Issue 82: Ends and Beginnings

"Ends and beginnings—there are no such things," wrote Robert Frost. "There are only middles."

Middles are the specialty of the house at Resources for the Future. As an organization we tend to take the long view, to place events and processes in perspective, to seek explanations for natural resource questions and approaches to their solution that stand up to time's abrasion. For example, the staff members who spent much of the 1960s studying energy issues were not overly surprised by the 1973-74 oil embargo and price hikes because they saw that global supply and demand conditions made such events possible. The energy "crises" of the 1970s were middle stages of a lengthy process begun many years before. Likewise, the recent plunge in oil prices does not signal an end to energy supply problems, but only a pause. Oil and natural gas still are finite resources.

This twenty-second annual "Highlights" edition of Resources gives an account of several issues and events that were of special interest in 1985 and will be of continuing concern for some time to come—classic middles. Because a comprehensive roundup of resource and environmental issues would require at least a book or two, the treatment is short and selective and represents the judgments of a number of RFF staff members. Our intent is not so much to report facts and figures as to explain what lies behind the news and to establish a framework for thinking about national and global resource problems.

The issues and events we study typically may be dominated by middles, but this year's institutional highlight is a combined sharp end and beginning. Emery N. Castle, president of Resources for the Future since 1979 and vice president before that, resigned his office at the end of February after nearly a decade of distinguished service and solid accomplishment. He has returned to the Pacific Northwest, where he has strong family and professional ties, and plans to do research and write on the problems of rural America. He will hold a part-time appointment as chairman of the graduate faculty of economics at Oregon State University, which he served in several top posts before coming to RFF.

Robert W. Fri is the new president. Formerly president of the Energy Transition Corporation and a key administrator of federal agencies concerned with both energy and environmental quality, Fri is familiar with RFF's agenda and with many members of the staff. He was a featured speaker at RFF's twenty-fifth anniversary celebration in 1977 and a member of the study group that produced Energy: The Next Twenty Years in 1979.