THE MYTHOLOGY OF CONSERVATION 



Samuel P. Hays 



On this occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the Governors' Con- 

 ference of 1908, we look back into history in order to evaluate the 

 present and to provide direction for the future. Such stocktaking, how- 

 ever useful it may be, invites self-deception. Few can resist the temp- 

 tation to use history to formulate an ideology which will support their 

 own aspirations, rather than to look squarely at the hard facts of the 

 past. The conservation movement has not escaped this lure. Both its 

 history and its popular battles are replete with a mythology which 

 does not conform to fact. Here I wish to comment briefly on two of 

 these conservation myths that seem to have crept into Mr. Griffith's 

 paper. One is his major point — that the conservation movement has 

 become more mature. The other is his belief that the public interest 

 has become much more widely accepted as a criterion of resource 

 policies and actions. 



During these fifty years, Mr. Grifiith finds, the conservation move- 



SAMUEL P. HAYS is Assistant Professor of History at the State Uni- 

 versity of Iowa, where his field is American history since the 1870's. Previ- 

 ously he taught at the University of Illinois. Earlier, he did forestry work for 

 two and a half years in a Civilian Public Service camp in Oregon. He is the 

 author of two books: "Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Pro- 

 gressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920," about to be published by the 

 Harvard University Press; and The Response to Industrialism, 1885-1914, 

 University of Chicago Press, 1957. He was born at Corydon, Indiana, in 1921, 

 and received his B.A. in psychology from Swarthmore and his Ph.D. in his- 

 tory from Harvard. 



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