1 60 The Political Economy of Resource Use 



a persistent concern of their followers. The Geological Survey as early 

 as the 1890's was emphasizing the advantages of multi-purpose river 

 valley development as against the nearly exclusive concern of the 

 Corps of Engineers with the use of rivers for transportation. Gilford 

 Pinchot in the Bureau of Forestry preached the doctrine of sustained 

 yield forestry on private operations and later advocated enclosure into 

 national forests as the best means of assuring a proper time distribu- 

 tion of the rate of cutting. The external diseconomies of competitive 

 grazing and the sacrifice of future benefits through overgrazing im- 

 pressed contemporary shapers of United States range land policy. An 

 able historian of the conservation movement states that, "Roosevelt, 

 Pinchot, Newell and others gradually recognized that underlying their 

 former resource policies was a common thread of waste elimination 

 and long-range planning." ^ And the wastes that principally engaged 

 their attention were what are here called external diseconomies (or 

 the neglect of possible external economies) and a faulty time distribu- 

 tion of the rate of use. 



The conservation movement, to be sure, as a socio-political phe- 

 nomenon, quickly broadened out to embrace much more, including 

 pubUc health, conservation of the morals of youth, ehmination of 

 child labor, preservation of natural beauty, "the elimination of waste 

 in education and war, the conservation of manhood, and the conser- 

 vation of the Anglo-Saxon race." ^ Pinchot campaigned for the Senate 

 in 1914, on a platform of the conservation of human rights, natural 

 resources, human welfare, and citizenship. A glance at the character 

 and qualifications of the individuals and groups invited to the Con- 

 ference on Resources for the Future in 1953 indicates how amorphous 

 and undefined conservation, in the popular usage, has become. As 

 President Taft earlier said, with some justice: there are a great many 

 people in favor of conservation, no matter what it means. 



At the core, however, conservation has always been primarily con- 

 cerned with natural resources and with the possibilities of eliminating 

 waste in natural resource use through government intervention. This 

 seems to be the meaning favored in many state and federal statutes 



^ S. P. Hays, "The First American Conservation Movement, 1891-1920" 

 (Ph.D. thesis. Harvard University, 1953), p. 201. 

 4 Ibid., p. 302. 



