Issue 78: Supply-side recreation

In January 1959, Marion Clawson presented a paper at the University of Wisconsin entitled "Methods of Measuring the Demand for and Value of Outdoor Recreation." Published with no fanfare as Number 10 in RFF's fledgling reprint series, Clawson's paper trickled out to academe and a small fraternity of outdoor recreation professionals and policy analysts.

Demand for Reprint Number 10 surprised everybody, perhaps especially the author, who calls it "crude, simplistic, and based on poor data." Successive reprintings seemed only to whet the appetite of a growing number of persons interested in the burgeoning pace of outdoor recreation in the United States, and the paper was reprinted for a fifth time in 1981. Not coincidentally, it was honored that year by the American Agricultural Economics Association with its Publication of Enduring Quality Award. It is indeed a seminal piece of work that set a pattern for all succeeding efforts on the demand side of the outdoor recreation equation.

In "Effective Acreage for Outdoor Recreation," the lead article in this issue of Resources, Clawson offers a parallel insight on the supply side. The problem he addresses is pervasive and long standing: what you see in outdoor recreation is not what you get. That is, a lot of land that is devoted ostensibly to recreational purposes may be off limits to most people for a variety of reasons. The great western parks are not easily available, for example, to the majority of U.S. citizens, who live in the East. Millions of acres of parkland in Alaska will go unvisited by all but the most avid and affluent recreationists.

What Clawson does is to provide a method and a measure—Effective Acreage Equivalent—that convert surface acres apparently available for outdoor recreation into a meaningful number of acres that are effectively available for that purpose. He cautions that he is not advancing the concept as a finished tool ready for use but rather as an experimental idea, and he invites criticism, comments, and suggestions from Resources readers.

The other two articles in this issue also concern the supply of critical resources. The University of Oregon's Raymond F. Mikesell examines oil exploration and development in those developing countries not lucky enough to be sitting on vast petroleum reserves. And RFF's Allen V. Kneese takes a look at the implications of falling water tables in the Ogallala Aquifer, once thought limitless.

Finally, we offer reviews of three new books, each of which happens to be of particular interest to those concerned about the lands and resources of the American West. Marion Clawson provides an appreciative, if mixed, appraisal of William C. Everhart's The National Park Service. Frank J. Popper writes a lively and mostly positive review of Western Public Lands, edited by John G. Francis and Richard Ganzel. And Winston Harrington says that Sacred Cows at the Public Trough, by Denzel and Nancy Ferguson, is angry and utterly without objectivity, but well worth reading.