GILBERT F. WHITE 213 



ages, fully exposed to the whole swing in public opinion against gov- 

 ernment intervention; but a major reason must have been the absence 

 of a national agency with which to collaborate, after the National Re- 

 sources Planning Board was abolished under the pressure of federal 

 agencies and Congressional blocs. 



If concrete accomplishment in transforming the water and energy 

 regimen of an area is the criterion, the TVA was the one clearly suc- 

 cessful innovation. More in other parts of the world than in the United 

 States it is the outstanding example of application of human effort 

 and ingenuity to developing the water and land resources of the area. 

 Why then does it stand alone in the United States? And why has every 

 other country which has tried a similar regional authority ended with 

 only one example? The difficulties and advantages of expanding the 

 valley authority have been examined thoughtfully by McKinley.* For 

 the reasons he states, especially the difficulty of reconciling a wholly 

 regional orientation with national needs and with the work of national 

 agencies, creation of additional valley authorities seems both unwise 

 and impracticable. Nevertheless, I believe today, as I did ten years 

 ago, that unless basic improvements are made in both policy and or- 

 ganization in the water field, the valley authorities might be preferable 

 to the prevailing arrangements. In this respect a particularly impor- 

 tant asset of the TVA (so long as it is permitted to discharge its ap- 

 pointed functions) is its competitive influence upon the standards and 

 practices of the national water agencies. 



To sum up, few of our innovations in resources organization are 

 strikingly fresh and new; and none seems to hold promise for improve- 

 ments on the large scale that is needed and desired. 



In our present state of knowledge so sweeping a generality must, of 

 course, be highly tentative. Not all the evidence is in, and not all of 

 the data that are available have been satisfactorily analyzed. We still 

 have a rather clumsy set of instruments with which to measure the full 

 impact of organized efforts to conserve and develop resources. No 

 innovation, for example, has been described more fully or debated 

 more hotly than the Tennessee Valley Authority. It was established as 



■^Charles McKinley, Uncle Sam in the Pacific Northwest (Berkeley: Uni- 

 versity of California Press, 1952), pp. 567-635. 



