38 The Changing Context of the Problems 



What had happened during fifty years was that resources lost their 

 fixed limits both as to place and subject. But the need to consider 

 their interrelatedness increased. An integrated resource program for 

 the nation became a will-o'-the-wisp drawing the National Resources 

 Planning Board off into general economic planning. The TVA did 

 integrate resource conservation not in spite, but because, of the fact 

 that it tackled a modest-sized area, and in that area related all of its 

 resource programs to the original federal plant at Muscle Shoals or 

 to the river and the river's products. Beyond that reached advice, 

 demonstration, and recommendations. 



Why have we enjoyed so little presidential leadership of conserva- 

 tion policy even while conservation attitudes have grown and the need 

 for policy decisions multiplied? I believe that it is because conserva- 

 tion no longer expresses a self-contained and self-justifying purpose; 

 resources have become means to ends as diverse as growing proteins, 

 living urbanely around cities, and winning international security. The- 

 odore Roosevelt's conservation crusade stood concerted and largely 

 independent. Franklin Roosevelt's conservation programs were means 

 to recovery and victory, as well as to restoring a natural harmony. 

 From this point of view it may not have been a backward step that 

 when the National Resources Planning Board had been liquidated, its 

 vestigial functions reappeared in two separate contexts, that of the 

 Council of Economic Advisers, and that of the National Security Re- 

 sources Board and its successor, the Office of Defense Mobilization. 

 More and more we have been conserving for something that seems 

 more nearly ultimate. 



It is fitting and proper, then, that we do not find ourselves, after 

 fifty years, gathered in a crusade. We are researchers and teachers of 

 not one but dozens of new sciences and engineering fields illuminating 

 and serving various aspects of useful nature: soil science, hydrology, 

 ecology, economic geology, weather control, water and air sanitation. 

 We are policy-makers in separate but related areas. As Mr. Griffith 

 has suggested, not only are water, land, and minerals separate fields 

 for most of us, but each has become too intricate to master whole. 

 Water supply, irrigation, flood prevention and control: we do well if 

 we can comprehend policy even in those subfields. Twenty years ago 

 there was a proposal for a department of conservation. Now we aim 



