Senator MCGEE. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The CHAIRMAN. Senator Carroll?

STATEMENT OF HON. JOHN A. CARROLL, A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF COLORADO

Senator CARROLL. Mr. Chairman, I have been asked to present to the committee the statement of Governor McNichols, Governor of Colorado. I am not going to read it all. I am going to point out one or two highlights and then let the statement stand for itself.

The Governor, of course, addresses himself to the chairman and the members of this committee. And he raises, he says, the basic question that is posed by Senate bill 2549, which is a simple one: Should our Government follow a coordinated, scientific course in dealing with the problems and potentials of our natural resources?

This is the question that is put by the Governor of Colorado.

I want to say to you, Mr. Chairman, that he is highly commendatory of your actions in introducing this bill. In addition, he calls to the attention of the members of this committee and its chairman that the Governors of the Western Conference have passed a resolution supporting in principle this type of legislation.

I now offer the statement of Governor McNichols, so that it may be placed in the record in its entirety.

(The prepared statement of Gov. Steve McNichols, of Colorado, is. as follows:)

STATEMENT OF HON. STEVE MCNICHOLS, GOVERNOR OF THE STATE OF COLORADO Honorable Chairman and distinguished members of the committee, I appreciate the invitation of the Honorable James E. Murray to appear before you and to speak on Senate bill 2549 for two reasons: I have a deep interest in the subject of natural resources, both as an individual and as Governor of a resource-rich Western State; and I believe this bill could rededicate the United States of America to the broad principles of conservation upon which it took its first feeble steps under the inspiring leadership of President Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot more than 50 years ago.

The basic question posed by Senate bill 2549 is a simple one: Should our Government follow a coordinated, scientific course in dealing with the problems and potentials of our natural resources?

I say, it should. After 50 years of experiment and education, I say it is time we recognized the fact that the principles of conservation can only be properly served by a unified, integrated approach at the highest possible level.

Present world conditions lend urgency to this concept. We should not delay longer. We can afford neither the time nor the expense nor the waste of a hydraheaded, multidirectional, and aimless natural resources program in our National Government.

We do lack some knowledge about our resource problems. But we do not lack the ability to obtain that knowledge if we can muster the initiative to adapt to new resource management conditions with new approaches to old problems.

We, and our fathers before us, have watched the flower of conservation break through the political topsoil sporadically over half a century. But we have not tended that flower with care. Instead of a garden, we have a weedpatch with an occasional flower somehow managing to make a bloom each year despite the fact that we let the gardener go a long time ago.

You know better than I the size of the conservation problem facing the Congress. The best example is water, our most basic resource.

There are at least four major committees in the Senate and at least this many in the House of Representatives which deal with various aspects of the water problem. Yet, until recently, there was only one major committee-Appropriations-in which these various approaches to the water problem came together.

The Congress must be commended for establishing the U.S. Senate Select Committee on National Water Resources last year, which has provided a temporary joint study of our water resources and their potential. This committee's hearings in the West in recent months have met with a ready and interested response, indicating the great interest not only in water problems as such but in a unified approach to their solution as well.

The Congress needs such a headgate as this to channel work on the Nation's water problems.

In the executive branch, there are at least 24 Federal agencies that deal with water problems. But there is no single agency that has water as its sole and major concern.

One agency deals with a body of water as a flood hazard, another looks upon the same water as a wildlife habitat, another regards it as a freightway, another approaches it as a utility for thirsty cities or industries, another regards it as a necessity for a successful agriculture, and yet another looks upon it as a source of hydroelectric power.

But no single agency has the authority nor the responsibility to establish overall policy, prepare inventories and determine the needs for this most versatile and vital resource.

The story is the same with our other resources. Attention to them is scattered throughout the congressional committees, the administrative departments, and the Cabinet posts.

There is no point at which all of our efforts and ideas on resources come together, unless it is in the Office of the President. And we all know that the amount of attention any given subject gets there depends wholly upon the attitudes and inclinations of the man who holds that office.

But even though a President were highly conscious of America's needs in resource programing he still would face a mare's nest of tangled authority, advice, and administration. There is no single agency for either the President or for Congress to turn to for overall, comprehensive counsel on resource matters. This failing of our self-government in this vital area of national wealth can be met by such legislation as you are now considering.

We must combine what we know of science with what we have experienced in domestic and international politics, and thus, I hope, lessen the partisan fervor that periodically sweeps conservation before it. In return, our citizens should be assured that a single coordinate agency is advising the Nation, the Presidency and the Congress in resource matters.

Your efforts should elevate resource development and conservation, and bring about better Federal-State coordination in resource use and management. They should make unnecessary the single-interest approaches to conservation that have only added new confusion to the existing confusion-such as the proposed wilderness bill now before the Congress.

If such an agency as is here proposed had been at work during the past 7 years, I seriously doubt that we would have ever been faced with Dixon-Yates, or with partial development of Hells Canyon, or with the no-new-starts policy that has hamstrung reclamation development, or with other costly resource and conservation mistakes.

It seems obvious to me that such an agency-with both the status and the technical experts needed to develop resource policy guided by the long-term public interest-would have blocked such attempts merely by reporting the facts in each case and pointing out how the public interest could best be served.

America needs an inventory of its resources. It needs direct action immediately on such problems of resource waste as water pollution.

We should substitute comprehensive new approaches to meet pressing new conditions of consumption and use of our resources.

Any new effort in this regard must look far beyond our own borders and our own times. We should shape resource and trade policies that can match the new economic and political shape of the world now emerging.

Our own resource policies should aid and augment our foreign policies and not, instead, provide the glaring and embarrassing examples of mismanagement that threaten America's role as the leading economic and political democracy of the world.

The individual States are limited in what they can do. Yet a resolution on this subject, which I sponsored at the western Governors conference at Sun Valley last September, indicates that the Governors of western States are well aware of the resources dilemma facing our Nation and the world. That resolution called for Congress and the executive department to initiate a “joint and

cooperative examination of the mineral resources of the free world with the other nations of the free world to the end that an inventory of those resources be commenced and policies recommended and adopted for their economic production, distribution, and marketing."

The Resources and Conservation Act of 1960 suggests such an agency to perform this function. Your committee has before it a concrete proposal that could help meet the needs felt and expressed by the western Governors conference.

In conclusion, let me enter a plea for a return to the original conservation principles expressed in the acts of President Theodore Roosevelt more than 50 years ago. It is a plea to substitute wise use for thoughtless waste, to clear out administrative channels clogged with outmoded concepts and with policies jaded with the passage of time, to simplify approaches that have become hopelessly tangled with bureaucratic redtape, and to give purposeful direction to policies now wandering aimlessly in an administrative jungle.

The Resources and Conservation Act of 1960 can be the most realistic and total approach to this critical problem of conservation since the National Governors Conference on Conservation called by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1908. The Congress can provide the groundwork for a rebirth of conservation-a science and a political concept that America should present to the world as one of the finest flowers of American self-government and economic democracy. Senator CARROLL. At the same time, Mr. Chairman, I have a letter from Mr. Palmer Hoyt of the Denver Post, addressed to the chairman of this committee, and accompanying that letter is an editorial from the Denver Post. I have been much impressed with the statement of the distinguished junior Senator from Wyoming, and of course I desire to associate myself with his remarks.

The editorial from the Denver Post, it seems to me, is worth reading. It is a short one. And I ask the chairman at this time whether or not this editorial has been offered here, or included in the record. If so, I will not encumber the record.

The CHAIRMAN. It has not.

Senator CARROLL. Well, I would like to read this, Mr. Chairman. This appeared on November 2, 1959, in the Denver Post, which is an independent newspaper, nonpartisan, bipartisan, on matters affecting the West, one of the agreed leaders, one of the great champions of the conservation of the resources of the West. And the title of this editorial is "A Yearly Resources Report Is Needed."

To any American veteran slightly concerned with natural resources and their wise future use, the number of Government and private agencies advising and acting in the field is staggering.

I will digress a moment from the editorial to say to you, Mr. Chairman, that there must be a reason for this type of legislation. In my opinion, the more I study this subject, the more I am convinced that we have to draw together, to unify, Government activity, Government investigation of the facts, so that we will know what to do in this vast field.

To continue on with this editorial:

As one example, there are 16 Federal agencies located in 6 different Government departments concerned with some aspect of Federal water policy. In addition, the U.S. Senate has at least four special standing committees with major interests in water problems, to say nothing of the regular congressional committees that pass on water legislation.

On top of this are the organized interest groups representing all shades of public opinion on water use, for example, on flood control, reclamation, power distribution, water recreation, and watershed preservation.

This picture is multiplied many times concerning other natural resources. Each field is staked out by many organized groups, each with its own cause and its experts showering facts upon our benumbered public servants.

52421-60- -3

Yet the great truth about natural resources development is that it must be considered

and in this editorial they have italicized this word—

it must be considered in a unified fashion.

Water development affects industrial location, agricultural output, and recreational opportunity. Good forest management basically affects the water supply, and so on. The interrelations in the resources field are endless and fundamental.

And now I give another italicized part of the editorial:

But who is to bring all of our resources information together into a unified report, drawn objectively with the national interest in mind?

This is the question put by the Denver Post editorial.

Senator James Murray of Montana, a veteran Democrat, who has spent most of his long legislative life in the resources field, has come forward with a reasonable plan.

His Senate bill 2549 proposes formation within our Government of these two bodies.

A Council on Resources and Conservation located in the President's Office in the executive branch, with the necessary experts and funds to prepare for the President and the Nation an annual resources and conservation report.

A bipartisan Joint Committee on Resources and Conservation made up of eight Senators and eight Representatives in Congress. This would have the necessary staff to make a continuing review of the President's annual resources report, from the legislative point of view.

This is the same system that has been working well in regard to our national economy as a whole.

The President has his Council of Economic Advisors and the Congress its Joint Economic Committee, which pull in tandem to give the Nation an adequate continuing review of just where it stands in ecoonmic progress.

The key point of the Murray proposal is that we need a permanent mechanism in our Government that will give continuous attention to our overall resources problems and will make annual recommendations on which the President and the Congress can act.

An additional point, well worth considering, is that such a mechanism in the economic field has proved valuable in educating the public on economic matters by periodically bringing into the news economics as seen by outstanding economists. The same could be true for resources.

Presuming such functions would be assigned to top-grade men and that the reports would be, as they have been in the economic field, reasonably objective, the Nation would gain great reward from this resources proposal.

Until something like this is done, we will continue to live in confusion regarding one of our most important national concerns.

Mr. Chairman, I think that is an excellent editorial, and it is one of the reasons I have taken the liberty of reading it at length into the record, and I now ask permission to put the letter of Palmer Hoyt to Senator Murray in the record at this point.

The CHAIRMAN. These will be printed in the record at this point. (The referenced letter is as follows:)

Hon. JAMES E. MURRAY,

Senate Office Building,

Washington, D.C.

THE DENVER POST,
January 21, 1960.

DEAR SENATOR MURRAY: Many thanks for your letter of January 15 and for the copy of the Congressional Record containing your excellent presentation of the facts and philosophies of resource development, use, and conservation.

It would be extremely difficult, owing to urgent commitments, for me to accept your thoughtful invitation for me to appear as a witness at the committee hearings.

Our position, however, has been set forth in an editorial published November 2, 1959. I enclose a clipping in case you do not have one in your files.

Mr. Mort Stern, editor of the Post's editorial page, expects to have additional comment as the measure progresses, and he will see that you receive copies without delay.

All personal regards.

Sincerely,

[From the Denver Post, Nov. 2, 1959]

PALMER HOYT, Editor and Publisher.

A YEARLY RESOURCES REPORT IS NEEDED

To any American even slightly concerned with natural resources and their wise future use, the number of Government and private agencies advising and acting in the field is staggering.

As one example, there are 16 Federal agencies located in 6 different Government departments concerned with some aspect of Federal water policy. In addition the U.S. Senate has at least four special standing committees with major interests in water problems, to say nothing of the regular congressional committees that pass on water legislation.

On top of this are the organized interest groups representing all shades of public opinion on water use, for example on flood control, reclamation, power distribution, water recreation, and watershed preservation.

This picture is multiplied many times concerning other natural resources. Each field is staked out by many organized groups, each with its cause and its experts showering facts upon our benumbed public servants.

Yet the great truth about natural resources development is that it must be considered in a unified fashion.

Water development affects industrial location, agricultural output, and recreational opportunity. Good forest management basically affects the water supply, and so on. The interrelations in the resources field are endless, and fundamental. But who is to bring all of our resources information together into a unified report, drawn objectively with the national interest in mind?

Senator James Murray, of Montana, a veteran Democrat who has spent most of his long legislative life in the resources field, has come forward with a reasonable plan.

His Senate bill 2549 proposes formation within our Government of these two bodies.

A council on Resources and Conservation located in the President's Office in the executive branch, with the necessary experts and funds to prepare for the President and the Nation an annual resources and conservation report.

A bipartisan Joint Committee on Resources and Conservation made up of eight Senators and eight Representatives in Congress. This would have the necessary staff to make a continuing review of the President's annual resources report, from the legislative point of view.

This is the same system that has been working well in regard to our national economy as a whole.

The President has his Council of Economic Advisers and the Congress its Joint Economic Committee which pull in tandem to give the Nation an adequate, continuing review of just where it stands in economic progress.

The key point of the Murray proposal is that we need a permanent mechanism in our Government that will give continuous attention to our overall resources problems, and will make annual recommendations on which the President and Congress can act.

An additional point, well worth considering, is that such a mechanism in the economic field has proved valuable in educating the public on economic matters, by periodically bringing into the news economics as seen by outstanding economists. The same could be true for resources.

Presuming such functions would be assigned to top-grade men and that the reports would be, as they have been in the economic field, reasonably objective, the Nation would gain great reward from this resources proposal.

Until something like this is done, we will continue to live in confusion regarding one of our most important national concerns.

Senator CARROLL. So, Mr. Chairman, to conclude: The Governor of Colorado, I am sure the entire congressional delegation from Colorado, the conference of Governors, the western conference, have pre