The Report on Land of the National Resources Board

Abstract

In the brief time at my disposal today it is impossible to review in detail the mass of data and reasoning lying back of the report on Land Utilization and Policy submitted to the National Resources Board by its technical land committees. I can do little more than outline its contents and commend to you a study of the report at your leisure-it represents many points of view and is the latest contribution to the subject. It is my sincere hope that this report as far as the general reader is concerned will escape the pigeon-hole destiny of many other products of serious, conscientious and worth-while effort. It merits careful critical study by all agricultural economists. Indeed, this is a report dealing with our basic asset, which deserves reading not alone in academic cloisters. I hope it can be popularized so that wide distribution will be given to its facts and conclusions-all with one aim, to bring the collective intelligence of the people the democratic approach to bear on the problems of land and the broad field of conservation. Then we might look forward with hope to the reshaping of old land policies and the formulation of new policies in line with current needs recognizing change. The background of the Land Report goes, I suppose, to the founding of the Republic. In our land policies we can find a major segment in the history of the development of this country. I do not suppose there has been any decade since the opening of the nineteenth century when we did not have a lively national issue related in some way to land. But the movement towards thinking of land in terms of all of the people developed more slowly. Development of thinking which associated land with a program of public conservation was also slow in emerging. A great deal of progress was made with the rise of the Roosevelt-Pinchot conservation movement, centering on forest conservation. It has remained for more recent years to develop a new and broader consciousness of land as a national asset of diverse uses, an asset to be preserved and protected for the public welfare. The Roosevelt-Pinchot conservation movement had a strong emotional current. Part of its spark centered about the rise of