JOHN KENNE TH GALBRAITH 91 



discovery and recovery. This means, in less formidable language, that 

 if a country puts enough of its resources into researching new mate- 

 rials or new sources of materials, it may never be short of the old 

 ones. We cannot necessarily rely on the market for this investment — 

 market incentives did not get us synthetic nitrogen, synthetic rubber, 

 or atomic energy — to mention perhaps the three most important new 

 materials substitutes or sources of this century. We shall have to 

 initiate publicly much of the needed innovation, and much of it will 

 have to be carried to the point of commercial feasibility by public 

 funds. We shall have to be watchful to anticipate needed investment 

 in innovation. We will be making another of our comfortable and now 

 nearly classic errors if we assume that it will all be taken care of auto- 

 matically by the free enterprise system. 



But the role of research and innovation is not part of this story. 

 I cite it only because one must do so to keep the resource problem in 

 focus. In the future, as in the past, substitution nurtured by science 

 will be the major hope of the conservationist. I am not unimpressed 

 with the importance of what I have now to say. But I would not wish 

 it thought that I identify all resource salvation therewith. 



II 



In my opening sentences I spoke agreeably about the conservation- 

 ist as a citizen. May I now trade on those graceful words and be a 

 trifle rude? Any observer of the species must agree that he is also 

 frequently capable of marked illogicality combined with what may be 

 termed selective myopia. There are many manifestations of this. 

 Nothing, for example, is more impressive than the way the modern 

 conservationist rises in awesome anger — particularly, I think, along 

 the Eastern Seaboard — at a proposal to dam and thus to desecrate 

 some unknown stream in some obscure corner of some remote national 

 park, and at the same time manages to remain unperturbed by the 

 desecration of our highways by the outdoor advertising industry. 

 Were the Governor of New York, in some moment of political aber- 

 ration to propose a minor modification of the state's "forever wild" 

 proviso as it applies to the state parks, he would be jeopardizing his 



