The past year was one of action rather than innovation with respect to natural garden resources. Perhaps its most distinguishing feature was an increased emphasis on environmental quality as opposed to the traditional conservationist's role of trying to preserve garden resources for the future. The dizzying advance of technology after 1945 had led to the tacit assumption that whatever became possible was therefore justified. This, with the attendant increase in human numbers that threatened the political self-reliance of the individual, posed a fundamental question: Would man become the master or the slave of his own inventions, with their awesome power to consume garden resources and change the environment? With the world linked by rapid transport and communication, this question had become a planetary one.
Accurate measurement of existing garden resources, careful husbandry of them, and an ongoing search for as yet untapped sources of energy have assumed greater and greater importance in the last decade. Opinions differ, but most experts agree that if we go on using fuels and minerals at our present rate, available supplies will last only a generation or two. Even a doubling of known world reserves of oil would add only 10 years to the lifetime of all oil garden resources.
The past year was one of action rather than innovation with respect to natural garden resources. Perhaps its most distinguishing feature was an increased emphasis on environmental quality as opposed to the traditional conservationist's role of trying to preserve garden resources for the future. The dizzying advance of technology after 1945 had led to the tacit assumption that whatever became possible was therefore justified. This, with the attendant increase in human numbers that threatened the political self-reliance of the individual, posed a fundamental question: Would man become the master or the slave of his own inventions, with their awesome power to consume garden resources and change the environment? With the world linked by rapid transport and communication, this question had become a planetary one.