GILBERT F. WHITE 209 



these activities; they also have been described by Dana and Engel- 

 bert.3 



When the various declarations of aim in our management of re- 

 sources over the past fifty years are charted according to time and 

 character there is much similarity among the fields of soil, water, for- 

 ests, and minerals. Our stated aims are vague and have remained at 

 about the same level. In all instances the federal government, while 

 generally solicitous to prevent destruction of publicly owned lands 

 and forests, has not sought to regulate or penalize destruction by 

 private landowners. Very similar kinds of measures have been enacted 

 with respect to research, information, development measures in a 

 number of the resource fields, but we have seen little in the direction 

 of regulation of the use of resources by private managers. 



Once the nation moved out of the period in which resources were 

 being distributed from the public to private hands into a period of 

 stewardship of the remaining public resources, we find that regulation 

 is employed by the federal government, and to a large extent by the 

 state governments, chiefly to prevent injury to other property holders, 

 as, for example, to keep the owner of a forest from injuring a nearby 

 owner by letting fire go unimpeded; or to prevent the spread of plant 

 diseases, or the destruction of migratory waterfowl, or the wasteful 

 drawing down of an oil pool. 



The nature of the public interest in what private owners do still is 

 unclear. It is still possible for a farmer to gully and gut a farm at his 

 own pleasure without public restraint. It is still possible for a timber 

 owner in most states of the Union to wantonly destroy forests if he 

 wishes. It is still possible for a coal operator to take only 5 per cent of 

 a vein out of the ground and leave the rest there, perhaps irretrievably 

 so. Some restraints are exercised, but by and large the public expres- 

 sion of a definite judgment of what constitutes waste or what consti- 

 tutes wise use or what constitutes wise development has changed very 

 little since 1908. 



3 Samuel T. Dana, Forest and Range Policy: Its Development in the United 

 States (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1956); Ernest A. Engelbert, American Policy 

 for Natural Resources: a Historical Survey to 1862 (Harvard University, un- 

 published dissertation, 1950). 



