THE CHANGING CONTEXT 

 OF THE PROBLEMS 



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. 



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