mendous diversity in the nature of resources. Diversity necessitates differences of treatment of many resources, depending on the local situation. The states are destined to continue as bodies politic-there isn't any prospect of their being erased, regardless of all the horrendous things said by those who are shouting loudest about states rights rather than being really interested in making states function. The states are going to be with us, and therefore we have to answer this question: what should be the role of the states in resource management? We should recognize that there must be close relationships between national, state and local resource activity. Certainly one of the roles the state should perform is to pay more attention to the local agencies with which it shares resource responsibilities. To illustrate this point, in the state of Oregon once the state has created a local flood control or diking district it has paid no more attention to it. The district will undertake certain obligations about flood control which, almost from the time the ink is dry on its contract, it has often failed to perform, yet nothing has happened. We've had a very considerable number of diking districts in this state which have flunked out on jobs which they undertook to do, after they signed a contract with the Corps of Engineers that if the Corps would come in and build the dikes, they'd maintain them. This is one state problem. The irrigation districts also are practically ignored by the state once they are created. Therefore they look to the Bureau of Reclamation for assistance if they are a district that got its works built by the Bureau. Although I have no objection to that, yet I think it is a function of the state to pay far more attention to the way the local entities that it creates perform as resource managing agencies. Only in this way can we get the best returns for the public funds which are spent. Another way in which, to some extent, the needed "pluribus" can be obtained in a system of "unum" is by decentralizing national administrative agencies which handle resources. There isn't any doubt, I think, that the national organization which has been most successful in its management of such tasks and which pioneered the job of organizing itself properly, is the Forest Service. One reason it has been so successful is because it was the first such federal agency to get started. The second reason is that it happened to have a very unusual person, Gifford Pinchot, at its head at that time. He was quite heterodox in his point of view about organization and he felt very keenly that you couldn't manage the forest resource unless you delegated adequate power from the center to the field, right down to the ranger district. That pattern has had a considerable influence in recent years on other federal resource management agencies. All of them are moving in that direction, some more rapidly than others. And Mr. Bessey, who was trying to assist the Department of the Interior agencies in the Pacific Northwest some years ago in this process could tell you in more detail what some of the difficulties have been in trying to get that process accelerated in the Department of the Interior. I remember being told by one distinguished public forester a good many years ago that when he first went to work for Uncle Sam he was employed by the Department of the Interior. This was before the national forest land was transferred to the Forest Service. He said that when a farmer wanted to get some firewood off the national forest he had to have a permit approved by the Secretary of the Interior before he could cut the firewood. By that time the winter would be over. This simply highlights the fact that you must have prompt decisions under some well understood and standardized policies to handle such resource functions. If you are going to deal effectively with tremendous diversity in the character of the resource from area to area, as is the case of forests and in land resources, you must suit your techniques to the job. Knowledge must be related to the peculiarities of the resource, and these vary tremendously from place to place. A second slogan I might use is Gresham's Law. In the field of economics Gresham's Law taught that the cheaper money drives out the dearer. My only use of this idea in the case of resource management is to point out that if one agency is governed by Congressional policies which are generous to particular private parties and another competing agency is governed by more stringent policies, because Congress so limited it, the former tends to undercut the agency with the less generous policy. To be concrete, when the Bureau of Reclamation builds a project, it has to see that the people who receive water from its reservoir pay back in a period of fifty years (unless Congress makes exceptions which unfortunately it does very often) the capital investment in that project, without interest. Moreover, one person can obtain water for not more than 160 acres. If the Corps of Engineers builds a similar project in which there are irrigation features, as they are now doing, it has no such requirements. Suppose you were a farmer who wanted more water, or a land speculator who wanted to get water on your land and thus make a killing, what agency would you try to get to build the irrigation project? There are numerous competitive elements in public policies secreted by Congressional statute that tend to make for the operation of Gresham's Law in the managment of resources on a good many fronts. To illustrate from agriculture, the Soil Conservation Service has been the victim of a Gresham's Law operating in the field of land management since the Supreme Court declared the old Triple-A Act unconstitutional. That was the original act which provided for the killing of the little pigs, you know, and the plowing under of cotton, etc., passed in the early New Deal days. The desire on the part of agricultural groups to get a fair shake on income, which was behind the AAA program, was still dominant. To get around the Court decision the emphasis in the statute was shifted to soil conservation. So in the late '30's a new statute was enacted to increase income under the guise of soil conservation. The shift was to what they called an Agricultural Conservation Payment program, by which the farmer was paid not to grow more wheat and other soil-depleting crops, and to plant legumes or grass. They paid him to put lime on the soil when his soil needed lime. By that means and by the new price support program, the income objectives were still dominant. So this AAA program was turned into this Agricultural Conservation Payment program under the guise of soil conservation. Some of it had soil conservation reality even though it was usually temporary. But this measure at once set up competition with the Soil Conservation Service, the other organization which had been created just about the same time to undertake the business of helping farmers develop complete farm plans, reorganize their whole farm program and do so on a long-term conservation basis. What would naturally happen under those circumstances? Well, the longterm farm plan program began to erode, just like the soil did, because all the conditions attached to it eroded. Today, farm planning is going on but you only take the part you want. I talked to a farmer the other day who said: "I'm not interested in this part of the farm plan because I can't make any money out of it." He was not primarily concerned with what was good for the long run use of the soil, although he wasn't just a day-to-day man. "But," he said, “in the case of the timberland I've got on this ranch-I've got 500 acres of it—and if I were to cut it on a tree-selection basis, what do I get out of it? It takes 180 years to grow a Ponderosa pine plant to a commercial tree. I wouldn't get anything out of it. In addition to that, I may need the money some day. I can get $30,000 to cut it all off at once and I may do that. I'm not sure yet. I may keep it for my boy. Maybe it would be useful as a kind of nest egg in case of economic difficulty." Well, a good many farmers aren't even thinking about their boys because their boys aren't staying home. I had another farmer tell me some 12 years ago: "I'm just a damned fool trying to farm my farm on a conservation basis because my boy isn't going to stay here when I'm through with it. Why should I do it?" What I'm suggesting is that it's very difficult indeed to build into farm practice long range conservation farming when there is, in the first instance, a good deal of incentive for the farmer to mine his soil. He makes more money out of it at certain times if he does mine his soil. It is very tough when, competing with an agency such as the Soil Conservation Service, there is an organization primarily concerned with giving the farmer more income immediately rather than with proper use of the land. However, since its beginning in 1938, I think this whole organization, now called Agricultural Stabilization Service, has moved over toward a more constructive long-range, land planning program. But there's still a considerable distance between where it is and where the Soil Conservation Service was in the late '30s. Partly that distance has been closed because the SCS has moved over toward the other agency, not in its ultimate goal, but because it has no sanctions to induce the farmer, after it makes its elaborate soil survey and works out a farm plan, to pay attention to that plan. When the Soil Bank program came into existence a few years ago, it provided for government renting a whole farm for a period of 3, 5 or 10 years. The farmer and the government, under the program, sign a contract. If a farmer violates it he gets penalized. He can't even sell the farm without the sale including this contract as a lien against it. So the buyer will have to live with it too. That is the first time since Hugh Bennett's old demonstration program was started that an effort has been made to get continuity into the obligation of the farmer to carry out the conservation commitments he has made. It's true, of course, that a good many farmers, once they are shown how to conserve the soil resource, will voluntarily continue to do it. But some will not. It may be, as some of my friends in the Soil Conservation Service contend, that you couldn't have made their older program with its penalties for non-fulfillment work because farmers wouldn't have accepted it. They might just have sat around with a lot of techniques to help farmers but with nothing to do! RESOURCE PROSPECTS AND ISSUES by Roy F. BESSEY Resource Management Consultant Mr. Bessey was special advisor to the Bonneville Power Adminis- I appreciate this opportunity of meeting with you. It's both a duty and a pleasure and I like the subject you have selected. My interests are those of a planning and program man rather than a scholar. You have not an "educated" presentation here, but one which has some background in decision preparation and policy formation and in operations in resources planning and programming fields. But I should mention, as probably worthwhile, that during the ten years of the National Resources Planning Board life—which I spent with it—there were a number of activities and opportunities that were related to education. Here, we had about five years of experience with a Northwest Regional Council, financed by the Rockefeller Foundation at the request of the planning people. The principal interest of that group was in the educational field and while it's ancient history now, it did make a number of significant starts—as with regionwide conferences on resources and planning, with resources and planning workshops in various parts of the Northwest, and with a number of publications. I'd like to get through with a rather broad coverage of my topic in time to give you plenty of time for what you came for-which, I believe, is give-andtake discussion. I would like to provide a little context for my own part of the presentation by going into things that are somewhat obvious but, perhaps too often, taken for granted: Conservation-what we mean by it; where it is needed, by whom and how conservation and development are attained. I think we are looking for a conservation concept of concern for all. And we're talking of one, when you put it in the most general terms, that nobody disputes any more than home and motherhood. But they do often ignore and override it; it's honored in the breach most of the time. And few practice it across the board. I would like to stress that-in contrast, perhaps, with some of you—I'm speaking of all resources and not somebody's pet, like fish and game or forests or parks, for example. Much as I believe in all of those individual aspects of conservation, my primary interest is in that of natural resources as a whole— the land, the water, the energy, the materials. And I don't think we can consider those apart from the economic resources that make them effective: the productive and distributive plant, the various institutions, service facilities, and the like. And even above the others, the social resources in a culture: our social service institutions, labor force, science and technology, and so on. Most of all, we are concerned with the people and their resources—individually and collectively, organizationally. I'd also stress that I'm thinking-as I believe all of you are- of resources for use. I assume we are not for "locking up" or for mere protection and that we're thinking of resources use, for human benefit and without waste: The use of resources in production, in environment improvement, in better and more secure living. In other words, we are concerned with the use of resources by and for people. How we manage and use our resources depends, of course, primarily on people on their knowledge, insight, understanding, purpose, technology and organization. And all of that comes back to people such as you in the fields of education and organization. Thus, I'd like to stress, particularly, the desirable. targets of education. We got into that a little yesterday. I think we should stress that we're not just educating specialists in conservation or in special fields of conservation. We're aiming, I think, at the resource managers and the stewards, whether generalist or specialist—whether they have a small piece of our resources or a large piece like the public domain under their view. We're aiming at conservation education in the various fields of philosophy, history and science. We are concerned with the educator as philosopher, as well as teacher, of conservation. Emphatically, we're aiming-we must aim-also at the citizens in the factories, on the farms, on the streets. Perhaps we might mention particularly the recreationist. We must think particularly of the politicians, the lawgivers and the policymakers. We must think of the leaders, and I think there hasn't been quite enough stress on that. In other words, we need something for all in conservation education. Another point for careful recognition is that of breadth and balance. We need a strong leaven of general training for all of the specialists. I think they should all see the context, and I am afraid too many of them do not. It occurred to me again yesterday, when we touched on a point like this, that the engineer is one of the worst of all offenders in not seeing his work in full context. I remember vividly, in The American Society of Civil Engineers' proceedings, a great argument in a symposium of the middle 30's. In this the leaders, almost without exception thought TVA, Bonneville and Coulee, the development of the Columbia, a big boondoggle. It couldn't possibly succeed. It was power for the jackrabbits, and so on. And that kind of thinking was true of other professions. I'd like to talk briefly of principles and the sciences and techniques of conservation, and of the ways and means for participation in these through education. A few highly trained and aware conservationists are not the answer. Many are needed with clear objectives and working knowledge-in government, in the universities and the research institutions, and everywhere. On the point of leadership, I'd like to quote a late friend, Barrow Lyons, in TOMORROW'S BIRTHRIGHT: "An ideal of the new democracy which we must build is so to con- "Insofar as Democracy fails to have this effect, upon its most Of course, the educator's role in leadership, and in all these other points of conservation education, is large. The capabilities are also very large, and I am well aware of this from experience in regional planning in the Pacific Northwest. 1 Barrow Lyons. Tomorrow's Birthright. New York, Funk & Wagnalls Co., 1955. |