210 Broader Bases for Choice: The Next Key Move 



Two trends, however, are discernible. With respect to stewardship, 

 there has been a shift from emphasis upon preservation to emphasis 

 upon development, from saving resources to maximizing the benefits 

 from their use, although it is unlikely that the full panoply of develop- 

 ment techniques practiced today in a national forest reserve or a west- 

 ern drainage basin would go far beyond the expectations of Pinchot 

 and Powell before the turn of the century. We now look to the federal 

 government for investment and administration as well as scientific and 

 research services. This increasing stress on positive development was 

 one major trend in aim. 



Direct federal subsidy or tax incentive has been used chiefly to 

 influence private operators either to encourage and strengthen devel- 

 opment efforts, as in the case of irrigation and much watershed pro- 

 tection, or to stabilize their incomes, as in the case of depletion allow- 

 ances for mineral discovery, with resource preservation or wise use 

 being a secondary objective. Agricultural conservation payments, for 

 example, were not primarily intended to save the soil. 



A second major trend was the shift from single-purpose to multiple- 

 purpose aims. Multiple-purpose concepts were not lacking in public 

 discussions and reports in 1908, but they found their way into con- 

 crete state and federal legislation slowly. The number of resource uses 

 for which some public action seemed warranted multiplied, and with 

 them the avowal, more often in preambles and speeches than in action 

 programs, of a belief in multiple-use management. Along with this 

 there has been a constant struggle to somehow combine the idea of 

 achieving scale economies and other economies with the ecologist's 

 concept of equilibrium in the web of nature, a kind of reconciliation 

 that we haven't fully achieved in theory let alone in practice. 



It is difficult to overestimate the impelling sense of community with 

 nature which has shown itself, not only dramatically in the desire to 

 preserve places of primeval beauty, but persistently in efforts to pre- 

 vent the unbalanced destruction of segments of the "seamless web." 

 Here, as in other branches of human endeavor, it is constructive striv- 

 ing toward harmonious life and knowledge, rather than defensive 

 action against threatening disaster, that often claimed imaginative in- 

 telligence. 



What about the agencies that the American people have maintained 



