MAIN LINES OF THOUGHT AND ACTION 



^ Ernest S. 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 aU 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. 



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