Resources Past and Future

As I suggested earlier, the report of the Paley Commission [Resources for Freedom, 1952] is interesting, not only because of its findings, but because of what it ignored. It says nothing about the desirability of protecting the environment in the course of meeting American materials requirements. One could defend the commission by saying that it was not asked to consider this question. However, a more perspicacious group of enquirers—particularly a group that emphasized the importance of real costs—might have asked themselves the question, How much will an adequate protection of the environment add to the cost of meeting materials requirements? In fact, it was not asked, and, in 1950, few, if any, were asking this question. Enquiry into the costs of environmental protection burgeoned only in the past fifteen to twenty years, and RFF has been a leader in this enquiry.

One would have to go back to the conservation movement which flourished between 1890 and 1910 in order to discover the initial impetus in this country for environmental protection. This was a political movement with objectives as disparate as saving the forests, destroying monopolies, and maintaining Anglo-Saxon supremacy. Its economic analysis was practically nonexistent, though it did emphasize the importance of sustained yield in renewable resources. The best it could do in defining the meaning of conservation was to say that it meant a "wise use of resources." Since almost any program could be accommodated under this rubric we can sympathize with President Taft's dictum, "A great many people are in favor of conservation no matter what it means." Despite the fuzziness of the concept, however, many in the conservation movement had a feeling for environmental values of a very modern character. The American frontier was disappearing, urban congestion was increasing rapidly, the farm population had begun to decline, forests were being raped, and rivers and lakes had become polluted. No general solution to these problems existed, other than to "prevent waste," but there is no doubt that a high value was assigned to environmental protection. . . .

How much will it cost us to maintain an adequate protection of the environment? Or, to put the query in the form in which it currently engages attention, How much of our growth rate will need to be sacrificed in order to maintain air and water standards, the urban noise levels, and the availability of natural resources amenities that we are willing to live with? There have been some attempts to estimate, in terms of their percentages of the GNP, the costs maintaining, particularly, certain air and water standards, but at best they are educated guesses. . . .

It is, in fact, rather early to make overall estimates of the cost of environmental protection. The problem needs to be broken down into its constituent parts, in order to devise better measures of social costs and social benefits: and a greater effort must be made to learn how to establish a political consensus on the objectives to be reached before we attempt to strike a balance between growth and protection of the environment. There seems little doubt that this is the natural resource problem of today and the immediate future.