104 The Environmental Debate
it seems preferable to any opposite, which to us
implies stagnation and decay. Where there may
be any unbreakable upper limits to the continu-
ing growth of our economy we do not pretend to
know, but it must be part of our task to examine
such apparent limits as present themselves.... [W]e believe in private enterprise as the
most efficacious way of performing industrial
tasks in the United States. With this belief, a belief
in the spur of the profit motive and what is called
“the price system” obviously goes hand in hand.
The over-all objective of a national materials
policy for the United States should be to insure
an adequate and dependable flow of materials
at the lowest cost consistent with national secu-
rity and with the welfare of friendly nations.
As a Nation we have long lived and pros-
pered mightily without serious concern for our
material resources. Our sensational progress in
production and consumption has been attribut-
able not only to the freedom of our institutions
and the enterprise of our people, but also to our
spendthrift use of our rich heritage of natural
resources. We have become the supreme advo-
cates of the idea that man and his labor are the
most valuable of all, and that inanimate materi-
als are to be used as fully as possible to give men
the greatest amount of return for the effort they
put forth.
This still is and should be our goal, but the
time has clearly passed when we can afford the
luxury of viewing our resources as unlimited
A hundred years ago, resources seemed limit-
less and the struggle upward from meager condi-
tions of life was the struggle to create the means
and methods of getting these materials into use.
In this struggle we have succeeded so well that
today, in thinking of expansion programs, full
employment, new plants, or the design of a radi-
cal new turbine blade, too many of us blankly for-
get to look back to the mine, the land, the forest:
the sources upon which we absolutely depend. So
well have we built our high-output factories, so
efficiently have we opened the lines of distribu-
tion to our remotest consumers that our sources
are weakening under the constantly increasing
strain of demand. As a Nation, we have always
been more interested in sawmills than seedlings.
We have put much more engineering thought
into the layout of factories to cut up metals than
into mining processes to produce them. We think
about materials resources last, not first.
The actions we as a Nation take or fail to
take in meeting the materials problems in the
period immediately ahead will affect profoundly
the state of affairs many years hence. Upon our
own generation lies the responsibility for pass-
ing on to the next generation the prospects of
continued well-being.
[The members of the President’s Materi-
als Policy Commission] share the belief of the
American people in the principle of Growth.
Granting that we cannot find any absolute reason
for this belief we admit that to our Western minds
DOCUMENT 89: Harry Truman’s Materials Policy Commission on
Economic Growth and Resource Policy (1952)In recommending economic growth as the highest priority in the making of U.S. resource policy, despite
the recognition of limitations on the availability of resources, President Harry Truman’s Materials Policy
Commission revealed an unwillingness to upset the status quo. The report provoked the indignation of both
conservationists and economists [see Documents 90 and 95]. One of the outgrowths of this consternation
was the formation in 1955 of Resources for the Future, a nonprofit think tank that studies environmental and
natural resource economics.^4