Henry Jarrett 1906-1978

Resources Staff

Henry Jarrett, RFF's first editor and director of its publications program for eighteen years, died May 11, 1978, at the age of 72. He joined the RFF staft in 1954 after serving as editor of The Nation Looks at its Resources, the report of the Mid-Century Conference on Resources for the Future. He had previously worked for the Baltimore Sun, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the just emerging Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and the Paley Commission, whose report Resources for Freedom (1952) helped lead to the founding of RFF. His contributions are reflected in this newsletter, Resources, which he established in May 1958, in several books that bear his nanze as editor—such as Perspectives on Conservation—in scores of other books and reports on which he worked, and in A Brief History of RFF, prepared last fall to mark RFF's 25th anniversary. But these bare facts only begin to suggest his importance to RFF, as the following tributes make clear.

It was a sad shock to learn of Henry Jarrett's death. I remember well my first encounter with him when he was a talented and energetic member of the editorial staff of the President's Materials Policy Commission in 1951 and 1952. He made many valuable contributions to our final report, Resources for Freedom. That was the beginning of an increasingly distinguished career in the resources field. His scholarship will live on, but all of us who knew him will miss him very much.

William S. Paley
Chairman of the Board, CBS

Everyone ever connected with Resources for the Future will remember Henry Jarrett with respect and fondness. Henry was the first, or almost the first, RFF employee. Over the years he has exemplified RFF's ideals as a research institution devoted to understanding the part natural resources play in human welfare.

Henry combined a love of the land and its soil, forest, and recreational resources—all in the tradition of Hugh Bennett, Gifford Pinchot, and his own close friend, Russell Lord—with an appreciation, genuine but also skeptical, of newer, highly technical research approaches to resource issues. From time to time Henry gently reminded younger colleagues of the conservation heritage they carried, almost in their genes, without knowing it.

High standards of written presentation were deeply important to Henry and, in his unobtrusive manner, he found ways of impressing this on all of us who worked with him. Pompous, overstuffed prose never got past his eye or his red pencil; in addition, he was always weeding technical jargon out of our sentences. He disciplined our writing so deftly that he seldom hurt our pride of authorship; typically we were not even aware of the surgery he was performing.

I owe a personal debt to Henry Jarrett, who for so many years was a very special colleague and close friend. As has been said, each of us passes this way but once; the companions we have on the journey, therefore, are so important. I am grateful for Henry's friendship.

Joseph L. Fisher
Congressman 10th District of Virginia and former President of Resources for the Future

I first knew Henry Jarrett as a member of the editorial staff of the President's Materials Policy Commission which published its report Resources for Freedom in 1952. He was everything that an editor should be: critical yet generous, gentle but firm, and with an instinct for the right word. The commission was equipped with talented technicians but few knew how to write the English language well. It was Henry's task to turn competent but awkward manuscripts into acceptable prose and he did remarkably well. He did it, moreover, without raising the hackles or bruising the egos of touchy professionals. He joined Resources for the Future almost as soon as the organization was formed and he served it devotedly for twenty-five years. Henry acquired in the course of his long association with natural resource problems a substantive knowledge of the subject that not only facilitated his editorial work but permitted him to make his own contributions. He became more than an editor for RFF. He was a valued member of its professional staff. But more than that, he was a gentle, lovable colleague whose loss will be long lamented.

Edward S. Mason
Honorary Director
Resources for the Future

A version of this article appeared in print in the April-July 1978 issue of Resources magazine.

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