he saying goes, "stand in the way of progress."

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Certain other philosophers, growing in numbers these days, say
emphatically that you can and should. These are the history-minded
people, the wilderness folk, the nature traditionalists, and the others
whose main concern is that man and the pleasant world around him have
lost all semblance of a balanced relationship with each other, and whose
view of the sturdy plunderlust of our ancestors is that our inheritance
of it, combined with the technology of bulldozers, is aiming us straight
toward a world in which our own structures and destructions may be all
there is to see, our own fumes and sewage all there is to smell, our own
voices and machines all there is to hear. Some people of this stamp are
quietly pessimistic; others actively commit themselves to fight. Some
who fight see present human growth and the growth of human demands on
resources as the stark unavoidable realities they are, and seek mainly
to guide them and mitigate their effects. Others stiffen their necks
against development to meet those demands, staunch enemies to all
reservoirs and other forms of compromise, stubborn if highminded
nay-sayers against the tide, consistent even when illogical.

Taken as a whole, however, these people with a sense of the imponderable
human value of natural ways and natural things may constitute the most
powerful support available for thoughtful planning and conservation. In
a precipitate and voracious society plunging on into its future, they
look back and seek to retain the best of what has always been, for
conservationism at least in this sense is conservatism too. Upon their
increase in numbers, in broad understanding and in political
forcefulness, upon the arrival of their basic values at a point of
publicly accepted respectability at least equal to that presently
enjoyed by time-hallowed exploitation and the profit motive, hope for a
decent future must heavily depend.

All of these ways of looking at man's problematical relationship with
the crust of the planet he inhabits, plus a number of others, are at
work within the minds of conscious people in this region and in the
great cauldron of its politics. Here they mingle with State and regional
and local loyalties and private self-interests into a fine American soup
of eagerness and reluctance, faith and apprehension, awareness and
befuddlement, chicanery and square dealing, altruism and frank greed,