GILBERT F, WHITE 215 



sing enterprise may be more effective than traditional public devices 

 in stimulating sustained yield management of eastern forest lands. ^ 



These and many other studies indicate we are reaching the stage 

 where systems of social accounting and analysis can reveal the prob- 

 able social costs and returns from public intervention in resources use. 

 All the measures are rough. Many concentrate upon income effects 

 without reference to change in the resource base. It is paradoxical, 

 however, that at the very time that our economic tools are becoming 

 more precise and more widely applicable, our national thinking has 

 reached a stage at which increasing stress is placed upon aesthetic and 

 national security values which are less susceptible to economic analysis. 



It is not possible to sum up all the probable effects of a park plan 

 or a farm improvement scheme in a benefit-cost ratio. Many values 

 defy monetary measurement. Yet there no longer is the excuse of 

 ignorance of method for our failure to make much more refined com- 

 putations of the impact of an irrigation or power project upon the 

 national economy or to regularly estimate, as Clawson and Held have 

 suggested, the dimensions of the federal land management function." 

 Tools such as benefit-cost analysis can be misused as well as used, and 

 their helpful application requires continuing interest in sharpening 

 them and in asking whether they are employed to justify or to guide 

 a political decision. 



Against this background of changing aims and organization for 

 resources conservation and development, and of changing methods of 

 analyzing them, let us turn back to some of the critical questions with 

 which I began, with a view to discovering some of the lines along 

 which further change may be anticipated or perhaps be fostered. 



Why have the states generally failed to exercise a strong hand in 

 most fields of resources conservation and development? The role which 

 was envisaged for the states at the Governors' Conference has not 

 been realized. With some happy exceptions they have not exercised 

 strong constructive influence upon the course of reshaping the land- 

 scape. Public grazing lands have been widely dissipated and misman- 



* Roscoe C. Martin, From Forest to Front Page (Inter-University Case Pro- 

 gram [Birmingham: University of Alabama Press, 1956]). 



^ Marion Clawson and Burnell Held, The Federal Lands: Their Use and 

 Management (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1957), pp. 330-33. 



