36 The Changing Context of the Problems 



are the public multiple-purpose storage reservoir and the defense 

 installation. 



Fortunately, people who 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 tlie 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 and 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 



