Quotes from the Forum

Facts and opinions from many viewpoints were exchanged by a dozen students of environmental problems at the 1966 RFF Forum held in Washington last March before an invited audience of 250. The brief passages below are from the book Environmental Quality in a Growing Economy, containing the collected papers, which will be published for RFF by The Johns Hopkins Press in December.

We are now in the middle of a long process of transition in the nature of the image which man has of himself and his environment. Primitive men, and to a large extent also men of the early civilizations, imagined themselves to be living on a virtually illimitable plane. There was almost always somewhere beyond the known limits of human habitation, and over a very large part of the time that man has been on earth, there has been something like a frontier ... The image of the frontier is probably one of the oldest images of mankind, and it is not surprising that we find it hard to get rid of.

Gradually, however, man has been accustoming himself to the notion of the spherical earth and a closed sphere of human activity ... The closed earth of the future requires economic principles which are somewhat different from those of the open earth of the past ... I am tempted to call the open economy the "cowboy economy" ... associated with reckless, exploitative, romantic and violent behavior, which is characteristic of open societies. The closed economy of the future might similarly be called the "spaceman" economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system which is capable of continuous reproduction of material form even though it cannot escape having inputs of energy ... In the cowboy economy, consumption is regarded as a good thing and production likewise; and the success of the economy is measured by the amount of the throughput from the "factors of production" ... The gross national product is a rough measure of this total throughput ... In the spaceman economy, what we are primarily concerned with is stock maintenance, and any technological change which results in the maintenance of a given total stock with a lessened throughput (that is, less production and consumption) is clearly a gain. This idea that both production and consumption are bad things rather than good things is very strange to economists, who have been obsessed with the income-flow concepts to the exclusion, almost, of capital-stock concepts.

—Kenneth E. Boulding

Modern Americans thoughtlessly tried to escape from the pollution which we rather vaguely associated with the city by running half-way back to the country. Some call exurbia a happy medium, but in pollution matters it is the worst of both worlds. People can get along at low rural density, where they are far enough apart not to pollute each other's water; and again at big urban density where they are close enough to use common facilities. But on the sprawling urban fringe we are close enough to get in each other's way and too far apart to do anything about it ... Rather than an expansion of exurban living we need a means for quick and complete transition of land from rural urban density.

—M. Mason Gaffney

There is no single expert opinion about attitudes toward quality of environment; there are the opinions each person holds, the opinions he thinks others hold, and the opinions he thinks they should hold. Many public administrators get mixed up about this. Perhaps the greatest confusion arises from their not knowing what others do believe and from lacking means of finding out. —Gilbert F. White