SAMUELT.DANA 25 



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 



