—of distinguishing the significant de- velopments of the past from the trivial and transient. In using the past as a springboard for appraising the present and future, hard questions arise on all sides.
The essays in this book explore some of them. For example, what forces during the past fifty years have shaped American concepts of conservation and attitudes toward it? What have been the really im- portant issues and trends in land and water, minerals and energy, outdoor recreation, and fish and wildlife management? How have re- source development policies and programs affected the nation’s econ- omy, political life, and social structure—and vice versa? Most impor- tant of all, what guidance does the record of the past offer for the future? We shall surely need all the guidance we can get, in a period when the growth of cities, increases in total population, and con- tinuing advances in technology will intensify or otherwise change the already familiar resource problems and doubtless bring some entirely new ones.
Few responsible persons care to give pat answers to large questions of this kind. This book offers none, nor does it attempt to be an en- cyclopedia in an assemblage of related fields that runs all the way from the A of aesthetics to the Z of zoology. It is intended, rather, as a modest guidepost toward better understanding of a set of complex and important problems. There are, naturally, conflicts among the interpretations and proposals of the twenty-three contributors, for they deal from a wide range of viewpoints with living questions and issues. But the sum of their essays adds up to more than a random sheaf of facts and comments. As a serious effort to help clarify an inherently confusing tangle of evidence, the book is held together by a definite pattern built around a central idea.
x Editor's Introduction
This pattern can be best explained, perhaps, by recalling briefly the series of public lectures and discussions at which the material in the book was first presented. The Forum consisted of six programs, held in the Assembly Hall of the Cosmos Club in Washington during the first three months of 1958.
Resources for the Future planned the series with three objectives in mind. One was to offer a forum in the nation’s capital to some lead- ing thinkers in fields concerned with resources from which they could express their critical appraisals and interpretations of conservation problems from their respective viewpoints. Another was to provide an audience of interested persons, not necessarily specialists, with a broad view of significant problems and trends in the field of resource con- servation and perhaps with new insights on some of them. The third was to look forward as well as back from the anniversary year of 1958 in an effort to draw upon analysis of what has happened for some indication of future needs and problems.
The problem then was to subdivide this vast subject into sections that would be manageable but still hang together. One of several pos- sible ways was the time-honored division by types of commodity or activity such as “forestry,” “minerals,” “recreation,” “wilderness,” etcetera. But a better way seemed that of taking a few of the most significant aspects of the whole conservation field. That is why after an introductory program that critically reviewed the historical back- ground, there were successive programs on the role of science and technology, the place of the ultimate consumer in resource conserva- tion, continued urban growth and its implications, problems of eco- nomics and political economy, and patterns of organization to gain conservation ends. The general pattern for each two-hour program was a principal paper dealing with the whole subject, briefer com- ments by two or three persons who had read the main paper in ad- vance and could either take issue with or supplement its content, and a short period for discussion by both the participants and the audience.
In the choice of persons to give the principal papers and the com- ments, a well-tested method again was passed up for a less usual one that seemed to offer more promise. The most obvious course would have been to select prominent conservationists or others who have taken leading parts in conservation issues. There are many among
99 «66 99 66
Editor’s Introduction xi
them who can be counted on to give stimulating and enlightening papers. On the other hand, those persons who are most closely iden- tified with conservation problems and issues are usually deeply com- mitted to one side or another in fields where controversy appears to be one of the chief signs of vitality. The result would have been either a lopsided presentation or a series of debates requiring the nicest bal- ancing. Furthermore, most of the leaders in the conservation area are highly articulate; their views are already widely known. So a plan was adopted by which each of the six authors of the principal papers, though deeply interested in, and familiar with, his respective conser- vation topic, was chosen primarily as one who would represent the scholar’s breadth and detachment rather than the credo of a protago- nist. In selecting the authors of the discussion papers one of the main objectives was a wide range of responsible opinion, so that identifi- cation with a special viewpoint was not necessarily a disadvantage. Nevertheless as a group the commentators, too, were marked by a scholarly attitude and an ability to see the whole picture. The pro- fessional fields of the Forum contributors included economics, geol- ogy, political science, geography, demography, public administration, and planning.
The idea of the 1958 Forum originated with Joseph L. Fisher, associate director of Resources for the Future, who also took the lead in shaping and carrying out the detailed plans. He was assisted by an informal staff group consisting of Henry P. Caulfield, Jr., Francis T. Christy, Jr., Irving K. Fox, and Henry Jarrett. Mr. Fisher and Reuben G. Gustavson, executive director of Resources for the Future, divided the job of chairing the Forum sessions.
Special guest of honor at the first program was Hermann Hagedorn, poet, biographer of the first Roosevelt, and director of the Theodore Roosevelt Centennial Commission. ““Theodore Roosevelt’s interest in conservation,” Mr. Hagedorn said, “came out of his deep feeling for people. Conservation to him was not land, or water, or oil, or gas, or minerals; conservation was meeting the needs of people.”
Horace M. Albright, chairman of the board of directors of Re- sources for the Future, was honor guest at the final session. Mr. Al- bright, a former director of the National Park Service and business executive, is a veteran conservationist of broad interests. In looking
Xil Editor’s Introduction
back over his forty-five years of experience in conservation, he ex- pressed his belief that the early conservationists would not be sur- prised at the persistence of some of the big problems nor discouraged at the rate of progress thus far.
In retrospect, the quality and reception of the whole set of Forum programs more than justified the decision to depart from tradi- tional arrangements. Both the selection of lecturers and the group- ings of conservation subject matter made it possible to look at old problems from new angles and with fresh eyes and to relate resource conservation more closely with the country’s total economy and social structure, and with world developments.
It is hoped that in their present form the essays will be as useful. However, they must speak for themselves; they are offered as a book, not as the literal record of the lectures and discussions. The papers have been edited, and some of them slightly revised by their authors. The record of discussion among speakers and their answers to ques- tions from the audience has not been included, not through lack of some lively and informative exchanges, but because impromptu com- ment is one thing and a carefully wrought book is another. A partial exception has been made for the informal closing remarks of each principal speaker, which represent his only opportunity to reply to the comments of persons who had seen his paper in advance. These statements do not appear as such, but important passages have been inserted in the main texts or used elsewhere as footnotes.
The essays do not lend themselves to summary; as noted earlier they range too widely and are too undogmatic. What can be said here is that they attest—if further proof be needed—the pervasiveness of resource conservation problems and the potential breadth of future conservation policies. Population; technology; people’s needs, stand- ards, and preferences; economic and political behavior—all of these are no less involved than the resources themselves. To get a full view of conservation is to look, from a certain angle, at the whole of our modern civilization.
Henry Jarrett, EDITOR, RESOURCES FOR THE FUTURE
Peer oRSt RIF TY YEARS
SKK
DN Main Lines of Thought and Action
ERENCES Tesi GRO Bol Et
Pioneers and Principles
SAMUEL T. DANA
The Changing Context of the Problems
EGE NERGYS) Cen HANK.
The Mythology of Conservation
SHAVMOUSEA ei Pre HVADYSS
MAIN LINES OF THOUGHT AND ACTION
Ve Ernest §. Griffith
The conservation movement did not begin in 1908; it certainly still has unfinished business in 1958—old battles, new frontiers, perennial confusions, widening horizons.
Nineteen hundred and eight was the date of the Governors’ Con- ference, itself a great landmark. In 1908 the Inland Waterways Com- mission, with a maturity and prescience which could have been born only of prior experience, wrote of “mineral fuels on public lands,” of “forests whose preservation is a public necessity for stream control, for timber supply, and for other purposes,” of “improvements of navigation,” of “floods and low waters,” of ‘annual soil wash,” of “reclamation by irrigation,” of “water power . . . which should be used for the benefit of the people,” of “the purification and clarifica- tion of water supply,” of “means . . . for co-ordinating all such [gov- ernmental] agencies.” Foreshadowing the future course of events was even a minority report of the representative of the Corps of Engineers dissenting from the recommendation of agency co-ordination!
ERNEST S. GRIFFITH has been Director of the Legislative Refer- ence Service of the Library of Congress since 1940. Early in 1958 he an- nounced plans to return to academic life as organizer and first head of the new School of International Service at American University. From 1935 to 1940 he was Dean of the Graduate School and Professor of Political Science at that University. An enthusiastic and notable hiker and mountain climber, he was long an official of The Wilderness Society. Mr. Griffith was born in Utica, New York, in 1896. He is a graduate of Hamilton College and of Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.
3
4 Main Lines of Thought and Action
In some uncanny measure this self-same commission identified all, or almost all, of the strands of conservation thought and action which crowded the intervening years and today furnish a still persistent agenda of unfinished business. The emphases have changed but in most essential elements 1958 is but 1908 illuminated.
Twice only in this century has conservation been a major preoccu- pation of our people and government: once in a rising crescendo which culminated in the Governors’ Conference of 1908; once in the rebound from a depression’s depths in the electric years of 1933-36. By a strange coincidence—perhaps resting in some obscure genes of the Roosevelt clan, more probably in the maturing of profound social forces, possibly in the sheer coincidence of two presidents whose earlier life had brought them into close and vivid relationship with forest and wild land—only in these two periods have our presidents dominated and dramatized the conservation scene. Between these years, and ever since, Congress and not the President has been the principal channel. The forces beating upon or expressed by Congress, the recommendations of the bureaus of the Administration to Con- gress, the deliberations and decisions within Congress—these, and not presidential leadership, have been the major factors in conservation policy development and change.
This does not mean that the other presidents have been without influence—and certainly not without views. But Taft was cautious; Coolidge, resistant to federal action; Harding was lax; Wilson and Truman and Eisenhower, preoccupied with other and to them more important matters. Hoover did possess a genuine interest and effec- tiveness in federal development of waterways, though with a mind set toward state rather than federal activity in other areas.
Hence the developments in conservation under these regimes were not developments characterized by strong and concentrated leader- ship. Rather they partook of the characteristic flavors of congressional policy—the gradual, persistent growth of problems; the slow but sure clarification of issues; the identification of local and national groups with economic or other stakes in solutions; the steady sharing of ex- perience on the part of the bureaus concerned with their congressional counterparts—and finally decisions in Congress, in part the product of balance and compromise, but also in part, and probably in greater
ERNEST S. GRIFFITH BI
part, marking continuity in that growing recognition of the public interest which registered our growing national maturity and our grow- ing concern with the future.
Much spade work had preceded 1908. Gifford Pinchot as Forester and later as Chief of the Forest Service, had not only become a na- tional figure, but, what was perhaps more important, had established a personal rapport with Theodore Roosevelt which changed the course of conservation history. Presidents Harrison, Cleveland, and McKin- ley with WJ McGee, Frederick Newell, George Maxwell, and others, had fostered the practice of forest reservation.1 The Land Grant Col- leges had had four decades of activity in studying and stimulating creative agricultural land use, later to come to its full flowering when the disaster of used-up land was dramatized in the 1930’s. Irrigation had made notable strides. Science and the idea of progress were twin factors in preparing the public for efficient utilization of all resources. Exposures of misuse and malfeasance had lowered the resistance po- tential of those who would block the public interest. The Spanish War had excited a growing nationalism, and an incipient imperialism cap- tured the imagination of more than merely the flamboyant.
The age found the man. It is currently fashionable in academic circles to belittle the achievements of Theodore Roosevelt. Most his- torians would now downgrade him to the ranks of the mere near-great. No longer does the monument of Mount Rushmore with its Washing- ton, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Roosevelt represent even the popular verdict, not to mention the considered judgment of our scholarly elite. The glamor of the other, later, Roosevelt, with his hospitality to ideas and eggheads, the world stage on which he played his part; the scholarly leadership of Woodrow Wilson; the political drama of Andrew Jackson; even the achievements of a Polk are preferred. Yet
1WJ McGee (he never used periods or separated the initials) had served under Major J. W. Powell from 1893 to 1902 as Ethnologist in Charge in the Bureau of American Ethnology. He is especially remembered for his work as a member, and secretary, of the Inland Waterways Commission, and for the study of United States water resources which he directed for the Department of Agriculture. Frederick Newell, Director of the Reclamation Service, 1907-14, was also a commissioner of the Inland Waterways Com- mission. George Maxwell’s activities in organizing the National Reclamation
Association in 1899 had led to passage of the National Reclamation Act in 1902. Subsequently, in Arizona, he organized the first Water Users Association.
6 Main Lines of Thought and Action
there are values and a type of greatness which a scholarly icicle can never know; there is a type of leadership which a detached positivist can altogether miss. The greatness of Theodore Roosevelt lay, not in a list of specific administrative acts, or a catalogue of laws enacted under his sponsorship, substantial though both of these were. His greatness was a kind of sursum corda, the activating of a nation’s conscience, the dramatizing of a nation’s unfinished business, the energizing of much of the moral public leadership of his day—and of the next fifty years—by the impact of his personality. Harold Ickes, Henry Stimson, Charles Evans Hughes, yes, even Franklin Roose- velt, have given generous credit to this dynamic of their formative years.
In no field was this more true than in that of conservation. The drama of the rape of the forest; the epic of our waterways; the devel- opment for all our people, and not the favored few, of a new empire of land and minerals; the saga of the strenuous outdoor life—these entered into the consciousness and conscience of our people in The- odore Roosevelt’s stirring years. I remember these years vividly, and what they meant to those of us who were looking for idealism in public life. From others, above all from Gifford Pinchot, came the necessary expertise, then and later; to others was left the task of de- velopment, the detail of administration. Theodore Roosevelt’s role was largely of another kind—the impress once and for all on our literature, our press, our public platform, our study, our mores, of certain values in land, water, forest, wildlife, never again to be lost.
Taft did not so much falter as pause—pausing better to under- stand, more adequately to appraise, what steps should next be taken. The temper and tempo of Taft were not for Pinchot, and the latter had to go. But the circumstances of his going were not the least of the factors in keeping alive the intent of Roosevelt, and alerting President Taft himself to the dangers and intrigues of special interests. Consti- tutional questions of the spirit and the letter remained to be clarified, for many years to come. The forests which Roosevelt had reserved against those whom he saw as predators stalking behind the Agricul- tural Bill of 1907, these had to be developed—but with a wider clien- tele and a far longer time dimension.
It was now the turn of Congress and the states to move into the
ERNEST S. GRIFFITH 7
picture. Following the national impetus, forty states created conser- vation commissions, albeit many of them abortive. From the experi- ence of the West came the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909. Under legislative safeguards and administrative oversight the traditional 160- acre limitation was raised to 320 for nonirrigable lands, but with con- tinuity of intent. The Withdrawal Act of 1910 looked in two directions. The still dynamic stand of conservation broadened and firmed the President’s authority over water power and irrigation and mineral lands, and this was natural. At the same time the pressure from and experience of a West impatient with what seemed to some the arrested development of its lumber and grazing interests accompanying the policy of forest withdrawal, expressed itself in the working out of policies which, while defensible, were more acceptable to local inter- ests.
These two strands—national planning and foresight on the one hand, and local economic interests on the other—were never there- after to leave the arena of conservation legislation. It would be a mis- take to regard these as opposites—the one wholly good, the other wholly bad. On the vitality and energy of local points of view and interests is built much of the rich tapestry of our political and eco- nomic pluralism; in the blind identification of each and every nation wide move with the long-range public interest lie dangers of central- ism and neglect of secondary and derivative effects. So it is with con- servation. In the long run, the development of our resources by local interests gives such development a much needed dynamic and adap- tation; safeguards in long-time national interest are, fortunately, not too often incompatible with this.
Such coincidence found significant expression in the Weeks Act of 1911. Watersheds and forests of navigable streams were extended protection. Private as well as public lands were included. The pattern of federal-state co-operative action, under the stimulus of grants-in- aid, was precedent to later activities under the same act and, perhaps an even greater achievement, national forests were extended by pur- chase, especially in the states along the eastern seaboard. Pinchot was influential in this, as was Joseph Holmes, State Geologist of North Carolina, who in 1910 became the first Director of the United States Bureau of Mines.
8 Main Lines of Thought and Action
From 1911 till 1920 not too much is recorded in the way of legis- lation. A notable exception was the establishment of the National Park Service in 1916, a consolidation of a number of earlier, separate establishments. These were years in which details of use were worked out, especially in the administration of the forests. Questions of rentals and charges were serious matters to those locally involved, but raised little national interest. In 1912, at the behest of Stimson, Taft vetoed a bill that did not provide for such charges. He let others go through. One of a series of alleviations of reclamation repayments took place in 1914. From the West, with support from Secretary of the Interior Richard A. Ballinger, had come a move to give back to the states the right to develop water power and control the utilization of mineral resources; but a decision of the Supreme Court (Utah Power and Light Co. v. U.S., 243 U.S. 389) in 1917 upheld the paramountcy of the federal government in its control of water resources on public lands. The states actually had been or were largely placated by grants of a percentage of the receipts from forest charges and (in the case of mineral leases) assignment of a percentage to the reclamation fund. In general, during these years, conflicting interests had to be compro- mised, varying methods of utilization tried, policies and standards defined.
Again national and regional agitation played an important role. The Hoover Dam project appeared on the horizon. The dam itself was not actually authorized till 1928. Both in its inception and in its exe- cution it marks the high point of Hoover’s resource accomplishment. Certain other solid accomplishments in navigation and flood control of the Hoover presidency date from his planning during his years as Secretary of Commerce. Incidentally, he continued such water re- source planning during his presidency, and much of the later develop- ment of the Grand Coulee and Central Valley may be traced to this. In 1913 the National Conservation Congress, in spite of efforts by private power interests, found itself in the hands of the conservation- ists by overwhelming majorities. Yet by 1916 the private power inter- ests were again in the ascendancy. The years from then until 1920 were so dominated by the war that water power legislation, such as it was, remained pretty much of a bewildering maze, with no clear lead. Not until 1920 was any comprehensive and clear adjustment of
ERNEST S. GRIFFITH 9
the public-private power struggle to find its way to the statute books. On the forest front the public interest issue continued with champions old and new. The year 1919 saw agitation on the part of Graves ? and Pinchot for legislation providing for public regulation of private cutting, eventually to influence the Clarke-McNary Act of 1924, and also a factor not without influence later, perhaps, in the “tree farm” movement of the 1940’s among the more enlightened of the private operators.
Speculator and homesteader had for decades struggled to win points in land laws and their administration. Two laws of some con- sequence were passed during this period: the Agricultural Entry Act of 1914 and the Stock Raising Homestead Act of 1916. Yet the days of abundant and productive land for the taking were over; the frontier was closed. For many years the number of new homesteaders had been dwindling, and these belated attempts could not disguise or post- pone the fact that new issues and new forces were paramount. New irrigation projects still had many years ahead of them, and to these homesteaders could still migrate—but for a price. How to use and lease the public lands; how to conserve the private lands; whether to confirm the lessees as owners—these were the issues of the future.
Nineteen hundred and twenty was an important year in the conser- vation movement. It marked the passage of both the Federal Water Power Act and the Mineral Leasing Act. The war was over; the issues had been churning around long enough, and the time had come in these two areas for a national policy to emerge. It was in Congress and not the White House that the effective maturing of decisions took place.
Mining entry had developed abuses. The lease seemed an appro- priate answer, at least for the nonmetallic minerals. The act itself was a compromise between the strict conservationist views and excessive advantages for private developments. For coal, sodium, and phos- phate deposits, competitive bidding was introduced. For oil and gas, prospecting rights were limited to 2,560 acres and two years. Discov-
* Henry S. Graves, formerly a consulting forester in partnership with Gifford Pinchot and, in 1900, founder of the Yale Forest School, succeeded Pinchot as
Chief Forester in 1910. In later days he is remembered as Dean of the Yale School of Forestry.
10 Main Lines of Thought and Action
ery gave a twenty-year lease, subject to royalties and annual rent.
Withdrawal of mineral lands in the interest of national defense had been an allowed policy for many years. The right to lease was vested in the Secretary of the Interior, however; and safeguards were inade- quate unless intent of public interest were present. Nineteen hundred and twenty-one and the new Harding Administration witnessed one of the most flagrant betrayals of the public interest for private gain in our history in the Teapot Dome scandal. There is no point in recount- ing the episode here. It is enough to indicate the danger of postwar reaction in the conservation field, as elsewhere; but likewise to indi- cate the strength of public recoil that followed exposure. Conserva- tion in the public interest may even in this case have registered a net gain.
The Federal Water Power Act was a landmark. For its day and age —a period of decline in the national ethos, of renewed predatory capitalism—it represented a real achievement. It was the end of un- certainty, the beginning of policy. Private and public interests were recognized—but the paramountcy of the national domain was estab- lished. Public charges for private power became henceforth the rule.
The next important act—and almost the only important act till the conservation explosion of Franklin Roosevelt’s first term—was the Clarke-McNary Act of 1924. Here as in the Federal Water Power Act there was a crystallization of issues, a forward move with most major forces in substantial agreement. Federal, state, and private interests found therein a basis for three-way co-operation in fire fighting. Re- forestation was authorized on an unprecedented scale—in fact as a program. Provision was made for the further extension of national forests, especially when watershed values were at stake. Experiment stations were established. This was followed in 1928 by the McNary- McSweeney Act which gave a statutory base to forest research. All in all, our national forest policy had largely come of age. Henceforth its battles were to be largely administrative, or those that arose out of defending a status quo against encroachment. Perhaps the only really new and major strand subsequently to appear on the forest front lay in the growing realization that the stake of the city man in the forest was not merely the forest’s role in conservation, but its facilities for his future recreation. But of this more later.
ERNEST S.). GRIP FIT 11
The consolidation of policy in water power and forests reveals a characteristic of the conservation movement in periods of “low temperature.” Except under circumstances of unique and strong na- tional leadership—and there have been only two such in our history in this field—the over-all view is rarely taken, either by Congress or by the public generally. It is true that a considerable measure of in- terest arose as a result of the earlier “Conservation Congresses” and the more recent large-scale conference on “Resources for the Fu- ture.” Advocates have been energized, scholars stimulated to re- search; the over-all and integrated view has made at least some impression upon those who generated policy in the several segments. Yet the problems of resources remain segmented, and the institu- tionalization of the multiple-purpose approach has been extraordi- narily difficult. The Tennessee Valley Authority remains a lonely experiment.
In general, fragmentation has been the prevailing mood. Power and forests will serve as examples. In Congress today three great com- mittees, Agriculture, Interior and Insular Affairs, and Public Works, have carved out for themselves major sectors of the resource problem. Each, especially Interior, is fragmented by subcommittees. Even this measure of consolidation represents an improvement over the splin- tering that existed prior to 1947. Nowhere in Congress is there an over-all, integrated view.
A similar split rules in the Executive Branch. In fact, if you read the hearings and the history of the Commission on the Reorganization of Congress you will recognize that the basic reason for establishing these three committees, in 1946, was to match their administrative counterparts—the Department of Agriculture, the Department of the Interior, and the Army Engineer Corps. These departments and the bureaus thereunder, the committees of Congress and the subcommit- tees therein, each have their respective clienteles in the electorates. These clienteles are fragmented. The relationships between the sub- committees or the committees and the corresponding bureaus and de- partments are extremely close. In fact, one might almost call them fellow conspirators along with their clienteles, rather than in any sense enemies. They are fellow conspirators not only against rival users, but also against the Bureau of the Budget, against the Appropriations
12 Main Lines of Thought and Action
Committees, against the Executive Office as a whole, against Congress as a whole—but not conspirators against each other under normal circumstances. The fragmentation has a deeper meaning than merely the fragmentation in the Executive Branch or the fragmentation in Congress. It is a fragmentation of clienteles whose separate needs and separate pressures have resulted in the creation first of laws, and then of bureaus through the laws, to give effect to their respective policies.
Yet from time to time a national policy even in a substantial sector does in fact emerge out of conflict, experience, research, and discus- sion. It is this which characterizes periods of Congressional ascend- ancy such as the era from 1920 to 1933. In minor matters, adminis- trative and legislative, local or special interests may prevail; in the great landmarks in forest, power, land, river development, mines, the public interest has usually prevailed—but it has prevailed in great measure by taking into account the vitality and the social contribution of the private interests.
The strength of the public and national aspects of the conservation movement was tested more than once in these years. Hoover, for example, announced a plan to transfer grazing and some forest lands to the states. The plan was killed by Congress in 1931-32. The West itself was divided. The bill for the Hoover Dam was signed in 1928, in spite of the opposition of private power interests. These had been able to delay the project, but not permanently block it. The Muscle Shoals resolution of 1931 affirmed the principle of public ownership.
Yet there was no real foreshadowing of the rebirth of conservation that was to mark the middle thirties. In retrospect one can see the forces gathering, not the least influential being the frustrations of the depression, the illogic of a system of unco-ordinated individual enter- prise that left millions stranded in unempioyment, that foreclosed farms, that made a mockery of the unregulated land use of a heedless age.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt had been chairman of the Committee on Forestry in the New York State Senate. During these years, he was greatly influenced by Gifford Pinchot, whose forest protection bill he introduced in 1912. Pinchot had dramatized to Roosevelt the need for forests to preserve watersheds and the land from erosion. Roose- velt had thought in terms of conservation on his Hyde Park estate.
ERNEST S. GRIFFITH 13
As Governor he had appointed (and listened to) vigorous conserva- tion commissioners in the persons of Alexander Macdonald and Henry Morgenthau, Jr. Over his young manhood had fallen the image and the dream of the other Roosevelt whom some day it would be his challenge to excel—and not the least in the field of conserva- tion which the older man had made peculiarly his own.
Perhaps never was there a president so temperamentally receptive to new ideas. Nor, with Henry A. Wallace and Harold Ickes as Sec- retaries of Agriculture and of Interior, and other men of the same mood and mold as advisers and administrators, were new ideas lack- ing. The spectacular and abortive action of the original industrial and agricultural programs for the most part overshadowed at the time the finer, ultimately more far-reaching elements of resource planning. It was this dimension of planning and of foresight that was to come into its own. Down the great river to the gulf had gone millions on mil- lions of tons of our best topsoil. Once rich grazing lands were starved and dust-blown, and the cattle and owners with them. Thus the Soil Erosion Service of 1933 became the Soil Conservation Service of 1935—and a program of national guidance and stimulation of wise private soils use and replenishment has been part of American policy ever since. That which began as terrace and check dams, contour and strip farming, has attained the stature of a national land policy, the child of the union of science and conscience. So also the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1933 with its crash program matured into the act of 1938 with its “ever normal granary,” its conservation overtones— and its basic attempt permanently to give the farmer economic pro- tection.
Although at the time it was thought of only as a stopgap, the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 through its persistence down to the present day did for the unclassified public lands much of what the Clarke-McNary Act did for forests and the Federal Water Power Act for the waters. It crystallized into policy the strands of land classification, local use and adaptation, and the conservation interests of the future. While the administration has been by no means perfect, yet what has proved to be a fundamental policy was laid down, a norm to guide alike the Administration and the local committees. In 1935, all the remaining public domain was withdrawn from entry for classification purposes.
14 Main Lines of Thought and Action
Relatively little was subsequently released for homesteading, which, except for Alaska, may be regarded as an era that has passed.
By no means the least important part of the Roosevelt program was the famous Civilian Conservation Corps. It was a conservation of manhood, as well as of soils and forests. The sight or demonstra- tion of hundreds of thousands of our young men engaged in conser- vation practices was itself an educator and dramatizer of conservation values and objectives on an unprecedented scale. The Civilian Con- servation Corps has passed into history, but if this nation ever again sustains a prolonged depression, we may be certain that something of this kind will again be formed. Its limitations and shortcomings were many, but its achievements were many also—and not the least of these was in bringing to the land and forest those who never had known surroundings other than the streets and alleys of our great cities.
But the great note of the second Roosevelt era was the concept of planning. The year 1933 brought the Tennessee Valley Authority, which established the river basin in our national consciousness as a natural unit for comprehensive multiple-purpose development. The nation has never been united on questions of public power; but that a river valley has an essential unity, that its waters must serve many balanced purposes the planning of which requires foresight, that its watersheds must be preserved, its soils used wisely—these matters are no longer in dispute. They have entered into our national policy —and power, irrigation, flood control, recreation, navigation, avoid- ance of pollution, industrial use, watershed management have be- come accepted as necessary interrelated ingredients in any scientifi- cally developed river basin. For this the TVA must take a large share of the credit. The special interests and clienteles and their bureaus may operate—or desire to operate—much as before, but their sym- bols must be those just mentioned. This, if it does nothing else, fur- nishes a platform for criticism of projects.
In 1934 the National Resources Board was established *—a vast, over-all concept which was a bit too far ahead of its day and age to
31935, National Resources Committee; 1939, National Resources Planning Board.
ERNEST S. GRIFFITH 15
survive the perhaps inevitable reaction. Its successor was abolished by legislative action in 1943.
Other acts applying to various sectors followed shortly. The Bitu- minous Coal Act of 1935 and the Connally Act of the same year were more in the National Recovery Administration mood—the self-regu- lation of a separate industry which sought a protected or favored place in the capitalist order, free from the rigors of unrestricted com- petition. It will be recalled that one of the permanent—and to many, the least fortunate—aspects of the spate of New Deal legislation was the extent to which the intervention of government in the economic struggle was sought so as to give one group after another the oppor- tunity to obtain the alleged benefits of limitations on competition and even of cartelization—though usually called by other names. The NRA codes were to a considerable extent of this character. So were the “fair practice” laws in retail trade, the marketing agreement au- thorizations in milk, the induced scarcity and parity legislation of basic agricultural crops, the collective bargaining and minimum wage laws in the field of labor, and certain single-industry laws of the char- acter of the Connally Act for petroleum and the Bituminous Coal Act. Many of these were harnessed to socially desirable goals—the preser- vation of the soil and the family farm, the orderly use of basic mineral resources, raising the standard of living and purchasing power of labor, and other values, real and alleged. Yet in the end what emerged —in the resources field no less than in other fields—was a type of mixed, regulated, and even rigid economy quite different from the orthodox picture of a competitive, anti-monopolistic capitalism. The fact that government regulation was to some extent substituted for the privately administered price may or may not have been a long- run asset. The role of government itself—in resources, as well as else- where—was basically transformed in the popular mind from that of a policeman to that of a weapon in the economic struggle. Hencefor- ward, business, labor, agriculture and the professions alike (and not merely the industries sheltered by a protective tariff) came to look to government for both defensive and offensive intervention in most of the major sectors of what had become a political economy.
Two other acts deserve notice in this period. The Flood Control Act of 1936 was particularly extensive, and also incorporated prin-
16 Main Lines of Thought and Action
ciples of local contributions and maintenance. The Norris-Doxey Act of 1937 expanded technical advisory services to privately owned for- ests and also encouraged tree planting, especially in shelter belts. Nonmaterial values also emerged in the general national awaken- ing of these recovery years. The Civilian Conservation Corps and the Tennessee Valley Authority had evangelical overtones among their economic objectives; but other moves, chiefly administrative, were more clearly inspired by the recreation needs of the present and future, and even by a nostalgia for the age of the hunter and pioneer. Wildlife and game refuges had begun to appear soon after the turn of the century. The first Federal Wildlife Conference was held in 1936, to be followed by the institution of a national system of wildlife refuges in 1937. The Pitman-Robertson Act, the Duck Stamp Act, the inter- national migratory bird treaties were all products of this strand. Stimulated by Aldo Leopold, the Gila Wilderness Area had been es- tablished as early as 1924. In 1935, Robert Marshall and others launched The Wilderness Society. This was designed to salvage for future generations some at least of the few remaining primitive wilder- ness areas. The United States Forest Service instituted protective regulations on its wilderness and wild areas in 1929. Meanwhile the National Park System surged forward, with its acreage growing from 4,821,760 acres in 1916 to 15,253,535 acres in 1936 and to 24,- 397,985 acres in 1956. Some of this growth was by legislation; some (in the shape of “national monuments”) by executive orders. Con- servation consciously and rationally was acquiring a new dimension —actually one which it had never been without, at least emotionally, from the days of that great naturalist John Muir. It was given new
4 Aldo Leopold and Robert Marshall were both active in organizing The Wilderness Society. Both for many years had served with the United States Forest Service. Leopold joined the Service in 1909, and in 1924, when Assist- ant District Forester in Charge of Operations, entered private consultancy practice; from 1933 to 1948, when he died, he was Professor of Wildlife Man- agement at the University of Wisconsin, and it was during this period that he produced most of his writings on wilderness areas. Marshall had joined the staff of the Forest Service in 1924: from 1933 to 1937 he was Director of For- estry of the Office of Indian Affairs, and from 1937 to 1939, when he died, he was again with the Forest Service as Chief of the Division of Recreation and Lands. It was under his leadership that the system of wilderness areas in Indian reserves and national forests was created.
ERNEST S. GRIFFITH 17
urgency by the necessity of balancing values under a now obvious population pressure. Much of this approach had previously crystal- lized in New York State where, by constitutional amendment in 1894, its forest preserve was to be kept “forever wild.” The Adirondacks and the Catskills to this day reflect the continuing and broadened pop- ular support of this policy. More recently, Maine, California, and Michigan have joined New York in recognizing the values of primi- tive wilderness; while a whole procession of states has undertaken the development of systems of state parks for various types of out- door recreation.
The shadow and eventually the substance of the Great War directed the nation’s attention to its growing scarcities, and at its end added uranium and atomic materials to the category of basic resources. Agriculture resumed its expansion as the bread basket for much of the free world. The use of oil was stepped up enormously. Some thought they saw clearly the often proclaimed but elusive end of domestic oil production by the usual drilling. We are now more fully aware that the precise date was and is debatable. Nineteen hundred and forty-four saw a response to this threat in the passage of the Synthetic Liquid Fuels Act, which authorized demonstration projects of the feasibility of use of oil shale, of which we possessed enormous quantities. However, private exploration and development of alter- native foreign sources was the more immediate effective response in petroleum, and also in iron ore and strategic metals generally. De- fense stockpiling and exploration under the auspices of the Muni- tions Board prior to World War II had brought but meagre results. The National Security Resources Board of 1947 and its successors instituted long-range programs of stockpiling and planning under the aegis of national defense. The first atomic energy act was passed in 1946—largely to establish an institutional base for further policy development. Efforts to amend the write-off tax provisions of our min- ing and drilling interests in favor of the general taxpayer were met in part by the strengths of the mining interests. However, there was also a sense that, as many of these resources became scarcer within the borders of the United States and our dependence on overseas sources grew, it was all the more important to place a premium on domestic exploration and development. Of this same character was the transfer
18 Main Lines of Thought and Action
of tideland oil to the states and by them to a more rapid private ex- ploitation.
By 1947 it became all too clear that the Communist world was enemy and not ally. By 1950 the cold war flared into actual combat in Korea. Henceforth considerations of national defense were to influ- ence, if not dominate, much of legislative and administrative policy. In this setting the Paley Commission produced its restrained, states- manlike report on materials policy. It provided the best factual, scien- tific base yet for holding the scales between exhaustion and discovery of strategic vital materials and sources of energy.
Conservation as a movement and as a policy was reaching maturity. Intensive management, multiple use, foresight were coming into their own. The mood was obvious on many fronts.
In the whole area of water resource development, while public vs. private power remained a sharp political issue, the operative differ- ences were narrowing. Whether by the aid of Madison Avenue or by a sharpened conscience or both, the private power group now ac- cepted the premise that its tenure must be justified in terms of the public interest. On the other hand, public projects were required in Congress to justify themselves through an appropriate cost-benefit ratio, else appropriations (if not authorizations) would not be forth- coming. If “public relations” occasionally glossed over sharp practice on the part of the utilities, so too did legerdemain in bookkeeping and estimates from time to time induce Congress to accommodate local desires for construction, flood control, cheap power, or irrigation. Yet private and public alike accepted the requirement that what they did or wanted must be justified in terms of a fairly concrete national in- terest. As experience sharpens the tools of analysis, we may at least hope for greater conformity to public norms. Although water develop- ments, particularly for municipal and industrial consumptive uses, will continue to rise, probably opportunities for the economically jus- tified large-scale public hydroelectric power projects have about run out with those already authorized. The Columbia may be an excep- tion. The battle ground of public vs. private power has shifted to atomic energy. Attacks by private interests on demonstrably success- ful public programs, such as rural electrification, have been virtually stillborn. A policy of “containment” on both the public and private
ERNEST S. GRIFFITH 19
fronts seems likely to prevail—with each ipso facto serving as a yard- stick on the other.
In forest management, also, a somewhat similar convergence has become apparent as between public and private forestry. In 1941, the “tree farm’? movement was formally launched, with its philosophy that timber is a crop and its objective of sustained yield. This steadily gained adherents, especially among the larger timber interests, some of whom had earlier introduced such practices. At the same time, dif- ferentiated, intelligent use and intensive management made steady progress in the Forest Service. The findings of research as to sus- tained yield, watershed management, fire fighting, insect and disease control were translated into policy. The single-purpose attack on Forest Service ownership and management by certain of the private grazing interests was rebuffed in Congress. Politics continued to swirl around the Forest Service, but it was by groups which felt the need of factual justification of their case—and more and more congressional decisions (as well as those within the Service) were based on such justification.
So also in the field of minerals. One would hesitate to say that the days of spurious claims or of ruthless exploitation were over. Yet the Multiple Mineral Development Act of 1954 resolved some at least of the conflicts between mineral leasing and the general mining laws. The further revision of the mining laws in 1955 revealed additional progress in the direction of maturity—a maturity marked in this in- stance by the policy of safeguarding, so far as still was practicable, the vegetative surface for the public interest. Without entering into the merits of the controversy, the Al Serena case in 1956 illuminated the state of public opinion on the subject. The whole discussion cen- tered around the merit of the mining claim. It was assumed that in the absence of such merit, the use of the valuable timber rights was totally unwarranted. At least local opinion, and probably national as well, would have winked at such an assumption not too many years ago.
Nowhere more than in recreation is it apparent that a new and powerful element has been added to resource management. Popula- tion pressures; the shortened work week; the presence of three gen- erations of boy scouts in the community; the drama of the Civilian
20 Main Lines of Thought and Action
Conservation Corps; the steadily mounting millions of visitors to national and state parks and forests; the expanded clientele of hunting and fishing; the interest in wildlife; the growth of a thirst for and sense of beauty, not only in art and music but in nature; a re-exami- nation of the contribution to our national tradition, fitness, and char- acter of the out-of-doors—these and other social forces have brought strength to nonmaterial insights and values. The “Mission 66” pro- gram of the National Park Service withstood the general cuts in esti- mates in 1957. The recreation wing of the conservation front was strong enough to defeat the powerfully supported Echo Park Dam in the Dinosaur National Monument in 1956. It saved, at least tem- porarily, the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge from the designs of the Department of Defense. It is rallying support for giving a statutory base to the few remaining wilderness areas—symbols of values of past days that have their importance for present and future genera- tions as well. We may even come to measure the maturity of a civiliza- tion by the regard it pays to nonmaterial values—in the conservation field no less than elsewhere.
Not all is well, especially in those matters which arise out of an archaic system of organizing resource decision making. Agriculture, Interior, and the Corps still have rival plans and approaches to river basin development. Their counterparts on Capitol Hill—the Agri- culture, Interior, and Public Works committees—have no effective liaison. What little over-all view there is in the Executive Branch stems from a small unit in the Bureau of the Budget, and the rela- tively untried co-ordinator of public works planning in the White House. Structured efforts at co-ordination in the shape of river basin interdepartmental committees have registered relatively little success. In the end, perhaps only the fiscal controls in the Executive as well as in Congress may contain the answer to the crying need for more effec- tive multiple-purpose development of land and water. For the present, rival clienteles have entrenched themselves in their institutional coun- terparts. Nor have Soil Conservation and Agricultural Extension reconciled their differences.
The past decade has seen some noteworthy studies by commissions.
The Natural Resources Task Force of the First Hoover Commis- sion was marked by its attention to organizational problems, and by
ERNEST S. GRIFFITH 21
its illumination of the influence of structure on policy. Its recommen- dation that a Department of Natural Resources be established has to date marked the high point in integrating thought. The Water Re- sources and Power Task Force of the Second Hoover Commission was most useful in its devastating attack upon the estimating and accounting practices of certain of the public agencies. Its conclusions in the direction of return to private operation got nowhere, perhaps because of the widespread, almost intuitive feeling on the part of many people that there was merit in retention (and implicit competi- tion) of both public and private enterprise, with each type having continually to justify itself.
Mention has already been made of the Materials Policy (Paley) Commission (1952). There were also the Water Policy Commission of 1950-51 and the Cabinet Advisory Committee’s Report of 1955 in the water resources field. Both alike called for a tie-in with local units; both saw problems in river basin and multiple-use terms; both called for a national board of review; but the earlier report was the stronger in terms of formulation of a national policy. It also was but- tressed by elaborate research in the extent and nature of our water resources and the detail of our conflicting water laws. During these same years the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee spon- sored a number of studies co-ordinated by the Legislative Reference Service, which, though abortive in achieving their total concept, did make a considerable contribution in highlighting the potentials of ground-water management. In 1953, under Ford Foundation financ- ing, Resources for the Future sponsored a notable conference which dramatized the many-faceted nature of the conservation problem, and set forth a program of research frontiers still to conquer. These stud- ies and others only a degree less significant were likewise signs of our national maturity of approach.
In retrospect, it is clear that certain persistent strands have marked these fifty years in conservation. The distribution of light and shade between them has varied, but little that is actually new has entered.
There has been ever present the dilemma between future use and present consumption. It first showed itself in the plundering of the nation’s forests; but these were renewable and this battle is almost won -—not by locking up the forests, but by their sustained use. Next it
22 Main Lines of Thought and Action
was dramatized in the field of soils by the dust bowl and overgrazed and overused lands; and the soil conservation movement is doing its work of adjustment. It moved then into the field of minerals under the spur of defense considerations. Research, invention, chemistry, stockpiling, atomic energy, and imports have provided at least a par- tial answer. The dilemma between future and present today centers also around a new set of resources—wilderness, parks, wildlife—but it is the same dilemma.
Subsidiary to this has been the dilemma of the nature of present use. Shall it be exploitive or developmental; wasteful or scientific? The theoretical battle is won on this front; the political battle is still with us in isolated sectors. It was the chief dilemma in the early days, but we have come far.
The strand or dilemma of public vs. private ownership and develop- ment has likewise been persistent. Two values, initiative and national interest—both of them good—have provided a philosophic basis for the struggle. Yet as public instrumentalities have developed ways of greater initiative and private corporations have acquired more of a social sense, this struggle has assumed somewhat less importance. If there is to be private monopoly, it is accepted doctrine that it must be regulated. Theodore Roosevelt was not doctrinaire on the subject. He attacked monopoly and predatory private interests when they did violence to conservation ideals; he used and even welcomed private interests when they co-operated.
Always the scientific strand has persisted, and some really perma- nent victories seem to belong here. Commissions, research, experi- ment, accounting—these have laid the groundwork. To these is ap- peal made in Congress; by these the results are more and more judged. From these have sprung other strands—multiple use, intensive devel- opment, sustained yield, and a hundred other more detailed adminis- trative decisions.
Present always has been a persistent political pluralism—geographic and economic. It is this pluralism that has blocked so many efforts at a national and integrated approach. On the other hand, it is geo- graphic pluralism that has been the life blood of multiple-purpose river basin development—though often tying such development into knots of internal contradiction. Both types of pluralism have found
ERNEST S. GRIFFITH 23
expression in institutional counterparts, in federal bureaus with spe- cial-interest clienteles, in regional “authorities” and “administrations,” in Congressional committees. Most of the abortive moves to transfer certain resource functions to the states have been largely inspired by local economic interests, though usually defended on “constitutional” grounds. Localism for many years blurred the effectiveness of na- tional administration, as the populace and their representatives in _ Congress rallied to the support of those whose habitual way of mak- ing a living “regardless” was threatened by administered conservation. National planning has made headway, but at least in part as it has forced divergent local interests to face their problems together. Finally there has been the dilemma of the spiritual versus the material, per- haps never more plainly articulated than by Theodore Roosevelt, but expressing itself more intensely today as the shortcomings of urbanism become increasingly apparent.
So the history of conservation could well be written, not so much chronologically, or institutionally, but in terms of these interwoven strands. Almost never did they appear in isolation. Rather could they be identified in each and every major situation as it developed. They are all with us today, but we are a more mature people. Our hierarchy of values has been rearranged somewhat, and for the better.
Today, as in the past, individual leadership counts for much. The great leaders of the past—Pinchot, the two Roosevelts, Senator Fran- cis G. Newlands, WJ McGee, Harold Ickes, Hugh Bennett, Morris Cooke, Senator George Norris, and others—have done their work well in educating a nation. Others are taking their place today; and their task in many respects is an easier one, for the groundwork has been laid and millions of Americans are with them in this, one of the noblest tasks to which a man may devote his life—the enlightened conservation of the natural heritage of a free people.
PIONEERS AND PRINCIPLES
vA Samuel T. Dana |
Dr. Griffith has covered the subject so admirably that I can do little except to add a few supplementary facts and thoughts.
He is to be congratulated on his wisdom in avoiding any definition of “conservation”—either his own, or someone else’s. I shall follow his example. I should like, however, to indicate what I conceive to be the objective of conservation both as a philosophy and a program of action: namely, to bring about the widespread adoption of policies and practices that will promote the public interest in all matters relat- ing to the management and utilization of natural resources.
Unfortunately, no two people completely agree on what constitutes the “public interest,” no matter how meticulously it is defined. One seldom has any difficulty in convincing himself that any policy or
SAMUEL T. DANA, Dean Emeritus of the School of Natural Re- sources, University of Michigan, has been associated with that University since 1927, as Professor of Forestry, first Dean of the School of Forestry and Con- servation, and first Dean of the School of Natural Resources. From 1907 to 1921 he was with the United States Forest Service, as forest assistant and assistant chief of silvics and forest research. He was Forest Commissioner of Maine from 1921 to 1923, and from 1923 to 1927 he was director of the Northeastern Forest Experiment Station. He has been president of the Society of American Foresters, editor-in-chief of the Journal of Forestry, and a direc- tor of The American Forestry Association and has frequently been a consultant to the federal government on national and international matters. Dean Dana was born in Portland, Maine, in 1883. He is a graduate of Bowdoin College and the Yale University School of Forestry.
24
SAMUEL T. DANA 72)
action he favors is clearly in the public interest; or if, deep down in his heart, he has any doubts, he is certainly not going to confess them. This human frailty is responsible for much of the confusion and conflict that has characterized the movement throughout its history.
It may, however, help to clarify our thinking to explore a bit fur- ther some of the dilemmas to which Dr. Griffith has called attention and which have continually plagued us during the last fifty years in our efforts to identify and to promote the public interest. These dilemmas involve real or apparent conflicts between present and future, between individuals and communities, between federal and state governments, between uses and values, between extensive and intensive management, between thrift and prodigality in consumption.
Conservation as an organized movement, although not under that label, started in 1873, when the American Association for the Ad- vancement of Science appointed a committee “to memorialize Con- gress and the several State legislatures upon the importance of pro- moting the cultivation of timber and the preservation of forests, and to recommend proper legislation for securing these objects.” This action was motivated by fear of a future timber famine and by the conviction that such a famine could be averted only by governmental action. Both the fear and the conviction are implicit in the title of a paper presented before the Association by Franklin B. Hough, one of the fathers of American forestry: “On the Duty of Governments in the Preservation of Forests.” To a small but far-sighted and public- spirited group of individuals it was clear that current methods of exploiting the timber resources of the country, however profitable from the private point of view, endangered the public interest—both present and future.
Since the exploitation centered chiefly in forests recently acquired from the public domain, often by questionable methods, its control clearly lay in retaining the lands in public ownership and permitting removal of the timber by private enterprise under governmental super- vision. Efforts of the AAAS, The American Forestry Association, and the National Academy of Sciences to achieve this goal finally re- sulted in passage of the acts of 1891 and 1897 providing for the establishment and administration of forest reserves. Both acts were
26 Pioneers and Principles
attached as riders to bills dealing with other subjects. Prominent among those who deserve credit for this achievement, and whose names should appear in any roster of early conservationists, were Dr. Hough, first chief of the Division of Forestry in the United States Department of Agriculture; John A. Warder, founder of The Ameri- can Forestry Association; Bernhard E. Fernow, also a chief of the Division of Forestry and a leading member of The American Forestry Association; Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz; Commissioners of the General Land Office James A. Williamson and William Andrew Jackson Sparks; Assistant Commissioner Edward A. Bowers; and Charles S. Sargent, chairman of the Forestry Commission of the Na- tional Academy of Sciences.
Dr. Fernow coupled the twin philosophies of the indispensability of all natural resources and of the responsibility of government for their wise use in a way that anticipated their popularization under Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt and in the 1908 Conference of Governors. In a vice-presidential address before the AAAS in 1895 on “The Providential Functions of Government with Special Reference to Natural Resources,” he made these trenchant statements: “Only those nations who develop their natural resources economically, and avoid the waste of that which they produce, can maintain their power or even secure the maintenance of their separate existence. A nation may cease to exist as well by the decay of its resources as by the extinction of its patriotic spirit. .. . Whether fertile lands are turned into deserts, forests into waste places, brooks into torrents, rivers changed from means of power and intercourse into means of destruc- tion and desolation—these are questions which concern the material existence itself of society. . . . It is true that as individuals the knowl- edge of the near exhaustion of the anthracite coal-fields does not in- duce any of us to deny ourselves a single scuttle of coal, so as to make the coal field last for one more generation, unless this knowledge is reflected in increased price. But we can conceive that, as members of society, we may for that very purpose refuse to allow each other or the miner to waste unnecessarily. . . . Here the general principle of Roman law, Utera tuo ne alterum noceas, prevention of the obnoxious use of private property, establishes readily the propriety of State in-
SAMUEL T. DANA Du.
terference, and by alterum we are to understand not only the citizen of the present, but of the future as well.”
Exercise of the providential function of government through the retention of public lands in public ownership started with the estab- lishment of national parks, four of which preceded the first forest reserves (renamed national forests in 1907). These were Hot Springs in 1832, Yellowstone in 1872, and Yosemite, General Grant, and Sequoia in 1890. Since the turn of the century the system has been greatly enlarged and substantial reservations have been made of min- eral lands and water-power sites. Recognition of both aesthetic and material values has long characterized the attitude of government toward its public lands.
The future of unreserved lands still remaining in the public domain is not yet clear. The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934, it must be remem- bered, merely authorized the establishment of grazing districts on public land “pending its final disposal.” No further action has been taken by Congress, and the grazing districts are still officially classi- fied as unreserved public domain. In addition, there are nearly 19 million acres of land in the unreserved public domain outside of graz- ing districts which are leased for grazing and more than 5 million acres of commercial forest land, the future of which is at best un- certain.
The apparently widespread belief that the first reserves of federal land were “locked up,” and that “multiple use” is a concept of recent development, is hardly in accordance with the facts. Secretary of Agri- culture James Wilson’s letter of instructions to Pinchot in 1905, when the forest reserves were transferred from the Department of the In- terior to the Department of Agriculture, was emphatic on these points:
All of the resources of the reserves are for use [italics are in the original], and this use must be brought about in a thoroughly prompt and businesslike manner, under such conditions only as will insure the permanence of these resources. The vital importance of forest reserves to the great industries of the Western States will be largely increased in the near future by the continued steady increase in settlement and development. The permanence of the resources of the reserves is therefore indispensable to continued prosperity, and the policy of this department for their protection and use will in- variably be guided by this fact, always bearing in mind that the
28 Pioneers and Principles
conservative use of these resources in no way conflicts with their
permanent value.
You will see to it that the water, wood, and forage of the reserves are conserved and wisely used for the benefit of the home builder first of all, upon whom depends the best permanent use of lands and resources alike. The continued prosperity of the agricultural, lumbering, mining, and livestock interests is directly dependent upon a permanent and accessible supply of water, wood, and for- age, as well as upon the present and future use of their resources under businesslike regulations, enforced with promptness, effective- ness, and common sense.
Creation of forest reserves put a stop both to trespass on them and to their acquisition by private owners at a tithe of their real value, but that it arrested the legitimate development of the lumber industry or any other industry is highly unlikely. Multiple use of the reserves for “water, wood, and forage” (as well as for minerals, the utilization of which was not under the control of the Department of Agriculture) was extended to include recreation as a growing population, auto- mobiles, and the call of the wild steadily increased their value for this purpose. The extensive tracts set aside as “wilderness” and “wild” areas, as well as the program entitled “Operation Outdoors,” testify to its importance in current administration of the national forests.
In view of the popularity that the theory of multiple use has re- cently attained as the key to land management in the public interest, it may be well to emphasize the fact that it is neither new nor a panacea. Its practical application immediately raises the question of what uses are to be favored, where, when, and by whom. How much water, wood, forage, minerals, wildlife, and recreation do we want, and who is to produce them? How do we compare tangible and in- tangible, material and spiritual values, for which there is no common measuring stick? Answers to such questions as these must be sup- plied in the first instance by legislators and administrators on the basis of the best information available, and in the long run by the general public whose interest it is the function of conservation to protect. Fifty years from now we shall know better than we do today how wise the judgments of these groups have been.
Decision as to what we want from our natural resources in the way of goods and services must be followed by management that will result in their actual production. This is no easy task. Very little, if
SAMUEL T. DANA 29
any, land is physically and biologically well adapted to all uses, and different uses often conflict. No matter what the quality of the land, it cannot produce maximum amounts of everything. If we want more water or more forage, we may have to grow less timber. If we want more timber for commercial utilization, we may have to be content with less extensive parks and wilderness areas. The inspiration af- forded by roadless areas will be experienced by fewer people than if they were made more accessible.
These considerations make it necessary to decide just what use or combination of uses will be favored on a particular piece of land. Much remains to be learned as to the techniques by which the desired objective can be attained. Research, which provides the tools for trans- lating plans into action, and which received its first substantial recog- nition in the field of wildland management in the McSweeney-McNary Act of 1928, is consequently an essential part of the conservation pro- gram. Its urgency increases as mounting pressures on natural resources necessitate the stepping up of production through more intensive measures of management. Sustained yield which, like multiple use, has become a phrase with which to conjure, attains its greatest use- fulness only as yields are sustained at higher and higher levels—a goal which requires more and more technical and managerial skill.
A related aspect of conservation which deserves more emphasis than it commonly receives is thrift in consumption. The greatest drain on natural resources comes not so much from the increase in popu- lation as from the constantly rising standard of living. During the last fifty years our consumption of nearly every product of the land has been greater than during all the previous years in our history. No one regrets that what was a luxury for the father has become a necessity for the son; but does that necessity require a prodigality in use that leads to unnecessary waste? Could we not live comfortably without burning so much gasoline in our automobiles, and without consigning so much material to the trash burner and the dump heap? Growing two trees where one grew before is no more effective in meeting our needs than is making one tree do the work of two. Science is helping greatly in this direction by developing new uses, new materials, and new processes which permit the more economical use of natural re- sources, but personal restraint in limiting our consumption to our real
30 Pioneers and Principles
needs would constitute an important contribution to the same end, with desirable moral as well as physical results.
The final aspect of conservation on which I wish to touch is the relationship between the federal government, state governments, cor- porations, and individuals. The facts that the federal government was first to take positive action to protect and manage the lands which it owned, and that conflicts involving a clash between public and private interests have commonly been fought at the federal level, have tended to create the impression that Uncle Sam must play the leading role in conservation matters. Both states and private owners take vigorous exception to this point of view. These groups feel that, while they may have been slow in getting under way, they have now come of age and can manage their own affairs with a minimum of federal interference and a modicum of federal help.
A subject of continuing, and mounting, friction between the federal government and the western states is that of water rights. The states claim that acts passed in 1866, 1870, and 1872 relinquished to them whatever rights the federal government may have had to control the use of the water of non-navigable streams in the West. The Depart- ment of Justice claims that these acts made no grant to the states, but merely granted to appropriators water rights acquired under state laws. There is general agreement that Congress has control over the navigable portions of interstate streams, and the contention of the states-rights advocates that this control does not extend to non-navi- gable waters, or to any purpose other than navigation, has not been upheld in several Supreme Court decisions. The states are conse- quently seeking legislation to affirm the rights that they believe they possess.
Three cases are of special interest. In 1940, in United States v. Appalachian Electric Power Company, the Supreme Court held that the New River, in Virginia, is a “navigable water” in spite of the fact that obstructions currently prevent navigation, and also that federal control over navigable streams is not limited to navigation. A year later, in Oklahoma v. Atkinson Company, the Court went consider- ably further: “The fact that ends other than flood control will also be served, or that flood control may be of relatively minor importance, does not invalidate the exercise of the authority conferred on Con-
SAMUEL T. DANA 31
gress. . . . It is clear that Congress may exercise its control over the non-navigable stretches of a river in order to preserve or promote com- merce on the navigable portions. . . . And we now add that the power of flood control extends to the tributaries of navigable streams. .. . There is no constitutional reason why Congress cannot under the commerce power treat the watersheds as a key to flood control on navigable streams and their tributaries.” Again, in 1954, in Federal Power Commission v. Oregon et al. (the “Pelton Dam case’), the Court held that the government has complete control over reserved lands in the public domain and in Indian reservations, and that it can license such lands for the development of hydroelectric power without regard to state law or to the wishes of the state. Whether federal or state control is preferable from the conservation point of view is a moot question.
A triangular relationship between the federal and state governments and private owners exists in the fields of public control over the ac- tivities of private owners and of federal grants-in-aid to the states for the encouragement of improved practices by private owners. Gifford Pinchot and his followers took the position, in the case of forest lands, that only the nation is big enough and strong enough to exercise any effective control over powerful private interests. William B. Greeley, as chief of the Forest Service, questioned the wisdom of federal con- trol on both theoretical and practical grounds. He favored, instead, a combination of state controls and federal grants-in-aid such as those embodied in the Clarke-McNary Act of 1924, the Norris-Doxey Act of 1937 (now repealed), and the Cooperative Forest Management Act of 1950. Although several states have enacted regulatory laws, their effectiveness as a means of enforcing substantially higher stand- ards of forest practice by private owners is open to question. In other fields, such as the control of stream pollution and the exploitation of oil and gas, the states have met with better, though by no means complete, success. Co-operation with private owners, with the help of federal grants-in-aid, is more popular than regulation and is work- ing out reasonably well. In general, it is fair to say that within the last twenty to thirty years the states have greatly strengthened their activi- ties in the conservation field.
During this same period progress by private owners, in voluntarily
52 Pioneers and Principles
adopting improved managerial practices that can be regarded as clearly in the public interest, has been unexpectedly rapid. The Code of Fair Competition for the Lumber and Timber Products Industries, which was adopted under the short-lived National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 and which pledged the industries “‘to carry out such prac- ticable measures as may be necessary for the declared purposes of this Code in respect of conservation and sustained production of forest resources,” may have had something to do with the change. So, too, as Dr. Griffith suggests, may the threat of federal control and the partial reality of state control. The principal reason, however, for improved practices by private owners—whether of forest, range, or mineral lands—is economic. Growing scarcities, higher prices, and improved technologies of harvesting and manufacturing make more intensive management a paying proposition in coin of the realm. Financial profit exercises more influence on the behavior of the pri- vate landowner as a land manager than do the police power of the state, education, and sentiment combined. Intensive management was not practiced until recently because the owner felt that he could not afford it; today it is being practiced more widely, although far from universally, with consequent promotion of the “public interest,” be- cause it pays.
Let me conclude with a summary of the salient points I have tried to make: The objective of conservation of natural resources is to pro- mote the “public interest.” Because of the many diverse, often con- flicting, factors involved, that interest is difficult to identify and harder still to attain in practice. During the latter part of the last century the ground was well prepared for the flowering of the conservation move- ment that took place in the early 1900’s. In the fifty years that have elapsed since the Governors’ Conference of 1908, progress has been intermittent but on the whole reasonably steady. We have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go.
Judgments as to relative values are gradually maturing; the poten- tialities and limitations of multiple use, sustained yield, and intensive management are being better appreciated; research is sharpening the tools of land management and making possible greater economy in utilization. Most important of all, public agencies (both federal and state) and private owners, in spite of recurring misunderstandings and
SAMUEL T. DANA 33
disagreements, are working together in a new spirit of co-operation. In today’s economic climate, it begins to look as if the conflict be- tween public and private interest, between present and future, might be less acute than formerly. “Planning” is no longer a dirty word.
On the other hand, the appraisal of relative values and the allo- cation of uses to specific pieces of land are becoming more difficult. We are still a conspicuously wasteful people, although today our prodi- gality is more evident in the consumption of finished products than in the harvesting of raw materials. The apparently never-ending increase in population and in standards of living raises new problems and in- tensifies old ones. These can be solved only by research on an ever- widening scale and by prompt and widespread application of the re- sults. Whether progress in the next fifty years will be more substantial than in the last fifty depends on our ability to effect “the union of science and conscience,” as Dr. Griffith put it, in sound policies and practices of land management.
THE CHANGING CONTEXT OF THE PROBLEMS
A Henry C. Hart
Mr. Griffith’s account of fifty years of conservation has been too com- prehensive, too honest with the events, to gloss over what he calls the “perennial confusions” of the story. He thus enables, indeed, I suspect tempts, his commentators to try their hands at reconciling the inconsistencies and explaining the contradictions. Conservation meant a national and integrated approach: Why have some of its best mani- festations been regional, and none of them comprehensive of all re- sources? As a nation, we are maturing toward a general high regard for conservation values: Why is conservation (to say the least) no more continuously the subject of vigorous presidential leadership than it was a half century ago? And in the face of all the unfinished battles Mr. Griffith has reported, can we say that conservation is a movement now, Or was a movement even at the peak of Franklin Roosevelt’s leadership, in the concerted, crusading form it assumed at the time of Theodore Roosevelt?
Nature made the world Theodore Roosevelt’s Americans lived in;
HENRY C. HART, Associate Professor of Political Science at the Uni- versity of Wisconsin, is an alumnus of the TVA (1936-43) who has since studied river development in two other areas. The resulting books are entitled The Dark Missouri and New India’s Rivers. He has been interested in the way people’s demands upon their water resources affect the kinds of developments they can make work. He was born in Tennessee in 1917, and received his B.A. degree from Vanderbilt University and his Ph.D. from the University of Wis- consin.
34
HENRY C. HART 35
men made ours. That is the first of the four changes of context which, if we take them into account, can help us solve these riddles. How thoroughgoing the change is we can detect at once by sampling afresh the common sense of the early 1900’s as it was passed on to the young. Mark Sullivan, gathering from the memories of men and women still alive in 1927 the contents of the old-time singing geog- raphies, recorded in Our Times that the state capitals were learned this way:
Maine, Augusta on the Kennebec
New Hampshire, Concord on the Merrimac...
But already, in 1927, he had to explain in a footnote to his modern readers that “before the coming of the railroad, a navigable river was an important element in the location and growth of a city.”
Thirty years later, not only railroads but highways were making cities, and cities were, as often as not, making rivers. New York brought in the Delaware through its aqueducts, Los Angeles the Colo- rado, and even the Calumet is being given some economic dignity by Chicago. An urban and, even more extensively, a suburban people were remaking their environment. On the farm, fertilizer first restored the soil, then enriched it beyond its primitive condition. The farm catered to the city and bought from it the expensive equipment for this transformation.
People who live in a world made for them by other people take a view of conservation different in two ways from that of fifty years ago. They make their own demands on nature; conservation is no longer merely saving, or even maximizing in any one direction, what nature has to offer. The modern issue is seldom conservation versus exploitation; it is often prudent exploitation for one purpose against prudent exploitation for another. Of course, during these fifty years, Americans living in an increasingly artificial environment demanded more and more vigorously that some fragments of their continent be kept wild. I myself believe this was not a defense of nature against man, but a creative movement of some of our aesthetically most culti- vated and imaginative people. In any event, the chief potential in- vaders of the wilderness today are neither selfish nor parochial. They
36 The Changing Context of the Problems
are the public multiple-purpose storage reservoir and the defense installation.
Fortunately, people whe make their environment have necessarily learned a good deal about respecting others’ opportunities and even tastes. Americans grew in civic sense as they grew in cities. Now, the public conscience did not incubate evenly. I am not ready to believe that oil rights to the tidelands were wanted by the Gulf states because the nation needed more oil, nor that the electric utility trade associ- ation is as interested in wide and abundant use of power as are cer- tain national and local government agencies. The real issue that emerged in this period was between the doctrinaires of both camps— those who believed all business and all local governments were poten- tial exploiters, and those who believed all “local interests,” public and private, were civic minded enough for partnership—as against those who believed civic conscience is where you find it and that it can be encouraged by defining responsibilities.
To operate and improve our artificial environment we made all kinds of new demands on nature, and thus became dependent on it in more intensive, more varied, and more competing ways. This was the second change of the conservation context. After we had occupied the last of our virgin soil, we began to concern ourselves with the soil we were already on. Our perspective as to soil shifted from the hori- zontal to the vertical. The same thing happened to ground water and then, in 1947, to air itself, in Los Angeles and Donora and since then in other cities. In the short run, this means more decisions as to pri- ority of uses, and more involvement of resource considerations with all other governmental considerations. In the long run, this trend awes us with the promise of energy from the heavy water in the sea, or breeder-reactors stoked with uranium from simple granite. Man, making over his environment, may thus be about to end for practical purposes the distinction between renewable end exhaustible resources, and even the distinction between resources and other elements of nature. Science multiplying natural means also multiplies policy choices that relate to ends.
Meanwhile, a third basic shift in the context stemmed from the filling up of our continental area. The frontier as a continuous edge of settlement had closed before the conservation movement could
HENRY C. HART ii
catch on. But some of the Theodore Roosevelt policies were designed to make good particular deficiencies of nature so the difficult reaches could be occupied like the rest. Reclamation was the key word: bring- ing land up to par. By the time of Franklin Roosevelt there was no par. Classification, uses accommodated to special potentialities, were substituted, as in the Taylor Grazing Act, the programs for the Plains, the soil conservation districts. Or regions were examined for their own resource emphases and tie-ups. These are the common threads of much of the work of the TVA, the National Resources Planning Board and the New Deal resource agencies. The report Regional Factors in National Planning and Development ' expressed the clear- est thinking of the advance.
By the time of the Board of Economic Warfare, we were thinking of our resource problem as encompassing, for some purposes, the friendly part of the world. The same note was sounded strongly a few years after the war in the Paley Report.” Perhaps this fourth change of context, too, was an indirect consequence of our filling up of the continent. In any event, the nearest current counterparts to the New Deal programs of putting people to work at harnessing nature to end poverty are to be found in the newly developing countries overseas. In this sense, the TVA is not a lonely experiment. India has copied it directly. In Iran some of the leading ex-administrators of TVA are developing the hydraulic and mineral resources of a river. Apparently there was more to the American conservation tradition than husband- ing the resources of our homeland. But have we not a hint here, also, that conservation programs as such, even in the scientific, region- adapted versions of the New Deal, had their role in parts of the world not yet highly urbanized and industrialized, where the potential of nature could give shape to a civic consciousness still in a formative stage, where demands on resources were not yet highly organized and highly competing?
Now, I think, we are back to the questions posed in Mr. Griffith’s paper a little better equipped to look for answers.
1 National Resources Committee (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1935).
2 Resources for Freedom, report of the President’s Materials Policy Commis- _ sion (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1952).
38 The Changing Context of the Problems
What had happened during fifty years was that resources lost their fixed limits both as to place and subject. But the need to consider their interrelatedness increased. An integrated resource program for the nation became a will-o’-the-wisp drawing the National Resources Planning Board off into general economic planning. The TVA did integrate resource conservation not in spite, but because, of the fact that it tackled a modest-sized area, and in that area related all of its resource programs to the original federal plant at Muscle Shoals or to the river and the river’s products. Beyond that reached advice, demonstration, and recommendations.
Why have we enjoyed so little presidential leadership of conserva- tion policy even while conservation attitudes have grown and the need for policy decisions multiplied? I believe that it is because conserva- tion no longer expresses a self-contained and self-justifying purpose; resources have become means to ends as diverse as growing proteins, living urbanely around cities, and winning international security. The- odore Roosevelt’s conservation crusade stood concerted and largely independent. Franklin Roosevelt’s conservation programs were means to recovery and victory, as weli as to restoring a natural harmony. From this point of view it may not have been a backward step that when the National Resources Planning Board had been liquidated, its vestigial functions reappeared in two separate contexts, that of the Council of Economic Advisers, and that of the National Security Re- sources Board and its successor, the Office of Defense Mobilization. More and more we have been conserving for something that seems more nearly ultimate.
It is fitting and proper, then, that we do not find ourselves, after fifty years, gathered in a crusade. We are researchers and teachers of not one but dozens of new sciences and engineering fields illuminating and serving various aspects of useful nature: soil science, hydrology, ecology, economic geology, weather control, water and air sanitation. We are policy-makers in separate but related areas. As Mr. Griffith has suggested, not only are water, land, and minerals separate fields for most of us, but each has become too intricate to master whole. Water supply, irrigation, flood prevention and control: we do well if we can comprehend policy even in those subfields. Twenty years ago there was a proposal for a department of conservation. Now we aim
HENRY C. HART 39
at staffing the President and the Congress better to see the connections among the necessarily separate programs. Conservation crusaders can expect no Armageddon now, but a lot of brushfire wars on pollution, power, flood control, wilderness areas, military versus economic uses of the atomic nucleus.
We have in common our tradition and a large segment of our ideals. The need for seeing all of our discrete professions and programs as they relate to those traditions and ideals is greater than it ever was. But it is all the more important to be clear about what the tradition and the ideals involve.
THE MYTHOLOGY OF CONSERVATION
A Samuel P. Hays
On this occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Governors’ Con- ference of 1908, we look back into history in order to evaluate the present and to provide direction for the future. Such stocktaking, how- ever useful it may be, invites self-deception. Few can resist the temp- tation to use history to formulate an ideology which will support their own aspirations, rather than to look squarely at the hard facts of the past. The conservation movement has not escaped this lure. Both its history and its popular battles are replete with a mythology which does not conform to fact. Here I wish to comment briefly on two of these conservation myths that seem to have crept into Mr. Griffith’s paper. One is his major point—that the conservation movement has become more mature. The other is his belief that the public interest has become much more widely accepted as a criterion of resource policies and actions.
During these fifty years, Mr. Griffith finds, the conservation move-
SAMUEL P. HAYS is Assistant Professor of History at the State Uni- versity of Iowa, where his field is American history since the 1870’s. Previ- ously he taught at the University of Illinois. Earlier, he did forestry work for two and a half years in a Civilian Public Service camp in Oregon. He is the author of two books: “Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Pro- gressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920,” about to be published by the Harvard University Press; and The Response to Industrialism, 1885-1914, University of Chicago Press, i957. He was born at Corydon, Indiana, in 1921, and received his B.A. in psychology from Swarthmore and his Ph.D. in his- tory from Harvard.
40
SAMUEL P. HAYS 41
ment has matured. Conservation today, he maintains, is the product of a long, sometimes painful, yet successful historic struggle, the gradual unfolding of beginnings some fifty years ago. He believes that the basic direction has not changed. In his own words, “1958 is but 1908 illuminated.” But the differences between 1908 and 1958, it seems to me, far overshadow the similarities. Since 1908, admittedly, the techniques of conservation have improved, although how much is questionable. But conservation is more than a technique; it is in- evitably geared to a scale of values, and since 1908 this scale of con- servation values has shifted drastically.
The conservation movement of 1908 was intensely optimistic. Men like WJ McGee, who was perhaps the most vigorous philosopher of the movement, felt that the possibilities of applied science opened up vast vistas of human achievement in the field of natural resources. If one could bring about sustained-yield management of biologic re- sources, multiple-purpose development of rivers, and less wasteful utilization of minerals, the future held untold possibilities. Conserva- tion came as an integral part of the fundamental changes in human knowledge which appeared in the second half of the ninteenth century —the revolt against formal, deductive reasoning and the increasing faith in empirical data. These changes seemed to presage almost un- limited opportunities not only for the discovery of knowledge about the earth, but equally unlimited opportunities for control of man’s environment for his own welfare. Conservation leaders of 1908 were deeply infected with this optimism; they had an abundant faith in technology as the key to human problems; they looked to the future and geared their program to an intensely felt hope for social better- ment.
Some of this outlook persisted in the 1930’s, and especially in the leadership of Morris L. Cooke in rural electrification and David E. Lilienthal in the Tennessee Valley Authority. But on the whole the atmosphere of the years since World War II has shifted, I believe, from optimism to a guarded pessimism. We think less of possibilities and more of limits; we think less in terms of human betterment, and more in terms of human survival. The unlimited horizons of tech- nology are less often in our minds today than the compulsive use of _ technology in a race toward world suicide. This new emphasis ap-
42 The Mythology of Conservation
peared soon after World War II in two popular books, William Vogt’s Road to Survival and Fairfield Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet, both of them infused with Malthusian pessimism, both emphasizing the enormous problem of population growth and the world’s limited food supply. Both warned that technology was not enough; resources were not unlimited; the pressure of population itself must be reduced. The increasing emphasis on national security augmented this sense of the limits, rather than of the opportunities of resources, of the need to husband rather than to develop, of the need to stockpile and save. I think that one of the reasons why the depth of this change is not fully understood is the prevalence of certain popular misconceptions about conservation in the Theodore Roosevelt era. The view is cur- rent that the Roosevelt conservationists locked up resources because of a fear that supplies might be exhausted, while their successors de- veloped a more intelligent program of wise resource use. This notion, popularized by those who attacked conservation policies, has got into the history books, but in the light of the evidence it must be revised. President Theodore Roosevelt, Forester Gifford Pinchot, and Sec- retary of the Interior James R. Garfield withdrew resources from many kinds of land entry, but in almost no cases from all forms of entry. Those water-power sites, for example, that were so important in the Ballinger-Pinchot controversy remained open to entry under the Right-of-Way Act of 1901, the act pertinent to water-power mat- ters. Withdrawals of water-power lands ensured entry only under certain laws, and development only as water-power sites. They did not prevent use, but defined a particular use. They were, in effect, a form of land classification. And so it was with almost every with- drawal during the Roosevelt Administration. As a result of its poli- cies, water power and coal development on the public lands did not stop, but went forward rapidly. In fact, it was the Taft Administra- tion, not that of Roosevelt, which withdrew water power sites from all forms of entry, and it was Secretary of the Interior Richard A. Ballinger who prohibited mineral entries on oil lands, when Garfield had refused to do so on the grounds that it would stop development. The Roosevelt administrators were imbued with a philosophy of de- velopment, not of the need to prevent use. They followed the vision that wise use would provide a resource base for unlimited growth. The conservation movement, then, has not progressed in one direc-
SAMUEL P. HAYS 43
tion since 1908. Instead, it has radically altered its course, shifting from an open, optimistic, hopeful movement, tied to a broad philoso- phy of human improvement, to a more rigid, pessimistic one, deeply affected by a fear for human survival. Can one call this a change toward maturity? *
As one evidence of the greater maturity of the conservation move- ment, Mr. Griffith cites a growing acceptance of the concept of the public interest. Past struggles, so the reasoning goes, have centered on the conflict between public and private interest, but with the tri- umph of the idea of the public interest this controversy has abated and conservation displays a growing unity. Many writings support this analysis of the past, for conservation history has emphasized those major episodes of the fight for public control: the Pinchot-Ballinger controversy, the struggle for the Water Power Act and the Mineral Leasing Act, and the Teapot Dome controversy. But this emphasis is misleading. Public control is not an end in itself; it is only a means to an end. Conservation means much more than simply public action; and we should be more concerned with the history of its objectives rather than of its techniques. In fact, by dwelling on the struggle for public action historians have obscured the much more basic problem of the fate of conservation objectives.
Some apparent victories for the principle of public ownership have actually involved defeats for conservation goals. The Water Power Act of 1920, for example, established the principle of federal adminis- tration of hydroelectric power on the public lands and in the navi- gable streams. Yet that act also marked the failure of the fight for one of the major conservation ideas of 1908—multiple-purpose river development. Ever since 1908, Senator Francis G. Newlands had fought for his measure to establish a multiple-purpose planning and development commission, and in the Rivers and Harbors Act of 1917 he finally obtained authorization of a planning body. But the Water Power Act of 1920, which was the real answer of Congress to the Newlands program, repealed this one meager foothold for the mul-
*NOTE BY MR. GRIFFITH Granted that we are pessimistic today, I do not think we are pessimistic about conservation—Vogt and Osborn to the contrary, notwithstanding. I think I shall retain my optimism on conservation on the assumption that we shall see another fifty years and that, at least for the United States, science will rout Malthus.
44 The Mythology of Conservation
tiple-purpose approach. At the same time that act gave no acknowl- edgment to what conservationists in 1908 had considered to be the key to their proposal, the use of water-power revenues to finance the multiple-purpose program. The Water Power Act of 1920 contained a single-purpose approach. It did not mention flood control or irriga- tion; it spoke of navigation only as a use to be protected from poten- tial encroachments from power production. Even on the crucial item of raising revenue from private hydroelectric power production to pay for river development, the issue over which the battle had raged since 1908, the conservationists capitulated almost completely. In brief, it seems clear that in the Water Power Act of 1920 conservationists sac- rificed the essence of their ideas for the single advantage of public control.
Emphasis upon the struggle between private and public interest has often transformed real conservation issues into spurious moral battles between the selfish capitalist and the noble public. Historians, for ex- ample, have refought the Pinchot-Ballinger controversy in moral terms. Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes reversed the moral judg- ments in his evaluation, recasting Pinchot rather than Ballinger as the villain. But Ickes succumbed to the same error of permitting an ethi- cal analysis to obscure the conflicts in conservation policy which lay at the root of the trouble. It is misleading to argue that Roosevelt and Taft had the same objectives; they did not. That celebrated contro- versy arose because men whom Taft appointed sought to modify policies instituted by Roosevelt administrators. These were policy differences, and it is amazing how deeply such questions became ob- scured, even at the hands of the participants, amid the mythology of morality and the “people versus the interests.”
Our own times have witnessed similar simplifications. Preserva- tionists, for example, have cast the struggle to preserve areas from commercial development as a contest between private and public in- terest. But commercial development is just as much a public value as is preservation for recreation and wilderness areas. As a prominent irrigation leader complained during the fight over the dam in Dinosaur National Monument, “We are conservationists, too.” Admittedly, one can choose between these values only with great difficulty, but to simplify the choice by invoking the mythology of the moral battle
SAMUEL P. HAYS 45
between public and private interest is to distort the issue. No such juggling of symbols can obliterate the fundamental conflict between preservation and development as perennial and competing public values.
I am not nearly as sanguine as is Mr. Griffith about the “greater conformity to public norms” of which he speaks. This, it seems to me, is a shift in language, rather than a change in the amount of agreement over conservation issues. The new language and technical concepts of “public interest” do not guarantee that conservation goals will be achieved. They do not answer the basic question: Who deter- mines the public interest? The National Rivers and Harbors Congress’ definition of public interest may differ from that of the National Reclamation Association, and the choice between them will depend upon how much political power each can wield.
The widespread use of the concept of the public interest often ob- scures the importance of this political struggle, and substitutes rhet- oric for reality. It permits bitter political contests to be waged far beneath the calm surface of agreed-on language and technical jargon, and drives those contests even farther into the dark recesses of legal and statistical mystery, away from the annoying eye of the public. The great danger of the rhetoric of the “‘public interest” is that it can lull one into complacency by persuading him to accept a mythological in- stead of a substantive analysis of both historical and contemporary conservation issues.
NOTE BY MR. GRIFFITH With the views that Dr. Hays has presented—that overstressing of the issue of public versus private tends to obliterate reality—I agree; but I still sense a very considerable con- vergence. I am with Dr. Hays in trying to pierce beyond the symbols and the myths to the realities. Yet symbols and myths can also serve as norms, and at least in Congress I can witness to a growing search for realities lying back of these symbolic norms.
Professor Hart pointed out the difficulty of a definition of public inter- est. I will stand on my earlier statement that however much we may quarrel about the public interest and what it is—and that is the essence of the quarrel—I still say that there is a net gain insofar as today it is the nature of the public interest that is the battle, and not whether we shall conform to the public interest.
Ny
II SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY,
AND NATURAL RESOURCES
AKKK
Ni The Inexhaustible Resource of Technology
THOMAS B. NOLAN
Technology on the Land
BYRON To SHAW
Malthus’ Main Thesis Still Holds
ROBERT C. COOK
The Barrier of Cost
HARRY A. CURTIS
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hi kOe aie ee as
eno nee | y
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THE INEXHAUSTIBLE RESOURCE On TECHNOLOGY
WA Thomas B. Nolan
The part played by physical scientists and engineers in the early his- tory of the conservation movement has, I suspect, been forgotten in the fifty years that have elapsed since the Governors’ Conference of 1908. And it seems equally true that the influence of these two pro- fessions in materially changing the nature of the movement during these fifty years has also been overlooked.
However, I shall mention only briefly the early interest of scientists and engineers in conservation, and shall devote most of this paper to the thesis that there have been major modifications in the nature and objectives of the conservation movement since 1908, and that, to a marked degree, these changes result from the much more reassuring picture of our natural resource situation brought about by the re-
THOMAS B. NOLAN is Director of the United States Geological Sur- vey. He received his undergraduate training at Yale University and the Ph.D. in geology from that institution in 1924. Upon completion of the doctorate he joined the. Geological Survey. His principal professional activities have con- cerned the geology of mineral deposits in the Gold Hill, Tonopah, and Eureka mining districts. In 1954 he was awarded the K. C. Li medal for research on tungsten and in 1933 the Spendiaroff Prize of the International Geological Congress. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, and many professional societies and organizations. He was born in Greenfield, Massachusetts, in 1901.
The author wishes to note his indebtedness to H. M. Bannerman, Julian Feiss, and Luna B. Leopold for helpful criticism and suggestions, and to Miss Jane Wallace for very material assistance in the preparation of this paper.
49
50 The Inexhaustible Resource of Technology
search accomplishments of physical and biological scientists and the technological advances of the engineers.
To judge from the records of the Governors’ Conference, many of the men who assisted Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt in its organization were the younger associates or successors of a small group of scientists, engineers, and administrators who were active in Washington during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, and who had participated in the explorations that led to the opening of the West. Later they had become involved in the problems that arose during its development. Through their association with both the gov- ernmental and scientific agencies in Washington and the national pro- fessional organizations, they exerted a considerable influence on both the intellectual and political thinking of the country.
Several of the early geologists and engineers of the Geological Sur- vey were members of this group. One of them, John Wesley Powell, the second Director of the Survey, was especially influential.
One of the photographs which adorns the Survey Director’s study is of the Survey “lunch mess” of the nineties. This was one of several similar gatherings that appear to have been a feature of the scientific bureaus of Washington in the latter part of the last century. Besides Powell, it includes WJ McGee and F. H. Newell, two men who appear to have played major roles in assisting Pinchot to organize the 1908 meeting. It also includes at least four others who were “general guests” of the White House conference. One can imagine that the discussions at such luncheon gatherings were instrumental in formu- lating the plans and developing the policies of the newly emerging conservation group. Their proposals must have been especially effec- tive since they were based on the knowledge of individuals who had appraised the resources of newly explored regions and had endeav- ored to control their development.
In developing my thesis that science and technology have changed the nature and objectives of the conservation movement, I propose first to review the original concept of conservation, next to examine the present situation in several of the resource fields in comparison with that pictured by the speakers at the Governors’ Conference in 1908, and finally to suggest some conclusions that seem to me to fol- low from this review.
THOMAS B. NOLAN 51
I believe the evidence is quite conclusive that the impelling reason for the widespread acceptance of the conservation movement in the early part of the century, as well as the specific justification for the Governors’ Conference, was fear—fear of exhaustion of the natural resources upon which the national economy was based, and concern that survival of the nation might be dependent upon ability to achieve restrictions in use that would postpone or alleviate the effects of such exhaustion.
The communication of the Inland Waterways Commission to The- odore Roosevelt, which led to the conference, called attention to an unprecedented consumption of natural resources, and exhaustion of these resources.! President Roosevelt clearly accepted this view and in his letters to the Governors calling the conference declared, “.. . there is no other question now before the Nation of equal gravity with the question of the conservation of our natural resources, ....
“It is evident the abundant natural resources on which the welfare of this nation rests are becoming depleted, and in not a few cases, are already exhausted.” ?
This theme was even more vigorously presented in his opening ad- dress to the conference. He said, for example, “I have asked you to come together now because the enormous consumption of these re- sources, and the threat of imminent exhaustion of some of them, due to reckless and wasteful use, once more calls for common effort, com- mon action:
“We want to take action that will prevent the advent of a woodless age, and defer as long as possible the advent of an ironless age.” ?
This keynote of fear for the future because of exhaustion of nat- ural resources was a recurrent one throughout the conference, and was emphasized by some of the more eminent and influential partici- pants. Andrew Carnegie, for example, predicted that our Lake Supe-
1T. E. Burton, and WJ McGee, Letter (Oct. 3, 1907) to the President of the United States, Theodore Roosevelt, Proceedings of a Conference of Gov- ernors in the White House, Washington, D.C., May 13-15, 1908 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1909), p. viii.
2 Theodore Roosevelt, Letter (Nov. 1907) to the Governors of the United States, idem, p. x.
3 Theodore Roosevelt, “Opening Address by the President,” idem, p. 6.
a2 The Inexhaustible Resource of Technology
rior iron ores would be exhausted before 1940,* and J. J. Hill, of railroad fame, expected that our supply of some varieties of timber would be practically exhausted in ten or twelve years. He was, more- over, concerned that the yield per acre for various agricultural prod- ucts had decreased, and attributed this diminishing return to soil destruction. His statement, “We are approaching the point where all our wheat product will be needed for our own uses, and we shall cease to be an exporter of grain,” might well be regarded as wishful think- ing today rather than as a matter of deep concern.°
Similar predictions were made concerning essentially all of the nat- ural resources. One speaker, in one of the first of the many similar statements that have followed, reported that “The supply of natural oil and gas is limited and uncertain and the amount available is re- quired for special industries.” ® He also anticipated exhaustion of domestic anthracite coal supplies in sixty to seventy years. Other speakers predicted exhaustion of phosphate supplies for fertilizer, one of them expecting it to be so nearly in the future that he reported that “there is not fertilizer enough to be gotten in the market to sup- ply all the American farmers.” 7
Equally bleak forecasts for future water-power supplies were made, and Hill’s concern over the future supplies of agricultural and forest products was endorsed. An electrical engineer, for example, reported that “The supply of water power is limited . . . and great care must be exercised to insure [its] preservation .. .”°
It is not likely that many of the speakers unreservedly accepted one Governor’s prediction that “The American people are on the verge of a timber famine,” ® but the concept of exhaustion was widely ac- cepted and appears to have dominated the conference’s deliberations.
Other views were, of course, expressed, and some of them are not at all dissimilar to much of present-day thinking. Two speakers par-
4 Andrew Carnegie, “The Conservation of Ores and Related Minerals,” idem, Dales
5James J. Hill, “The Natural Wealth of the Land and Its Conservation,” idem, p. 72.
6H. St. Clair Putnam, “Conservation of Power Resources,” idem, p. 293.
7James Wilson, “Address by the Secretary of Agriculture,” idem, p. 97.
8H. St. Clair Putnam, op. cit., p. 295.
9 Edwin S. Stuart, “Conservation of Pennsylvania’s Resources,” idem, p. 327.
THOMAS B. NOLAN 53
ticularly anticipated the current emphasis on wise use. Edmund James emphasized the need for “so organizing and utilizing our natural re- sources as to produce in the large and in the long run the greatest return in the form of material wealth to the Nation.” He also observed that “we shall add far more to our natural resources by developing our ability to increase them than we can ever do by mere processes of saving.” 1° Andrew Carnegie also pleaded for more knowledge—“but especially I urge research into and mastery over Nature . . . our great- est need today [is] the need for better and more practical knowl- edge.” 14
On the whole, though, the emphasis on exhaustion prevailed, and the Declaration of the Conference, adopted shortly before the sessions were adjourned reiterated that theme.!*
These predictions that supplies of iron ore, fuel, timber, water power, and even grain would become inadequate or be exhausted in a relatively few years after 1908 appear surprising to us today, when we consider the proposals that have been made in recent years to pro- vide subsidies of various kinds to domestic producers of these com- modities because of existing oversupplies. The threatened exhaustion not only has not occurred, but for some commodities we are seri- ously proposing research programs to develop new uses in order that existing capacity for production can be utilized.
I have called attention to these predictions of fifty years ago not to ridicule the individuals who made them, but to make clear the basic assumptions upon which the initial concept of the conservation movement rested, and to bring out the extent of the change from it to the present-day one. We now characterize conservation objectives, insofar as natural resorrces are concerned, as those promoting wise use of the resource. They imply practices that wiil provide a sustained yield so far as the renewable resources are concerned, or those that will achieve orderly development without waste, in the case of non- renewable ones.
Increasingly too, conservation has meant the utilization of resources
10 Fdmund J. James, “Address by the President of the University of Illinois,” idem, pp. 174, 178.
11 Andrew Carnegie, op. cit., p. 24.
12 Newton C. Blanchard, and others, “Declaration of the Governors,” idem, ’ pp. 192-94.
54 The Inexhaustible Resource of Technology
in such a way as to preserve the social and aesthetic values of the natural environment for succeeding generations. Leopold has recently implied that this may ultimately become the objective of the move- ment, since increasingly the adequacy of supply of such resources as water and minerals has become a matter of economics.'?
In retrospect this represents a major change in the meaning of con- servation—a change from the negative objective of restriction of use (Carnegie 1* phrased it as “economy, that the next generation and the next may be saved from want’’) to the positive one of better utiliza- tion of our resources and our environment in order to make possible better and fuller lives for all the people.
I believe that this change could only have come about as a result of a popular acceptance of the concept that the resource base for the national economy was not in immediate danger of exhaustion. This reassurance came about in part through the development of addi- tional supplies, in part through supplementing existing resources by substitute materials, and in part by better utilization practices. It has been easy for most of us to accept, for even the most casual observer is aware of the increased standard of living with the attendant in- crease in the amount and variety of resources on which it is based on the one hand, and the troublesome recurrent surpluses of supply of so many commodities, on the other.
To me it is also clear that this expansion of the resource base is the product of science and technology. It is an interesting speculation that the concern over exhaustion of natural resources, apparent at the Governors’ Conference, stimulated research by physical and biological scientists and engineers in this field. Whatever the cause, research has been active and has been productive of results.
A brief review of the changes in our resource situation brought about by research in each of the major fields will, I hope, document this belief.
The field of nonrenewable resources—the mineral raw materials and fuels—is one with which I am most familiar and which I will, therefore, discuss first and in somewhat more detail than the others.
13 Luna B. Leopold, Water and the Conservation Movement (U.S. Geological
Survey Circular 402), Washington, 1958. 14 Andrew Carnegie, op. cit., p. 24.
THOMAS B. NOLAN 55
It is especially noteworthy too that even for these natural resources— which as everyone knows cannot be replaced when once consumed— we now think of the means by which needs for these commodities can be met, rather than express concern over their imminent exhaustion.
How has this change in opinion come about? In general, it has been a gradual process that has been in part the result of new or potential production from sources that were unknown or not regarded as capa- ble of exploitation in 1907, and in part through the development and utilization of substances that supplemented or replaced the common materials of the past.
I had the privilege of reviewing these developments at the Mid- Century Conference sponsored by Resources for the Future a little over four years ago; !° it will be helpful, and instructive, I believe, to examine that review and bring it up to date. It was proposed at that time that three major fields of research had been, and would continue to be, productive in expanding our resource base of the useful expend- able materials.
The first of these major fields of research is that directed toward a better understanding of the origin of the kinds of deposits currently being exploited, and related studies on new and improved tools and techniques by which additional like deposits could be found, even though they might not be exposed at the earth’s surface.
The petroleum industry is probably the best example of the effec- tiveness of this approach. It has provided the country with proven reserves of petroleum that are today sevenfold larger than those of only thirty-five years ago. I believe that this can, to a large degree, be attributed to industry-supported studies on the origin of oil and the factors that control its migration and accumulation, as well as a most elaborate and effective development of geologic, geochemical, geophysical techniques and instruments that have improved our ability to locate petroleum accumulations economically and efficiently.
It is true that we still must face the eventual exhaustion of our oil fields and Hubbert 1° has recently prepared an interesting and instruc-
15 Thomas B. Nolan, “The Way Ahead for Research in Nonrenewable Re- sources,” The Nation Looks at Its Resources (Washington: Resources for the Future, Inc., 1954), pp. 314-16.
16M. King Hubbert, Nuclear Energy and the Fossil Fuels (Shell Develop- ment Company Publication 95, 1956), 40 pp.
56 The Inexhaustible Resource of Technology
tive discussion which outlines the future decline in the rate of dis- covery and production. But his predictions are a far cry from those of twenty or more years ago, which appraised our total future supply as significantly less than the production that has been made since then, let alone the even larger proven reserves that are presently known.
The older reserve estimates have been completely invalidated by the great strides that have been made through the use of geology, geo- physics, and engineering in finding and extracting petroleum from the ground. The various types of stratigraphic traps in Texas and the Mid-Continent Region, the reservoirs adjacent to the salt domes of the Gulf Coastal Plain and the Continental Shelf, and those bordering the ancient reefs of Texas, the Williston Basin of North Dakota and western Canada have added to our primary reserves and are the result of the increased capacity of the petroleum geologist to predict, and find, concentrations of oil and gas in environments that were poorly understood not too many years ago. Our known reserves have been further enlarged by the increased yield from known fields due to the work of the petroleum engineer on secondary recovery methods and on induced fracturing in the reservoir rocks.
And we can view the possibility of exhaustion of even these re- serves with some equanimity in the light of our research-derived capacity to produce synthetic liquid fuels from the tremendously large reserves of oil shales, tar sands, and, in the still more distant future, low-grade coals.
Progress in increasing our resource base for the metallic and non- metallic mineral resources has lagged behind that for petroleum, largely because demand for these commodities did not increase as fast as did demand for petroleum products after adoption of the internal combustion engine. But there is considerable evidence that support of research on the origin of these deposits and into the means of ex- ploring for them is increasing both in industry and in government, and is beginning to bear fruit.
We are at the moment unfortunately more concerned with selling and utilizing the products of our copper, our lead-zinc, and our tung- sten mines than in finding additional sources to bring into production, but recent years have seen the discovery of new and significant de-
THOMAS B. NOLAN S77.
posits of metalliferous minerals, which greatly expand our capacity for future production. The new lead-zinc deposits of New Brunswick in Canada and in Tennessee, the new copper deposits in Arizona, the iron and lead deposits of southeast Missouri, and the immense rare- earth occurrence of the Mountain Pass district in California are exam- ples of discoveries that, to a large extent, have been the result of re- search-guided exploration using new techniques, such as airborne geophysical instruments and geochemical prospecting methods. There are sound theoretical grounds for believing that many additional de- posits remain to be found by sharpened and improved concepts of origin and by new and more elaborate exploration tools. Engel’s re- cent study '* of variations in the ratio of the isotopes of oxygen in some minerals associated with ore deposits, and the possibility that such variations may reflect temperature gradients existing at the time of ore deposition offers an exciting example of these techniques. Barton 1° similarly has opened up the possibility of predicting the environment in which ore minerals may be deposited through his work on the equilibrium relations on these minerals.
The additions to our resource base now being made by better knowledge of presently mineable orebodies and improved exploration methods and techniques will be supplemented in the future to an in- creasing extent by research on subgrade and ultra subgrade material. The study of the distribution of elements in the earth’s crust in con- centrations that are too small to be presently workable is already pointing the way to accumulations in which two or more elements or substances are present in trace amounts but which, in combination, may represent potential sources of very large magnitude. In addition, increased requirements or new and improved recovery methods may make much material merchantable that is presently below acceptable grade.
It appears that many elements may be distributed through the crust in such a way that there is an inverse relationship between the quan- tity or tonnage of material containing the particular element and the
17 A. E. J. Engel and C. Patterson, Isotopic Composition of Lead in Leadville Limestone, Hydrothermal Dolomite, and Associated Ore (Geological Society of America Bulletin 68, 1957), p. 1723.
18P. B. Barton, Jr., “Some Limitations on the Possible Composition of the Ore-forming Fluid,” Economic Geology, Vol. 52 (1957), pp. 333-53.
58 The Inexhaustible Resource of Technology
grade or concentration of the element. The impact of more detailed knowledge of this matter on potential supply may well be tremen- dous.
Two examples will illustrate what may be expected with continuing “trace-element”’ research, especially if it be combined with economic incentive. The first pertains to our domestic resources of uranium. Initially we were essentially dependent upon the high-grade deposits of the Belgian Congo and Canada; these ores contained 20 pounds or more per ton, and the quantities of ore were not impressively large. Recognition of the need for additional supplies at the close of the war led to one of the most extensive and thorough programs of re- search on occurrence and of exploration that has been carried out in recent years. Much of the research was concentrated on phases of trace occurrences of uranium and on factors causing local relative concentrations. It has been phenomenally successful—we now have well-established reserves amounting to approximately 70 million tons of material containing about 5 pounds per ton,'® and are using new recovery methods that have proved to be entirely satisfactory and are installed in a dozen or so new plants. In addition, there are even larger quantities of phosphate rock containing less than one-half pound per ton, from which uranium can be (and already has been) recovered as a by-product. And finally, there are literally billions of tons of easily mined black shales, containing in the neighborhood of one-tenth of a pound per ton, that constitute a future reserve when, and if, it is needed. Lest this last be dismissed as a completely im- practical source, I will observe that Hubbert calculated the energy value of the uranium in a ton of this average shale as equivalent to that in nearly 1,000 barrels of petroleum.?°
A second example of a trace-element resource not yet exploited, but which I am convinced will be some day, is the Phosphoria forma- tion, a rock unit of the Rocky Mountain region. It includes, as sepa- rate beds, most of the high-grade phosphate rock in the western United States; and, in addition, it contains significant trace amounts
19 Jesse Johnson, “Uranium Production in the United States,” address deliv- ered to the 4th Annual Conference of the Atomic Industrial Forum, New
York, October 28, 1957. 20M. King Hubbert, op. cit., pp. 33-35.
THOMAS B. NOLAN 59
of a number of metals, including uranium, vanadium, the rare earths, silver, nickel, zinc, and molybdenum, as well as appreciable quanti- ties of fluorine, distillable hydrocarbons, and sulfur. McKelvey and his co-workers 71 have estimated that the formation is present over a large part of a 135,000 square-mile region. Within this area, the formation contains billions of metric tons of phosphate. In recent years a great deal has been learned about the distribution and amount of the trace elements in the formation; on the basis of present knowledge, a thick- ness of 50 feet or more of rock, extending over several hundreds of square miles, may contain more than a half dozen commodities with a gross value of something in the order of $5.00 a ton.
Finally, I am convinced that a still further extension of our resource base of mineral raw materials will come about through research into the basic physical and chemical properties of the elements and their compounds, with the objective of developing synthetic or substitute materials. Indeed, it seems entirely probable to me that in the future we may be able to invent, or produce out of abundant materials, new substances that have predictable, specific desired properties. A first step along this line is already well under way, and substances are being developed to provide particular, desirable properties. The rela- tively new field of powder metallurgy has provided one means of ac- complishing this; one of its techniques—that yielding the so-called “cermets” and “cermet coatings”—has been especially fruitful. These substances may be considered as comprising refractory carbides, ni- trides, borides, silicides, or oxides with or without a cementing metal. Some of them combine high chemical stability and oxidation resist- ance with high strength and low density.”
Events of the four years that have elapsed since this earlier review of our nonrenewable resources have strengthened the conclusion that was reached then, that “it does not seem too improbable that, through one or another of the methods of improved exploration techniques, exploitation of presently unavailable supplies, or programs of substi-
21V. E. McKelvey, R. W. Swanson, and R. P. Sheldon, “The Permian Phosphorite Déposits of Western United States,” Origine des gisements de phosphates de chaux, X1Xth International Geologic Congress, Fasc. XI, p. 56.
22 A good summary is provided by Technical Assistance Mission No. 141,
Powder Metallurgy (Paris: Organisation for European Economic Co-operation, 1955).
60 The Inexhaustible Resource of Technology
tution and improved utilization, raw materials for our civilization can be obtained for a long period in the future . . .” 73
I believe a similar conclusion may be reached in respect to our water resources. Water, unlike minerals and the mineral fuels, is a renewable resource. Thanks to the automatic operation of the hydro- logic cycle, our supply is continuously, but not always uniformly, re- plenished by rainfall. Although three-quarters of the precipitation which falls is returned to the atmosphere by evapotranspiration and only one-quarter is currently available for man’s use, we are in this country using only one-fifth of this smaller available amount. And of this one-fifth that we do use, approximately one-half is applied to what are regarded as nonconsumptive uses—that is, this amount is subject, within certain limits, to repeated reuse. Hence in the broadest sense, Our water resources are not only renewed by natural processes but, in theory at least, the use of about one-half of them is subject to almost unlimited expansion.
A number of the papers given at the 1908 conference expressed concern over the continued adequacy of our supply of water. Irriga- tion, water power, and inland waterways appear to have been con- sidered as requiring the preservation of our water resources, and pro- tection of a forest cover seems to have been considered the major factor in such a preservation. Curiously enough, little attention was given to industrial supplies, which now represent about half of the present water use. Nor was there recognition of the nonconsumptive character of the water-power use.
We still have problems of adequate supplies of water, although the use pattern is significantly different from that of fifty years ago. And as the drought in the Southwest of a year ago made dramatically clear, water shortages may have a devastating effect upon the econ- omy of a community or region. Luna Leopold, however, in a recent illuminating discussion of Water and the Conservation Movement, makes clear that our current problems of water surpluses or shortages, serious as they may be locally, are basically not problems of conser- vation so much as they are of economics. Except for the problems that arise through our desire to preserve portions of the original environ-
23 Thomas B. Nolan, “The Outlook for the Future—Non-renewable Re- sources,” Economic Geology, Vol. 50 (1955), p. 7.
THOMAS B. NOLAN 61
ment of the nation, he considers that “all our other water problems are problems of shortage due to geographic and time variations, which, important as they are, can be reduced to problems of economics. Eco- nomic problems gradually become solved by the play of forces in- herent in the market place. Water will be used in those places and for those purposes which can best afford to bear the cost under prevailing conditions.” 7+
Leopold’s conclusion is in effect another way of stating that we are now able to solve our water problems, not by curtailment of use or other restrictive measures based on possible exhaustion, but by utiliz- ing our knowledge of the hydrologic cycle gained through extensive research over past years, and our capacity to transport or regulate water on a scale vastly greater than in the past as a result of tech- nologic advances. Our concern is not with running out of water that is needed to accomplish certain desirable or necessary things, but with whether the expenditure of labor and materials is justified by the re- sults to be obtained. Use, rather than restrictions on use, controls our thinking.
I believe it is also true, as was suggested in the discussion of min- eral raw materials, that we have by no means exhausted our capacity to increase the amount of water available for use. From the knowl- edge gained through research into particular segments of the hydro- logic cycle, there are good grounds for believing that the usable frac- tion of the water that reaches the earth as rainfall can be somewhat enlarged over the one-fifth now considered to be the maximum. Cur- rent studies on the principles of evaporation, for example, are greatly increasing our knowledge of the relative importance of the factors that affect the process; > with this increased knowledge comes the ability to influence one or more of them in a way to decrease current evaporation losses, such as the experimental work now being done on the use of a mono-molecular film of a nonpermeable solid on the sur-
24Tuna B. Leopold, op. cit., p. 6.
25 Water-loss Investigations: Lake Hefner Studies, Technical Report (U.S. Geological Survey Prof. Paper 269, 1954), 158 pp. Water-loss Investigations: Lake Hefner Studies, Base Data Report (U.S. Geological Survey Prof. Paper 270, 1954), 300 pp. G. E. Harbeck, Max Kohler, G. E. Koberg, and others, Water-loss Investigations: Lake Mead Studies (U.S. Geological Survey Prof. Paper 298), Washington, 1958.
62 The Inexhaustible Resource of Technology
face of ponds and reservoirs.*° Similar studies of the transpiration process seem to hold promise. Other research in progress on recharge to underground aquifers and on the nature of the salt water—fresh water interface in coastal areas, as well as continuing study of the mechanics of ground-water flow, give promise of materially increasing our ability to expand wisely the use of existing supplies of under- ground water.
And perhaps still further in the future will be the possibility of eco- nomic justification for conversion of saline water to fresh water. It seems certain that further work will greatly increase the number of areas in which one or another of the several processes now under study may be economically justified. If for example, oil field brines, and other saline ground waters could be economically treated, for domestic and industrial uses, many places in the arid or semi-arid Southwest might have their current water problems greatly alleviated.
I am not especially familiar with the changes that have occurred in the two other major fields that were considered by the Governors’ Conference—soils and the foods produced from the soil, and forest resources. But there can be little doubt that the 1908 conferees were seriously concerned about the possibility of an inadequate future sup- ply of food and forest products (exhaustion in the case of renewable resources being an unlikely end-result) and of accelerated erosion of soil, as a result of the exploitation of forest and range that was being so vigorously carried on as our country was being developed.
Perhaps the most graphic means of bringing out the magnitude of the change in our national situation, so far as food and forest products are concerned, is to contrast the statements of J. J. Hill that both for timber and grain the United States would face within the century either exhaustion or become dependent upon imports,?’ with the intro- ductory statement of the recent report of the Commission on In- creased Industrial Use of Agricultural Products: “American farmers have succeeded so well in the necessary effort to increase their effi-
26 G. E. Harbeck, “Can Evaporation Losses be Reduced?” address delivered at First Intersociety Conference on Irrigation and Drainage, San Francisco, April 29, 1957. Irving Langmuir and V. J. Schaefer, “Rates of Evaporation of Water through Compressed Monolayers on Water,” Journal of the Franklin
Institute, Vol. 235 (1943). 27 James J. Hill, op. cit., pp. 65, 72.
THOMAS B. NOLAN 63
ciency that they now consistently outrun the capacity of the economy to consume what they produce. . . . Though population is growing and living standards are rising, the productive capacity of our agri- culture promises for many years to keep increasingly ahead of both.” 8
The report of this commission is really a most impressive testi- monial of the effectiveness of the research programs in agriculture and forestry during the last fifty years; it is encouraging to consider that in some respects these are analogous to the threefold research program now being initiated in the minerals field. The widespread acceptance of such practices as crop rotation in agriculture and of the principle of sustained yield in forestry has increased the resource base in the same way that improved exploration techniques have in the mineral resource field. And the success of the studies on plant breeding, on the control of pests and blights, and on improved culti- vation practices have had a comparable effect in increasing yields as has the utilization of lower and lower grade material in minerals. Finally, the noteworthy advances in utilization of food and forest products, through the research activities of the Forest Products Labo- ratory and the Agricultural Experiment Stations, have not only elimi- nated much of the waste that concerned the conferees of fifty years ago, but have, especially for forest products, actually increased the resource because of a new ability to utilize the waste products for the same purposes as the primary product.
The situation in regard to soils, in contrast to the products of the soil, is basically more like that of mineral resources, since the produc- tion of soil from rock is a geologic process and can be accomplished only in units of geologic rather than everyday time. I have the im- pression that our slower progress in better utilizing and in expanding our soil resources lies partly in our failure to appreciate this, and partly in our lack of knowledge of the nature of the erosion that locally so dramatically destroys or removes some of our best soils.
I suspect also that far too little research has been done on the de- tails of processes in soil-profile development and other aspects of soil morphology. The present practice of soil classification will probably
28 J. Leroy Welsh and others, Report to the Congress from the Commission
on Increased Industrial Use of Agricultural Products, 85th Congress, 1st Ses- sion, Senate Doc. 45, 1957, p. viii.
64 The Inexhaustible Resource of Technology
be revised as such additional knowledge becomes available, and im- proved classification schemes better founded on soil morphology might make possible a more rational separation of soils adapted for different use. Under such an improved classification scheme some soils might best be used for agriculture, some for forestry, but others as areas of ground-water recharge or for other water management purposes.
Although the effectiveness of erosion control programs has in- creased, this improvement has come principally, in my opinion, from empirical trials rather than a greatly increased depth in knowledge of the erosion process. Basic understanding of principles appears to me to offer the main source of further improvement in erosion manage- ment techniques.
We cannot of course prevent erosion in the broad sense, any more than we can prevent in the broad sense aging or growth in plants or animals; we can in a small, but to a constantly increasing, degree modify such phenomena and take advantage of our knowledge of the controlling principles in order to achieve effects more nearly in accord with our desires. Soil conservation practices, based on such knowl- edge, give great promise not only in the maintenance of present soil resources, but also in reducing the sediment load carried by the streams, and deposited in reservoirs. A preliminary report on Brandy- wine Creek, Delaware, shows evidence of the effectiveness of land management programs for control of sediment; °° it indicates a reduc- tion of 38 per cent in the sediment load from this small eastern drain- age basin-within an eight-year period as the result of adoption of a watershed treatment program with practically no dams or other struc- tures.
In general, we can say that watershed treatment programs will be especially effective in control of sediment movement; their effect on the disposition of water probably needs more study before we can arrive at a definite conclusion.
I am also intrigued at the long-range possibilities of research on the nutritional requirement of specific crops, including laboratory studies
“9H. P. Guy, “The Trend of Suspended-sediment Discharge of the Brandy-
wine Creek at Wilmington, Delaware, 1947-1955,” U.S. Geological Survey Open File Report, 1957, 55 pp.
THOMAS B. NOLAN 65
in hydroponics. Further work in this field may make possible a much more effective utilization of fertilizer resources as well as a more in- telligent correlation of soil types with particular crops.
I fear that some of my conservationist friends will feel that I have been unduly optimistic in my confidence that scientific research and technologic development have to a large extent eliminated from the conservation movement concern over the adequacy of our resource base. They will, quite correctly, point to a number of commodities and to a number of localities, in which adequacy is far from assured —areas in which ground-water supplies are being drastically, and perhaps permanently, depleted is one example.
But I am unwilling to acknowledge that such existing local or spe- cific, individual shortages invalidate my firm conviction that con- tinuing research, combined with man’s ingenuity, can be depended upon to resolve them. To me one of the lessons to be learned from the 1908 conference is the danger of extending into a future that will be predictably in a state of disequilibrium, projections that are based on static conditions. Carnegie’s prediction that the Lake Superior iron ores would be exhausted before 1940 contrasts with a recent estimate of high-grade reserves still in the ground that is significantly larger than the amount he reported for 1907, and reserves of potential ore nearly a hundred times as great.2° And in the other direction, his prediction of coal production for 1937 was eight times too large.
Other examples might be cited, and, in general, it would seem that the more eminent and successful the speaker, the more likely his pre- diction was in error in the direction of imminent exhaustion. It would appear that this inability to predict accurately might be correlated with the necessary intense concern with and profound knowledge of existing conditions that characterize the successful man of affairs. Conversely though, it implies an inability to comprehend man’s ca- pacity to adjust to, and devise means to seek control of, a changing physical, economic, and intellectual environment.
I suppose there will be always a tendency to accept a concept of conservation that is based on exhaustion and that proposes restriction in the use of resources, simply because it is so easy to project the present. But I cannot concur that such a concept can ever prevail,
30 Andrew Carnegie, op. cit., p. 17.
66 The Inexhaustible Resource of Technology
since it ignores the fact that continual change, rather than a perma- nent stability, is characteristic not only of the earth, but of its in- habitants. I believe that the prospect of impending shortages or un- suitable supplies will continue to inspire the research and technical advances that will make it possible to resolve such problems well in advance of the doom we often are prone to foresee.
We probably need to fear, not the exhaustion of physical resources, but the dangers of inadequate or belated utilization of our intellectual resources. I hope we are currently rediscovering the need to practice this kind of conservation.
Wider recognition of the part that science and technology have played in the conversion of conservation from a movement based on fear, to one calling for wise use of presently-used resources and the preservation of social and aesthetic values, may well stimulate research by the social scientists and humanists to seek comparable progress towards the newer objectives.
I have not specifically considered in this paper the dilemma that appears to confront modern civilization, and which is at the root of many of the more restrictive statements of conservation: the problem posed by an assumed infinite population in a finite world. Personally, I believe it to be another example of the dangers of projecting current trends into what we can be sure will be the changed world of tomor- row. Edward Teller has recently phrased this belief so felicitously that I shall conclude my paper by quoting him:
Of all long-range prophecies, the theory of Malthus may well be the most plausible and the most inaccurate. About 150 years ago he predicted that the population of the earth would tend to increase faster than the food supply. Since he made his dire predictions the rate of population increase has continued to reach higher and higher levels—and so has the standard of living throughout most of the world. It is true that conditions are wretched in many countries; but even where life is hard people are objecting not because they look back to a happier past but rather because they demand a bet- ter future—which they know can be realized. Human fertility is un- doubtedly great, but so far human ingenuity has proved greater. I suspect that ultimately the population of the earth will be limited not by any scarcity but rather by our ability to put up with each other.*!
31 Edward Teller, “Atomic Energy in the Year 2000,” The Lamp, Vol. 39, 1s Oe
mECHuNOEOGY ON THE LAND
A Byron T. Shaw
Dr. Nolan in his excellent paper comes to the conclusion that “re- search and technologic development have to a large extent eliminated from the conservation movement concern over the adequacy of our resource base.” My comments on his paper will be confined to those relating to soil and the products of the soil, including forests. Dr. Nolan has explained that he designedly has touched on soils and forests very lightly.
I shall begin where Dr. Nolan did—the 1908 Governors’ Confer- ence called by Theodore Roosevelt. I shall not go into the statements made at that conference for Dr. Nolan has treated the subject ade- quately; rather I shall examine the facts available to the conferees which formed the basis of their conclusions.
The Department of Agriculture began keeping statistics on crop production and land use about 1865. By 1908 there was a record of some forty years. Crop yields per acre of our principal crops re- mained unchanged throughout this period. But there had been many
BYRON T. SHAW is Administrator of the Agricultural Research Sery- ice, United States Department of Agriculture. An agronomist by profession, he was head of soil management and irrigation investigations at Beltsville before moving up to his present post. He has been both a high school and college teacher and formerly was Professor of Agronomy at Ohio State University. He was editor of the book Soil Physical Conditions and Plant Growth. He was born at Paradise, Utah, in 1907; took his B.S. at Utah State Agricultural Col- lege, and his doctorate at Ohio State.
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68 Technology on the Land
changes in land use that should have raised yields. Vast areas of highly fertile virgin land had been plowed up and worn-out areas had been discarded. Millions of acres of potentially productive wet land had been drained. Fertilizer and lime use had increased to substantial quantities. New higher yielding crop varieties had been introduced. Controls had been developed for a number of insect pests and crop diseases. Yet with all these improvements yield levels had stayed the same. There was only one possible conclusion. All the improvements that had been made had barely succeeded in offsetting the decline in soil productivity that was taking place.
In 1908 it was necessary to look only as far as 1920 to see that most of our good cropland would be in crop.
My colleagues in the Forest Service, V. L. Harper and James Rettie, have reminded me that at the time of the Governors’ Conference in 1908, millions of acres of forest were being burned by fires every year and no effective control was in sight. The Washington-Oregon fires of 1902, the Adirondack fire of 1903, the Chisholm fire of 1908, and the Idaho-Montana fires of 1910 wiped out more than 3 million acres of timber within a period of eight years. Other losses to less spectacular fires added up to a much larger acreage. Forest protection and forest management as we now think of them were practically unknown. Timber harvesting was a mining operation, pure and simple.
In 1908 there was cause for concern about our soils and our for- ests. And it was well-founded concern that prompted timely effort. Action was taken on a broad front by the federal government, by the states, by farmers, and by forest land owners. Research was given due recognition.
Today, after fifty years, we see the fruits of the effort started in 1908. It took nearly thirty years to get into operation, but then the payoff came.
In 1939, when World War II broke out in Europe, American farm- ers produced a 2'%2-billion-bushel crop of corn on 88 million acres. Last year, they produced 32 per cent more on 15 million less acres. The story repeats itself with virtually all major crops. The 740 million bushels of wheat produced in 1939 took 52% million acres. Last year, on only 431% million harvested acres, the crop was 200 million bushels greater. When we consider the fact that, compared with 1939,
BYRON T. SHAW 69
farmers last year reduced cotton acreage by 45 per cent and still pro- duced 95 per cent as much cotton, we have to admit production capacity definitely has gone up.
It is the same story with livestock. In 1956 we had nearly 3 million fewer dairy cows than in 1940, but each cow produced two-thirds of a ton more milk during the year. For every two eggs a hen laid in 1940, her descendant is laying about three today. We have 99 million cattle and horses on the same pastures and rangelands that in 1940 supported 83 million head. We had a pig crop of 90 million in 1956 on the same farm plant that produced 80 million in 1940.
All told, we’re producing 40 per cent more farm commodities on virtually the same farm acreage we had in 1939.
Organized fire protection now covers about 95 per cent of all forest land requiring such protection. Utilization of logging residues and of mill residues as raw materials for the production of pulp and other wood-fiber products has reduced the volume of unused wood. Hard- woods are being used in the pulp and paper industry.
But these facts and figures alone don’t tell the whole story. Figures on manpower required to do the job also are significant. In World War I, we produced our farm commodities with 13% million workers; in World War II, with 102 million workers; today there are only 72 million farm workers.
This is a good time to point out that I am in agreement with Dr. Nolan’s thesis that technology is a resource that can be substituted for other resources.
Now let us look at the future. Carl Heisig, of the Farm Economics Research Division, states that the record farm output in 1957 may need to be increased by 35 to 45 per cent by 1975 if a population of 230 million is assumed. The job ahead becomes somewhat more than double the annual increases attained since World War II. Because of our current surplus situation, the increases in output indicated by 1975 will need to come more in the second decade than in the first.
A study by the Forest Service indicates that demand for timber products can be expected to increase about 30 per cent by 1975 and 80 per cent before the year 2000. These demand projections are based on median expectations of population growth and on the assumption
70 Technology on the Land
that price of timber in general will rise at about the same rate as price of competing materials.
Compared with past trends in performance the job ahead appears to be substantial. Like Dr. Nolan, I am optimistic about the future. Also like him, I place my chief reliance on science and technology. But many difficult problems of adjustment still lie ahead. The question is not whether we can produce enough, but rather at what cost. I can- not subscribe to Dr. Nolan’s assumption that the economic aspects of conservation will solve themselves. It is not enough to say that in- creased requirements will bring higher prices. These higher prices mean higher costs. Therefore, less total resources will be available to be spent for other production goods, and the higher cost of certain resources will limit the potential rise in our level of living. Illustra- ting this point in terms of nonrenewable minerals, it is not enough to discover low-grade minerals that can be used as a substitute for the higher grades that are exhausted. It is necessary to discover new technology that will close the gap in the cost of using the lower-grade minerals as compared with the higher grades. Otherwise, more of other resources (labor and other capital) will be required to satisfy the demand.
There are other conservation problems about which we should not be complacent. Destructive agents—principally insects and disease —still take a heavy toll of our forests. About one-fourth of our forest land is poorly stocked. Some 50 million acres, or about one acre out of every ten of commercial forest land in the continental United States, is in need of planting or some other means of artificial regeneration to restore a timber stand within a reasonable time. Much of the tim- ber being grown is of kinds and quality not harvested. Of the timber being harvested, about one-fourth is still not utilized for any purpose —not even for fuel.
Despite all our current efforts in conservation, the soils of the United States are still deteriorating. The problem varies by region. In areas of the Southeast and along the Eastern Seaboard where erosion is being well managed, cultivated soils today are better than they ever were, primarily perhaps because their initial productivity was so low. There is still much serious erosion in the Southeast and practically all southern soils need further improvement. Much of the Northeast is on
BYRON T. SHAW FA
the upgrade. In the rest of the nation soils are still deteriorating. We know methods to maintain and improve soil productivity with eco- nomic use of land in all areas except the Great Plains. In that area the full answer is yet to be found.
We have big problems ahead of us with soils and forests, but I am confident that we can meet them, if as individuals and as a nation we are sufficiently determined to do so. Perhaps we need more of that sense of urgency that characterized the 1908 Governors’ Conference.
MALTHUS’ MAIN THESIS STILL HOLDS
VA Robert C. Cook
Dr. Nolan’s main theme is the “effect” of science and technology on the “conservation” of natural resources; or rather, perhaps, their effect of making such conservation unnecessary. Tom Nolan and I have never seen eye-to-eye on this subject. In raising some questions regarding the “miracles of technology” and otherwise in attempting to capsule vigorous dissent in limited space, I hope I shall not sound too brusque. We love each other, but sometimes from opposite corners.
The lush benefits of technology have been limited to a very small proportion of the world’s population. The 6 per cent who live in the United States have been blessed far beyond any other nation on earth. The success of applied physical science in the western world (exclud- ing Latin America) invites the dangerous illusion that “science,” as virtually a deified abstraction, “has all the answers.” This can lead us to forget that we humans are part of an ecosystem that includes the biological world, the social-cultural world, as well as the physical world. This confidence in the god Science may lead to a dangerous
ROBERT C. COOK, scientist and editor, is Director of the Population Reference Bureau and editor of the Journal of Heredity and the Population Bulletin. He is also lecturer in biology at the George Washington University and lecturer in medical genetics at the Medical School of that University. He is author of Human Fertility: The Modern Dilemma, and is a frequent con- tributor to technical journals and popular magazines. He was born in Wash- ington, D.C., in 1898, and studied at George Washington University and the University of Maryland.
72
ROBERT C. COOK 73
tendency to worship the scientist as a modern medicine man and thus to ignore a great deal of the total ecosystem.
The public seems eager to accept this myth. This is dangerous and I warn against it strongly. Any notion that the laboratory smock has supernatural properties is an illusion.
Dr. Nolan’s evocation of Dr. Edward Teller to debunk the current population crisis is a case in point. Dr. Teller is unquestionably a world authority in his specialized field of thermo-nuclear physics. But distinction in one area in no sense qualifies a person as competent in demography or economics. To think that it does is to play the game of the medicine man of science very dangerously.
In terms of limited areas of the earth’s surface—and for very spe- cial reasons—Malthus guessed wrong, at least in the short term. The people of northern and western Europe and their descendants else- where, nourished, as Edmund Burke remarked, “from the full breast of the exuberance of the New World,” have multiplied their numbers and their affluence during two profligate centuries of grace. But now the exuberance of a very rich continent has begun to dry up. It is hard to say just how this will affect the way people within the United States will live during the next few decades. Demographers have learned since the 1930’s that population growth in this country is definitely modulated by the level of economic activity, which is gen- erally measured for purposes of calculation as gross national product, or GNP. If the present unemployment trend continues and we have four or five million unemployed, the birth rate of the United States will undoubtedly decline quite sharply. I am sure that this is one demographic prediction that wili be realized.
We cannot predict what the GNP is going to be next year or the year after. So we cannot predict with too much confidence what will happen to the population growth in the United States. Apparently if we can maintain the fantastic level of prosperity which, until recently, has existed since the war, the birth rate very likely will remain at a high level.
But in underdeveloped countries today where population increases are rapid, the rise is not due to any changes in the birth rate. In under- developed countries with a low level of education, the birth rate is pushing close to the physiological maximum. It is not tied to the eco-
74 Malthus’ Main Thesis Still Holds
nomic situation. As long as mortality continues to be attacked in the underdeveloped countries by the amazingly effective modern tech- niques, the rapid increase in population growth will continue.
As long as the death rate is relatively low and the birth rate remains at the physiological maximum, population will continue to grow rapidly. But there is a limit. Death rates can be held down only so long. Actual famine has so far been held off in most parts of the world, but the balance is becoming more precarious. Authorities agree that hunger is becoming more widespread. So with the control of mortality there is desperate need around the world to come some- how to grips with the problem of fertility. I think we fool ourselves when we hope that technology in other areas can give the answer.
For much of the world today there are no untapped bonanzas to turn to. In grim earnest, Malthus’ basic thesis still holds in the face of today’s relentless acceleration in population growth which is un- precedented in history. Population pressure is now eroding the tenu- ous subsistence of many, many hundreds of millions of already hungry human beings.
It does no good to dangle before the eyes of these hungry people a trace-element economy of abundance a century hence. For a ma- jority of the earth’s people today, it is simply not true that their de- mand for a better future has any possibility of being realized short of a miracle of loaves and fishes. Human fertility is outrunning human ingenuity today over most of the earth. Here is documentation from competent sources in the field of demography:
United Nations’ Report on the World Social Situation, published in 1957, concludes that as a result of the various fertility and mortality trends the present rates of growth in some of the economically under- developed countries are higher than any that have been known in the history of the human race. Though food production has increased, food consumption per capita in many less developed countries where a large part of the world’s population lives still remains below the prewar level. Although food production in the better-fed nations has greatly increased, world trade in foodstuffs shows little sign of im- provement. The wide disparities in consumption (including quality of diet) between the better-fed and the more poorly fed nations have not notably diminished.
ROBERT C. COOK V5
Dr. Kingsley Davis, Professor of Sociology and Social Institutions at the University of California and this country’s representative on the United Nations’ Population Commission, has recently written:
Poor people are more numerous today than ever before, because population is skyrocketing in the poorer countries. If two-thirds of the earth’s population was impoverished a century ago and only one-third today, there would still be more poor people now than there were then. With many countries multiplying at a rate near 3 per cent per year, their economies must somehow move ahead at 4 or 5 per cent per year if poverty is to be reduced. This is no easy task when the ratio of people to resources is already excessive and the poverty so great that capital can hardly be accumulated for long-run industrial development.
Many economists question emphatically Dr. Teller’s inference that the world’s people are better off today than ever before or at least have the hope that abundance is just around the corner. I will cite only two:
At the Industrial Development Conference held in San Francisco in October, this observation was made by Dr. A. Eugene Staley, Senior Economist of the Stanford Research Institute:
Despite all the vaunted technological and economic progress of modern times, there are probably more poverty-stricken people in the world today than there were fifty years ago or a hundred years ago. This is because economic progress has been slow or nonexist- ent in most of the under-developed countries during this period, in which their populations have been growing.”
A major problem in altering this situation for the better is that with a very low level of living and with population doubling every genera- tion, the difficulties of achieving an economic breakthrough are almost insuperable.
Another speaker at that conference, Dr. David McCord Wright of McGill University, spelled out concisely the economic paradox that stands athwart any easy solution of the world’s hunger and misery:
1 Kingsley Davis, “Analysis of the Population Explosion,” New York Times Magazine, September 22, 1957, pp. 15 ff.
2A. Eugene Staley, “The Revolution of Rising Expectations” (speech), Jn- ternational Industrial Development Conference News, San Francisco, October 14-18, 1957, p. 3.
76 Malthus’ Main Thesis Still Holds
... The per capita gross national product of the United States in 1955 is figured at $2,343.00; that of Ceylon at $122.00; that of Burma at $52.00. . . . But let us take a more developed Latin American country—say Mexico. Their per capita G.N.P. is $187.00.
In other words, to raise the per capita gross national product of Mexico to the American level would require a thirteenfold increase in output . . . relative to the same population. But . . . Mexico will double its population by 1980. So, to have Mexico reach, and keep the present American per capita level by 1980 will require not a thirteenfold, but a twenty-sixfold increase in output (gross national product)! In absolute terms it means a rise in Mexican annual gross national product from around $6 billion to $78 billion, to $156 billion! 3
The almost insurmountable difficulties the overpopulated agrarian countries face in finding the capital to achieve a modern technology have recently been explored in an extensive analysis by the Interna- tional Bank for Reconstruction and Development, with India as the model. The outlook is somber unless population growth can be checked. The United Nations’ report cited above sums it up in these words:
. accelerating population growth can aggravate the problem of capital shortage, which is one of the most important obstacles to economic development of nearly all under-developed countries... . While in a well-developed dynamic economy the demand for such capital investments may serve as a stimulus to continuing economic growth, the case of the under-developed countries, with their nar- row margin of income over subsistence needs, is different. For most of them it is difficult to save and invest enough from their meagre annual income to permit economic development to proceed at a sat- isfactory pace, even without rapid population growth.*
In discussing the Abbé Raynal’s dictum that “before social laws existed, man had the right to subsistence,” Thomas Malthus made some points on the distinction between rights and powers which the above considerations make very relevant today:
3 David McCord Wright, “Economic Needs and the Population Explosion,” speech at the International Industrial Development Conference, San Francisco, October 14, 1957, pp. 1-2.
4 United Nations, Bureau of Social Affairs, Report on the World Social Situa- tion, New York, 1957, pp. 5, 49.
ROBERT C. COOK Fah
[Raynal] might with just as much propriety have said that before the institution of social laws every man had a right to live a hun- dred years. Undoubtedly he had then and has still a good right to live a hundred years, nay a thousand if he can, without interfering with the right of others to live; but the affair in both cases is princi- pally an affair of power not of right. Social laws very greatly in- crease this power, by enabling a much greater number to subsist than could subsist without them, and so far very greatly enlarge le droit de subsister; but neither before nor after the institution of social laws could an unlimited number subsist; and before as well as since, he who ceased to have the power ceased to have the right.®
In increasing our own power over the fifty years since 1908, we appear to have grievously impaired the rights of the people of many lands. The fantastic increase in the levels of living in the United States has been at the expense not only of our own resources, but of those of the rest of the world as well. The gargantuan scale of this drain on the world’s resources was set forth by The Twentieth Century Fund in 1955:
Of many raw materials the United States consumes as much as all
the rest of the world combined. It accounts for about half the
world’s steel capacity, for example, now that the post Korean ex- pansion has been completed. It consumes more than half of the world’s crude petroleum and nine-tenths of the world’s natural gas.
It is the leading consumer of nearly every industrial raw material, and, with some notable exceptions, is also the leading producer.®
This voracious demand will accelerate as population growth acceler- ates.
In the light of the parlous situation of a majority of the earth’s people, the picture is not altogether pleasant. Our standard of living is not now, nor does it appear likely to be soon, based on a balanced exploitation of our own resources.
Marie Antoinette earned a niche in history’s hall of fame by pro- posing to feed the starving people of France on cake since they had no bread. At the present moment in history, we, the incredibly for- tunate 6 per cent, having pre-empted much of the earth’s industrial
°T. R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (9th ed.; London: Reeves and Turner, 1888), p. 421.
6 J. Frederic Dewhurst and Associates, America’s Needs and Resources, The Twentieth Century Fund, New York, 1955, p. 754.
78 Malthus’ Main Thesis Still Holds
bread as above listed, seem to be able to offer our less fortunate neighbors little more than a pious hope that they will be able to eat granite some fine day a century or so hence. This offer of stone for bread out-Antoinettes Marie with a vengeance. If this is the best we can offer the earth’s people in this time of crisis, surely we will have nobody but ourselves to blame when the deluge engulfs us.
THE BARRIER OF COST
KA Harry A. Curtis
The main thesis presented in Dr. Nolan’s paper is that research and technology in the past fifty years have profoundly affected the situa- tion we face with respect to natural resources and have even changed our concepts as to the conservation of these resources. Dr. Nolan de- scribes only briefly, and sometimes rather vaguely, the actual research and technology involved in bringing about the effects he discusses. It is the impact of research and technology that he talks about.
Dr. Nolan gets under way with a discussion of the Governors’ Con- ference called by President Roosevelt in 1908. He does not ridicule the persons involved in the conference, but he belittles their naive concept of conservation, their unwarranted concern over the possible exhaustion of natural resources, and their lack of faith that science and technology would soon solve all the problems that worried them. I dissent from these views regarding the conference. In the first place the leaders of the conference did not voice the layman’s common con- fusion of conservation with hoarding. In fact, as Dr. Nolan agrees,
HARRY A. CURTIS before his recent retirement was a director of the Tennessee Valley Authority where he previously had served as Chief Chemical Engineer. He has been Professor of Chemical Engineering at Yale University and Professor of Chemistry at Northwestern University, and Dean of the Col- lege of Engineering of the University of Missouri. In the early 1930’s he was Director of Research for the Vacuum Oil Company. He was born in Sedalia, Colorado, in 1884, did his undergraduate work at the University of Colorado, and earned his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin.
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80 The Barrier of Cost
Edmund James, one of the conferees, expressed the broad concept of conservation that has always prevailed amongst thoughtful and in- formed people. Moreover, Gifford Pinchot, who was President Roose- velt’s mentor in matters concerning conservation, was no layman. When he returned from studying forest management in Europe he was placed in charge of the Biltmore forest in North Carolina, and promptly demonstrated there that conservation and the proper har- vesting of timber are not incompatible practices. Even Andrew Car- negie, who probably knew more about the benefits to be derived from a high tariff on steel than he did about conservation, pleaded for re- search and practical knowledge, items that would scarcely be needed if hoarding were to be a policy. All in all, it seems to me that the ideas of conservation expressed at the conference were not naive.
The conferees in 1908 were concerned with some real and very important problems. True, they underestimated the progress that sci- ence and technology would make in the next fifty years, and their guesses as to when the natural resources cupboard would be bare were in error. Nevertheless, it was high time that responsible people took note of the declining fertility of farm lands, unchecked soil ero- sion, wasteful practices in the harvesting of timber, the rapid rate of depletion of high-grade ore deposits, and, in general the heedless exploitation of natural resources with little or no regard for the future. There was no reason to be complacent over the situation that prevailed in 1908, and I must say that I see no reason to be compla- cent over today’s situation.
In the background of the 1908 conference, though not played up strongly there, was the question of who is to benefit from natural re- sources—people everywhere or just a few favored individuals. The Inland Waterways Commission had mentioned “the equal opportunity of all our People” to share in the heritage of natural resources. Presi- dent Roosevelt was certainly not blind to the fact that for a hundred years it had been federal policy to deliver natural resources to private interests with no regard for the public’s stake in these resources. It was even more wicked in 1908 than it is today to impose any restric- tions on “the American way of life” as practiced by big business. In 1906 President Roosevelt vetoed a “give-away” bill covering poten- tial water power development. If he had publicly repudiated the Ten
HARRY A. CURTIS 81
Commandments the uproar in business circles and in the Congress could scarcely have been more violent. The good “American way of life” was being flouted by a willful President.
So I express my belief that the 1908 Governors’ Conference not only dealt with real problems but marked a milestone in changing public attitude toward natural resources.
In reading Dr. Nolan’s paper I get the impression, perhaps to a greater extent than he intended a reader should, that, in his opinion, all the problems concerning the conservation of natural resources have now been solved or the methods of solution clearly indicated. It seems that we have plenty of petroleum left underground to say noth- ing of the oil shales. Also we have plenty of high-grade iron ores, more fertile soil than farmers need—to say nothing of hydroponics, plenty of water in or on the land and a lot more in the ocean if we ever need it, plenty of timber, plenty of most everything. I am unable to arrive at such a happy haven of thinking. Maybe it is my own fault that I am still unhappy over many of the situations now pre- vailing with respect to natural resources. If there are no longer any problems with respect to water supplies, surely this glad news should be passed along to a hundred or so of our American cities. To be sure Dr. Nolan doesn’t quite say that there is no noticeable shortage of water here and there in the United States, but he takes comfort in quoting Luna Leopold to the effect that it is only a matter of eco- nomics. It surely is just that, and therein lies the trouble, not only with respect to water supply, but with respect to the utilization of all natural resources. Our standards of living are all hedged about by problems of economics, and do not rest on the technical feasibility of using a natural resource but with the economy with which it can be utilized. Perhaps my main dissent stems from my conviction that Dr. Nolan’s paper pays too little attention to economics and the role it plays in maintaining standards of living.
Water? Surely there is plenty of water in the seven seas and we only need to purify it, as chemists have known how to do for at least two hundred years. It is, as Leopold says, only a little matter of eco- nomics and some day the economy of the purification process may be such that anyone could afford to take a bath occasionally.
Hydroponics? This is another art that has been well known for
82 The Barrier of Cost
more than a hundred years and one that still makes newspaper head- lines when someone takes a new flier in that direction. There is noth- ing wrong with the technology, but something quite askew with the economics.
Petroleum? Seven times as much in proved reserves in the United States as there used to be. Maybe that is why American petroleum companies are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in oil proper- ties in remote corners of the earth. Or is it possible that some eco- nomics got into the picture?
In any event, all that these optimistic statements add up to is that whereas the conferees in 1908 thought the cupboard would be bare the day before yesterday, actually there is enough to last until the day after tomorrow. Every long-range fuel supply survey made in recent years, and there have been several, relegates gas and oil to the drop- in-the-bucket category. Now one of the pegs on which our present standard of living hangs is an abundant supply of liquid fuel at a cost in capital invested and manpower hours not far different than pre- vails at present. Any shift to a higher-cost liquid fuel inevitably affects our standard of living. Fossil fuels such as oil and gas are not, of course, our only sources of energy, and our present civilization de- pends even more on an abundant and cheap supply of energy than on a cheap and abundant supply of liquid fuel. Amongst the problems not yet solved from the viewpoint of economy are the utilization of sunlight, ocean tides, and other sources even more difficult to tap. The only really promising breakthrough in recent years lies in the possibility of using nuclear energy. Dr. Nolan has mentioned the splendid job of the geologists in applying new techniques in the loca- tion of uranium deposits. But we are as yet a long way from having cheap nuclear energy in usable form.
Unfortunately, it is economics which dictates many of the wasteful practices in the utilization of natural resources. The economics here is of two sorts, one of which I call the “little economics” which relates to the day-by-day operations of private companies which must make a profit or quit the game. The other sort, which I call the “big eco- nomics,” relates to the long-range welfare of all our people. Occasion- ally government should intervene for the sake of the big economics, and less frequently it does intervene, but for the most part it is the
HARRY A. CURTIS 83
little economics that determines the course of events, and the public be damned. May I illustrate my point here? The companies mining phosphate in Tennessee tear up many thousand acres of good farming land and leave the earth and topsoil piled in big windrows. Rainwater then courses down the gullies and soon cuts them so deep that there is no longer enough earth in the windrows to fill the gullies. The land is thereby ruined for agricultural use. Now the little economics says that it would cost, say, $500 per acre to level up the land immediately after mining, and the leveled land would then be worth, say, $200 per acre. The mining companies naturally say that they cannot afford to level the land. Actually this is not so, for when the TVA started min- ing phosphate in Tennessee I arranged to have five cents per ton of crude ore mined set aside to restore the land to normal agricultural use. This very small assessment per ton has proved over the years to be ample to restore the land. Here then is a clear case in which the state of Tennessee should have intervened in the interest of the big economy, but did not take action.
The alternative to government intervention, and in most cases the only feasible course of action, is to find ways of making it attractive to profit-seeking companies to exploit a natural resource without waste. May I again illustrate my point? Down in Florida the pebble phosphate mining companies are wasting about one-half of all the phosphate they mine, not only wasting half but so mixing the dis- carded part with the sand and clay overburden removed that it will probably never be feasible to recover it. It would cost very little to segregate in the mining operation the relatively low-grade phosphate lying in the so-called “leached zone,” the part that is now discarded. But the mining companies will not do so as long as they regard the leached zone material as worthless. The TVA succeeded in develop- ing an economically feasible process for treatment of the leached zone material and is now building a million dollar pilot plant in an effort to convince the Florida companies that the material is worth saving.
Speaking of phosphate, Dr. Nolan mentions that the Phosphoria formation of the Rocky Mountain region contains “billions of tons of phosphate.” There is indeed a lot of high-grade ore that can be mined economically, but a considerable portion of the total is of such low grade that it cannot be processed economically. Another considerable
84 The Barrier of Cost
portion lies thousands of feet under river valleys and mountain ranges and cannot be mined except at prohibitively high cost. Dr. Nolan estimates that in addition to phosphate, there might be extracted about $5.00 worth of other values from every ton of the enormous quantity of rock in the Phosphoria formation. He doesn’t venture a guess as to what it might cost to recover those values, but it would certainly be more than they are worth, and one cannot afford to lose much money per ton of rock processed if millions, or billions, or trillions of tons of rock are to be handled. So I think that those values are likely to remain undisturbed for quite a while. It is comforting to know that we have something left in the cupboard, as the old lady said of the rotten apple.
Dr. Nolan has presented an interesting paper. His calm assurance that all is well with our natural resources comes like a cooling breeze from the mountain tops to the fevered brows of those of us who worry over water supplies for American cities, over soil erosion, over the wasteful mining of potash in New Mexico and of phosphate in Florida, over the desert that is moving into eastern Colorado, over the encroachment of sprawling cities and superhighways and military reservations on the agricultural lands of the country, over the waste of water storage potential and power development in the Hells Can- yon fiasco, and over the coming exhaustion of high-grade ore deposits, just as our fellow worriers did back in 1908.
EDITOR’S NOTE Mr. Nolan, in responding to comments made upon his paper, pointed out that he had chosen to restrict himself to the physical impacts of science and technology upon natural resources, and that this did not imply that he felt the social and economic aspects were unimportant. Other papers in the forum series, he said, would deal with these aspects. “I wish to correct what I believe was implied by both Dr. Cook and Dr. Curtis: that my thesis is in effect a negation of conservation. My own belief—which I hold strongly—is that my conclu- sions place the conservation movement on a much firmer basis than could be provided by the original concepts of conservation. I certainly had no intention of implying that the original attendants at the 1908 conference were either unsound in their conclusions or were poorly advised in their motivation. I have a great deal of admiration for what they did. In calling attention to some of the changes that seem to me to have occurred, it was
HARRY A. CURTIS 85
not in an effort to criticize their efforts as much as to try to point out the much more attractive future that we could look forward to through the use by the social scientist and the humanist of the same techniques that the physical scientist and engineer have used.
“Having reassured ourselves (perhaps more to my satisfaction than to Dr. Curtis’) that the physical base of our resources is adequate, we should now turn to research in thé social sciences and humanities in order to similarly improve our capacity to live with our environment. To me this is a much more attractive concept than the negative one of impending exhaustion.”
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™ How Much Should a Country Consume?
JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH
The Crucial Value Problems
PHILIP M. HAUSER
Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Balance of Nature
PAUL B. SEARS
HOW MUCH SHOULD A COUNTRY CONSUME?
A John Kenneth Galbraith
Conservationists are unquestionably useful people. And among the many useful services that they have recently rendered has been that of dramatizing the vast appetite which the United States has devel- oped for materials of all kinds. This increase in requirements we now recognize to be exponential. It is the product of a rapidly increasing population and a high and (normally) a rapidly increasing living standard. The one multiplied by the other gives the huge totals with which our minds must contend. The President’s Materials Policy Commission! emphasized the point by observing that our consump- tion of raw materials comes to about half that of the non-Communist lands, although we have but 10 per cent of the population, and that
JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH, Professor of Economics at Harvard University, is also a prolific author of books and articles dealing with the nation’s economy. Among the former are American Capitalism, A Theory of Price Control, The Great Crash, and, published this year, The Affluent Society. From 1943 to 1948 he was a member of Fortune’s Board of Editors, and previously was Deputy Administrator of the Office of Price Administra- tion, Director of the Strategic Bombing Survey, and Chief Economist of the American Farm Bureau Federation. Mr. Galbraith was born in Iona Station, Ontario, in 1908. He received his B.S.A. at the University of Toronto in 1931, his Ph.D. at the University of California in 1934, and was a student at Cam- bridge in England during 1937-38.
1 References here are to Resources for Freedom (Washington: U.S. Govern- ment Printing Office, June 1952). Summary of Volume I, hereinafter cited as PMPC, Summary.
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90 How Much Should a Country Consume?
since World War I our consumption of most materials has exceeded that of all mankind through all history before that conflict.
This gargantuan and growing appetite has become the point of de- parture for all discussions of the resource problem. In face of this vast use what is happening to our domestic reserves of ores, to our energy sources, to the renewable resources? Are we being made excessively dependent on foreign supplies? How can we ensure that they will continue to flow in the necessary volume and with the necessary in- creases to our shores? How is our security affected?
The high rate of use has catalyzed conservationist activity on many other fronts. Because of it we have been busily assessing reserves of various resources and measuring the rate of depletion against the rate of discovery. We have become concerned with the efficiency of meth- ods of recovery. As a result, for example, of the meteoric increase in natural gas consumption, the prospect for further increase, and the limited supplies at least within the borders of continental United States, we have had an increasing concern over what was flared or otherwise lost. The large requirements and the related exhaustion of domestic reserves support the concern for having ready stocks of ma- terials in the event of national emergency. (Support for this also comes from the not inconsiderable number of people who, in this instance, find prudence a matter of some profit.) Our large fuel re- quirements have deeply affected our foreign policy even though it remains a canon of modern diplomacy that any preoccupation with oil should be concealed by calling on our still ample reserves of sanc- timony.
Finally, and perhaps most important, the high rate of resource use has stirred interest in the technology of resource use and substitution. Scores of products would already have become scarce and expensive had it not been for the appearance of substitute sources of materials or substitute materials. We still think of innovation in terms of the unpredictable and fortuitous genius which was encouraged by the pat- ent office. In fact, input/output relationships for investment in inno- vation, not in the particular case but in general, are probably about as stable as any other. And investment in such innovation may well substitute, at more or less constant rates, for investment in orthodox
JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH 91
discovery and recovery. This means, in less formidable language, that if a country puts enough of its resources into researching new mate- rials or new sources of materials, it may never be short of the old ones. We cannot necessarily rely on the market for this investment— market incentives did not get us synthetic nitrogen, synthetic rubber, or atomic energy—to mention perhaps the three most important new materials substitutes or sources of this century. We shall have to initiate publicly much of the needed innovation, and much of it will have to be carried to the point of commercial feasibility by public funds. We shall have to be watchful to anticipate needed investment in innovation. We will be making another of our comfortable and now nearly classic errors if we assume that it will all be taken care of auto- matically by the free enterprise system.
But the role of research and innovation is not part of this story. I cite it only because one must do so to keep the resource problem in focus. In the future, as in the past, substitution nurtured by science will be the major hope of the conservationist. I am not unimpressed with the importance of what I have now to say. But I would not wish it thought that I identify all resource salvation therewith.
II
In my opening sentences I spoke agreeably about the conservation- ist as a citizen. May I now trade on those graceful words and be a trifle rude? Any observer of the species must agree that he is also frequently capable of marked illogicality combined with what may be termed selective myopia. There are many manifestations of this. Nothing, for example, is more impressive than the way the modern conservationist rises in awesome anger—particularly, I think, along the Eastern Seaboard—at a proposal to dam and thus to desecrate some unknown stream in some obscure corner of some remote national park, and at the same time manages to remain unperturbed by the desecration of our highways by the outdoor advertising industry. Were the Governor of New York, in some moment of political aber- ration to propose a minor modification of the state’s “forever wild” proviso as it applies to the state parks, he would be jeopardizing his
92 How Much Should a Country Consume?
future. When he seeks to make the highways of his state less hideous, he can hope, at most, for the applause of Robert Moses, the New York Times, the most determined garden clubs, and a few eccentrics. One may formulate a law on this: The conservationist is a man who concerns himself with the beauties of nature in roughly inverse pro- portion to the number of people who can enjoy them.
There is, I sense, a similar selectivity in the conservationist’s ap- proach to materials consumption. If we are concerned about our great appetite for materials, it is plausible to seek to increase the supply, to decrease waste, to make better use of the stocks that are available, and to develop substitutes. But what of the appetite itself? Surely this is the ultimate source of the problem. If it continues its geometric course, will it not one day have to be restrained? Yet in the literature of the resource problem this is the forbidden question. Over it hangs a nearly total silence. It is as though, in the discussion of the chance for avoiding automobile accidents, we agree not to make any men- tion of speed!
I do not wish to overstate my case. A few people have indeed ad- verted to the possibility of excess resource consumption—and com- mon prudence requires me to allow for discussions which I have not encountered. Samuel H. Ordway in his Resources and the American Dream * has perhaps gone farthest in inquiring whether, in the inter- ests of resource conservation, some limits might be placed on con- sumption. He has wondered if our happiness would be greatly im- paired by smaller and less expensive automobiles, less advertising, even less elaborate attire. And he argues, without being very specific about it, that the Congress should face the question of use now as against use by later generations.
By contrast, The Twentieth Century Fund in its effort to match ma- terials and other resource requirements to use, takes present levels of consumption and prospective increases as wholly given. It then adds to prospective needs enough to bring families at the lower end of the income distribution up to a defined minimum. While the authors are, on the whole, sanguine about our ability to meet requirements, they foresee difficulties with petroleum, copper, lead, zinc, and the additive
2New York: The Ronald Press, 1954.
JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH 93
alloys for steel.? I would say on the whole that The Twentieth Century Fund’s approach represents a kind of norm in such studies.
The President’s Materials Policy Commission took a similar al- though slightly more ambiguous position which is worth examining in some slight detail. It began by stating its conviction that economic growth was important and, in degree, sacrosanct. “First, we share the belief of the American people in the principle of Growth.” + (It is instructive to note the commission’s use of a capital G. A certain divinity is associated with the word.) Growth in this context means an increasing output of consumers’ goods and an increase in the plant by which they are supplied. Having started with this renunciation, the commission was scarcely in a position to look critically at consump- tion in relation to the resource problem, and it did not.
Yet the PMPC could not entirely exclude the problem of consump- tion from consideration. In the course of its formal recommendations it asked that the armed services in “designing military products, and in drawing up specifications, focus on using abundant rather than scarce materials, and on using less of any material per unit of product where this can be done without significantly affecting quality or perform- ance.” And it asked for “greater emphasis on care and maintenance of military equipment and conservation in use and increase[d] scrap recovery of all kinds.” ° But it almost certainly occurred to the able members of the commission that this was straining furiously at the gnat. Why should we be worried about the excess steel in a tank but not in an automobile? What is gained from smaller radar screens if the materials go into larger TV screens? Why should the general be denied his brass and his wife allowed her plumage? There is an obvi- ous inconsistency here.
As a result the PMPC did venture on. Although it did not support the observation with any concrete recommendation, it did comment with some vigor on present tendencies in consumption. “The United States,” it observed, “has been lavish in the use of its materials... . Vast quantities of materials have been wasted by over-designing and
3J. Frederic Dewhurst and Associates, America’s Needs and Resources: A New Survey (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund, 1955).
4PMPC, Summary, p. 5.
5 PMPC, Summary, p. 10.
94 How Much Should a Country Consume?
over-specification. We have frequently designed products with little concern for getting maximum service from their materials and labor. We drive heavier automobiles than is necessary for mere transporta- tion, and we adorn them with chromium. . . . We blow thousands of tons of unrecoverable lead into the atmosphere each year from high octane gasoline because we like a quick pickup. We must become © aware that many of our production and consumption habits are ex- tremely expensive of scarce materials and that a trivial change of taste or slight reduction in personal satisfaction can often bring about tre- mendous savings.” ®
The captious will want to inquire, if the losses in satisfaction here are trivial and the savings are tremendous, why the commission did not seize the opportunity to urge savings. Why did it make no recom- mendations? But given its position on growth and the meaning of growth, it could in fact go no further. At first glance it does not seem impossible to pick out kinds of consumption which seem especially wasteful—things which reflect not use but wasteful use. Surely the utility of an automobile is not diminished if it is lighter or if its gaso- line contains less lead. But this is a distinction that cannot be made. Consumption, it quickly develops, is a seamless web. If we ask about the chromium we must ask about the cars. The questions that are asked about one part can be asked about all parts. The automobiles are too heavy and they use irreplaceable lead? One can ask with equal cogency if we need to make all the automobiles that we now turn out. This question gains point when we reflect that the demand for auto- mobiles depends on that remarkable institution called planned obso- lescence, is nurtured by advertising campaigns of incredible strategic complexity, and on occasion requires financial underwriting that would have seemed rather extravagant to Charles Ponzi.
As with automobiles so with everything else. In an opulent society the marginal urgency of all kinds of goods is low. It is easy to bring our doubts and questions to bear on the automobiles. But the case is not different for (say) that part of our food production which con- tributes not to nutrition but to obesity, that part of our tobacco which contributes not to comfort but to carcinoma, and that part of our cloth- ing which is designed not to cover nakedness but to suggest it. We can-
6 PMPC, Summary, p. 16.
JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH 95
not single out waste in a product without questioning the product. We cannot single out any one product without calling into question all products. Thus having specifically endorsed ever more luxurious standards of consumption—for this is what is meant by growth—the PMPC obviously could not pursue the notion of wasteful consump- tion without involving itself in a major contradiction. It made its ges- ture against the automobiles and then, wisely, it stopped.
III
There are several reasons why our consumption standards have not been called in question in the course of the conservation discussion over the last fifty years. There is also some divergence between those that are given, or which come first to mind, and those that are ulti- mately operative. Thus, to recur once more to the PMPC, it simply stated its belief that economic stagnation is the alternative to growth, meaning uninhibited increases in consumption. No one, obviously, wants stagnation. But does this argument really hold? Clearly we can have different rates of growth of consumption. In other contexts we are not nearly so committed to the notion of all-out increase in con- sumption. In 1957 economic output was virtually constant. This level- ing off of output—stagnation if I may use the pejorative term—was, more or less, a goal of public policy. The purpose of the tight money policy was to reduce the rate of investment spending and thus of eco- nomic expansion in order hopefully to win a measure of price stability. In this context we weren’t so appalled by the idea of a lower rate of growth—something approaching what the PMPC would have had to call stagnation. As I write, in the first quarter of 1958, we have had something more than a leveling off; we have experienced a rather sharp reduction in output. But even this, at least in some quarters, has not been regarded with great alarm. We are being told that breathing spells are inevitable in the free enterprise system.
Also, as I shall suggest in a moment, we can have patterns of growth which make heavy drafts on materials and other patterns which are much more lenient in their requirements.
In any case, if our levels of consumption are dangerously high in relation to the resource base, or are becoming so—and the PMPC at
96 How Much Should a Country Consume?
least expressed its concern—it would obviously be better to risk stag- nation now than to use up our reserves and have not stagnation but absolute contraction later on. Those who sanctify growth but also say that the resource position is serious are, in effect, arguing that we have no alternative to having our fling now even though, more or less literally, there is hell to pay later on. This is an odd posture for the conservationist.
It is also suggested that uninhibited consumption has something to do with individual liberty. If we begin interfering with consumption, we shall be abridging a basic freedom.
I shan’t dwell long on this. That we make such points is part of the desolate modern tendency to turn the discussion of all questions, how- ever simple and forthright, into a search for violation of some arcane principle, or to evade and suffocate common sense by verbose, inco- herent, and irrelevant moralizing. Freedom is not much concerned with tail fins or even with automobiles. Those who argue that it is identified with the greatest possible range of choice of consumers’ goods are only confessing their exceedingly simple-minded and me- chanical view of man and his liberties.
In any case, one must ask the same question as concerns growth. If the resource problem is serious, then the price of a wide choice now is a sharply constricted choice later on. Surely even those who adhere to the biggest supermarket theory of liberty would agree that their concept has a time dimension.
Finally it will be said that there is nothing that can be done about consumption. This of course is nonsense. There is a wide range of instruments of social control. Taxation; specific prohibitions on waste- ful products, uses, or practices; educational and other hortatory efforts; subsidies to encourage consumption of cheaper and more plentiful substitutes are all available. Most have been used in past periods of urgency.
And here, indeed, is the first reason we do not care to contemplate such measures. The latter forties and the fifties in the United States were marked by what we must now recognize as a massive conserva- tive reaction to the idea of enlarged social guidance and control of economic activity. This was partly, no doubt, based on a desire to have done with the wartime apparatus of control. In part, it was a
JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH 97
successful conservative reaction to the social intervention of the New Deal. In part, it was the resurgence of a notably over-simplified view of economic life which seized on this moment to ascribe a magical automatism to the price system (including the rate of interest) which, as we are again gradually learning, it does not have. Euphemisms have played a prominent part in this revolt. Many have found it more agreeable to be in favor of liberty than against social responsibility. But the result has been to rule out of discussion, or at least to dis- criminate heavily against, measures which by their nature could be accomplished only by according increased responsibilities to the state.
Since consumption could not be discussed without raising the ques- tion of an increased role for the state, it was not discussed.
However, tradition also abetted this exclusion of consumption levels from consideration. Economics is a subject in which old questions are lovingly debated but new ones are regarded with misgiving. On the whole it is a mark of stability and sound scholarship to concern one- self with questions that were relevant in the world of Ricardo. In the Ricardian world, to be literal about it, goods were indeed scarce. One might talk, although without courting great popularity, about redis- tributing wealth and income and thus curbing the luxurious consump- tion of the classes. But the notion that people as a whole might have more than a minimum—that there might be a restraint on the con- sumption of the community as a whole—was unthinkable. In modern times this has, of course, become thinkable. Goods are plentiful. De- mand for them must be elaborately contrived. Those who create wants rank among our most talented and highly paid citizens. Want creation —advertising—is a ten billion dollar industry. But tradition remains strongly against questioning or even thinking about wants.
Finally, we are committed to a high level of consumption because, whether we need the goods or not, we very much need the employ- ment their production provides. I need not dwell on this. The point is decidedly obvious at this writing in early 1958. We are not missing the cars that Detroit is currently not producing. Nor are we missing the steel that Pittsburgh and Gary are currently not making. The ab- sence of these products is not causing any detectable suffering. But there is much suffering and discomfort as the result of the failure of these industries to employ as many men as in the recent past. We are
98 How Much Should a Country Consume?
chained to a high level of production and consumption not by the pressure of want but by the urgencies of economic security.
IV
What should be our policy toward consumption?
First, of course, we should begin to talk about it—and in the con- text of all its implications. It is silly for grown men to concern them- selves mightily with supplying an appetite and close their eyes to the obvious and obtrusive question of whether the appetite is excessive.
If the appetite presents no problems—if resource discovery and the technology of use and substitution promise automatically to re- main abreast of consumption and at moderate cost—then we need press matters no further. At least on conservation grounds there is no need to curb our appetite.
But to say this, and assuming that it applies comprehensively to both renewable and nonrenewable resources, is to say that there is no materials problem. It is to say that, except for some activities that by definition are noncritical, the conservationists are not much needed.
But if conservation is an issue, then we have no honest and logical course but to measure the means for restraining use against the means for insuring a continuing sufficiency of supply and taking the appro- priate action. There is no justification for ruling consumption levels out of the calculation.
What would be the practical consequences of this calculation— taken honestly and without the frequent contemporary preoccupation not with solution but with plausible escape—I do not pretend to say. As I suggested at the outset, I am impressed by the opportunities for resource substitution and by the contribution of technology in facili- tating it. But the problem here is less one of theory than of technical calculation and projection. As such it is beyond the scope both of this paper and my competence. It has been my task to show that at any time that the calculation is unsanguine, restraint on consumption can no longer be excluded as a remedy.
However, let me conclude with one suggestion. There may be occa- sions, in the future, when in the interest of conservation we will wish to address ourselves to the consumption of particular products. (This,
JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH 99
as noted, can only be in the context of a critical view of all consump- tion.) The modern automobile may be a case in point. I share the view that this is currently afflicted by a kind of competitive elephanti- asis. As a result, it is making a large and possibly excessive claim on iron, petroleum, lead, and other materials; but much more seriously it is making excessive inroads on urban and rural driving and stand- ing space and on the public funds that supply this space.
But in the main it would seem to me that any concern for materials use should be general. It should have as its aim the shifting of con- sumption patterns from those which have a high materials require- ment to those which have a much lower requirement. The opportuni- ties are considerable. Education, health services, sanitary services, good parks and playgrounds, orchestras, effective local government, a clean countryside, all have rather small materials requirements. I have elsewhere argued that the present tendency of our economy is to dis- criminate sharply against such production.’ A variety of forces, among them the massed pressures of modern merchandising, have forced an inordinate concentration of our consumption on what may loosely be termed consumer hardware. This distortion has been underwritten by economic attitudes which have made but slight accommodation to the transition of our world from one of privation to one of opulence. A rationalization of our present consumption patterns—a rationaliza- tion which would more accurately reflect free and unmanaged con- sumer choice—might also be an important step in materials conser- vation.
7 The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, May 1958).
THE CRUCIAL VALUE PROBLEMS
A Philip M. Hauser
As a demographer and statistician I should, I suppose, be expected to