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 of 1937 (now repealed), and the Cooperative Forest Management 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 



