SIGURD F. OLSON 149 



a way of life in the Middle East. There is no alternative today. We 

 must move into this vacuum without all of the preliminaries of prepa- 

 ration, move swiftly with courage and vision, confident that the 

 future will prove the wisdom of our action. 



This is a difficult thing to do in a democratic system. We must stop 

 talking about natural resources, recreational areas, and conservation 

 generally in cold-blooded economic terms, seeing them only as graphs 

 and statistics, national income and expenditures, taxes, price sup- 

 ports and programs. We must see them from an ecological point of 

 view involved with such inherent needs as freedom, human dignity, 

 and happiness. We must recognize the human necessity of keeping 

 physical contact with the land, knowing now ^nd in the generations 

 to come the meaning of the old simplicities and satisfactions. While 

 we may well be able to provide synthetics in fuel, food, and mate- 

 rials to take the place of exhausted resources of the past, cope with 

 an expanding population without starvation or want, the great ques- 

 tion will always be: Is this enough, is this the kind of a world we 

 really want to live in? 



Once having decided what we want and recognizing that there is 

 no time to waste, no time to wait for the orderly and logical results 

 of an educational program extending across decades, the question 

 before us is: What can and what must be done now? The answer is 

 first of all to find the leadership, and then for city, state, and federal 

 governments to move immediately into the field of natural resources, 

 doing everything possible to bring them into adjustment with con- 

 sumption. While there is still time, governments must also attempt 

 to plan urban developments so that recreational areas of all kinds are 

 set aside to meet the needs of a burgeoning population. It makes 

 little difference what the immediate designations of such reservations 

 may be. The important thing is to acquire and preserve them before 

 they are gone forever. At the most, we have a decade to accomplish 

 this purpose. If we wait much longer than that at the rate we are 

 building now, the land will be gone and our opportunity for the 

 future as well. 



