Issue 117: To Strengthen and Sustain

RFF was established in 1952 to address a national concern that we might soon run out of some of our natural resources. Over the years, the question "Is there enough?" has transformed into "Can we produce what we need in an environmentally sustainable way?" RFF research has kept pace with these emerging concerns.

This issue of Resources contains four articles that show how the sustainability issue affects the conservation and use of four natural resources—forests, minerals, cropland, and water. Based on their many years of study, the authors consider whether and how we can maintain commodity production while meeting our responsibility to future generations.

Roger Sedjo examines how local restrictions on logging, designed to reduce regional environmental damage, may have just the opposite effect when the global picture is considered. Using a timber-supply model developed here at RFF, he predicts how and where timber production relocates to meet changes in demand and speculates about what the attendant environmental consequences might be.

Roderick Eggert from the Colorado School of Mines traces the development of mining by reviewing the history of the General Mining Law of 1872, still the overarching law governing mining activities on many federal lands. He shows the growing influence of environmental values on mining policies and outlines the key issues in the current debate over the Mining Law's reauthorization.

Pierre Crosson grapples with the question of whether demand for U.S. agricultural products can be met indefinitely at socially acceptable economic and social costs. His conclusion—that the environmental costs of sediment from cropland runoff may turn out to be the one constraining factor for U.S. agriculture—points to a limitation of which few people are yet aware.

Kenneth Frederick's analysis of water use in this country shows how the emphasis on the marketability of water has been giving way in recent decades to an emphasis on its environmental value. The difficulty of balancing these two values, as he demonstrates, is nowhere more clear than in the environment versus development contests that have developed in the context of the Endangered Species Act.

Just as we have broadened the questions we ask about natural resources, we are expanding the frontiers of research and analysis. For instance, senior fellow Molly Macauley was honored recently for her work in space economics (see p. 11), a relatively new field in resource economics. We also are helping to open resource and environmental economics to new scholars, through academic programs and other activities that encourage students to enter the field and ease the way for young professionals (see p. 11). As always, we are grateful to the generous contributors who sustain us in all of these programs.

— Robert W. Fri, President