viii Editor's Introduction 



shed light on some of the resource conservation problems of the next 

 fifty years from the vantage point of a critical review of the past fifty. 



Reckoning from 1908 when Theodore Roosevelt convened the first 

 Governors' Conference to consider resource problems, the idea of 

 conservation has been a strong influence in the national life for half 

 a century. The origins of the movement are much older than that. In 

 the earlier years of Roosevelt's presidency there had been a spreading 

 ferment and some notable accomplishments; and these, in turn, had 

 been preceded by a chain of developments running well back into the 

 nineteenth century. But it was at the time of the Governors' Confer- 

 ence that the conservation idea emerged fully and unmistakably as a 

 conscious, widely recognized force in American thought and action. 

 It has remained so ever since. 



Nineteen hundred and fifty-eight, therefore, is a golden anniversary 

 year. Through a happy coincidence it is also the one hundredth anni- 

 versary of the birth of Theodore Roosevelt. This is not, however, a 

 commemorative volume of the conventional wreath-laying variety. 

 Neither is it an exercise in historical analysis for its own sake. The 

 main purpose is to examine the record of the past fifty years for the 

 lessons that may contribute to the understanding and solution of 

 present resource problems and those of the next fifty years. We are 

 concerned here not with a chapter that has closed, but with a con- 

 tinuous set of dynamic developments that is still unfolding. This, after 

 all, is the most fitting commemoration of T.R. and the other early 

 giants of conservation, and the one they would have understood best: 

 continued critical inquiry into the problems they saw as so important 

 and absorbing. 



William Howard Taft once remarked that conservation was such 

 an abstruse subject that many people were for it no matter what it 

 meant. There was, and still is, a good deal of truth in the tart joke. 

 The essays in this book do not suggest any one best set of answers; 

 many of the contributors, in fact, pointedly avoid any definitions of 

 the key word. Some see the central problem in terms of the good life, 

 some in terms of technology or economics, some from intermediate 

 positions. Yet clearly the core of what they are talking about is some- 



