SAMUEL P . HAYS 41 



ment has matured. Conservation today, he maintains, is the product 

 of a long, sometimes painful, yet successful historic struggle, the 

 gradual unfolding of beginnings some fifty years ago. He believes that 

 the basic direction has not changed. In his own words, "1958 is but 

 1908 illuminated." But the differences between 1908 and 1958, it 

 seems to me, far overshadow the similarities. Since 1908, admittedly, 

 the techniques of conservation have improved, although how much is 

 questionable. But conservation is more than a technique; it is in- 

 evitably geared to a scale of values, and since 1908 this scale of con- 

 servation values has shifted drastically. 



The conservation movement of 1908 was intensely optimistic. Men 

 like WJ McGee, who was perhaps the most vigorous philosopher of 

 the movement, felt that the possibilities of applied science opened up 

 vast vistas of human achievement in the field of natural resources. If 

 one could bring about sustained-yield management of biologic re- 

 sources, multiple-purpose development of rivers, and less wasteful 

 utilization of minerals, the future held untold possibilities. Conserva- 

 tion came as an integral part of the fundamental changes in human 

 knowledge which appeared in the second half of the ninteenth century 

 — the revolt against formal, deductive reasoning and the increasing 

 faith in empirical data. These changes seemed to presage almost un- 

 limited opportunities not only for the discovery of knowledge about 

 the earth, but equally unlimited opportunities for control of man's 

 environment for his own welfare. Conservation leaders of 1908 were 

 deeply infected with this optimism; they had an abundant faith in 

 technology as the key to human problems; they looked to the future 

 and geared their program to an intensely felt hope for social better- 

 ment. 



Some of this outlook persisted in the 1930's, and especially in the 

 leadership of Morris L. Cooke in rural electrification and David E. 

 Lilienthal in the Tennessee Valley Authority. But on the whole the 

 atmosphere of the years since World War II has shifted, I believe, 

 from optimism to a guarded pessimism. We think less of possibilities 

 and more of limits; we think less in terms of human betterment, and 

 more in terms of human survival. The unlimited horizons of tech- 

 nology are less often in our minds today than the compulsive use of 

 technology in a race toward world suicide. This new emphasis ap- 



