28 



COMMERCIAL FISHERIES REVIEW 



Vol. 28, No. 10 



Fig. 1 - An estuary in Florida's Everglades National Park, (Photo by M, Woodbridge Williams, National Park Service) 



of the things that man does to alter and 

 destroy them. 



Every day there are more of us with con- 

 cern for the quality of the environment and 

 the way that we manage our natural resources. 

 We have been labeled. We are the "conser- 

 vationists." It is a good label in many ways, 

 but it is not a precise one because of the very 

 complexities I have mentioned and because 

 conservation has become a movement. 



Like most popular movements, conserva- 

 tion has had its slogan makers. James Bry- 

 ant Conant, when President of Harvard Uni- 

 versity, said in a baccalaureate address in 

 1934: 



"Slogans are both exciting and comfort- 

 ing, but they are powerful opiates for the 

 conscience. . . . Some of mankind's 

 most terrible misdeeds have been 

 committed under the spell of certain 

 magic words or phrases." 



In the resources field, "multiple use" has 

 become one such rallying cry. Only a few 



months ago the President of a State Chamber 

 of Commerce, in arguing against a sugges- 

 tion that polluters be taxed, said that pollu- 

 tion of a stream was one of its multiple uses. 



Definitions in the conservation field, as in 

 other movements, become catch-words that do 

 do not really define but only express general 

 and pious notions. One of the oldest goes like 

 this: Conservation is the use and management 

 of natural resources for the greatest good of 

 the most people over the longest time. This is 

 is frequently abridged to: Conservation is the 

 wise use of natural resources. 



There is an easily recognized good inten- 

 tion in the language of these definitions. The 

 meaning does not have to withstand economic 

 or political analysis as long as a problem re- 

 mains generalized. One does not, as a con-* 

 servationist, have to determine what is the 

 "greatest good" in terms of alternate "goods" 

 or of various possible combinations of con- 

 sequences of actions that may be more or less 

 "good." One does not have to decide whether 

 what is deemed "good" by most people does 

 in fact produce a social cost for all people, a 



