112 The Environmental Debate
those which have a much lower requirement. The
opportunities are considerable. Education, health
services, sanitary services, good parks and play-
grounds, orchestras, effective local government,
a clean countryside, all have rather small materi-
als requirements. I have elsewhere argued [in The
Affluent Society] that the present tendency of our
economy is to discriminate sharply against such
production. A variety of forces, among them
the massed pressures of modern merchandising,
have forced an inordinate concentration of our
consumption on what may loosely be termed
consumer hardware. This distortion has been
underwritten by economic attitudes which have
made but slight accommodation to the transition
of our world from one of privation to one of opu-
lence. A rationalization of our present consump-
tion patterns—a rationalization which would
more accurately reflect free and unmanaged con-
sumer choice—might also be an important step in
materials conservation.Source: John Kenneth Galbraith, “How Much Should a
Country Consume?” in Henry Jarrett, ed., Perspectives
on Conservation: Essays on America’s Natural Resources
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1958), pp. 98-99.and nonrenewable resources, is to say that there
is no materials problem. It is to say that, except
for some activities that by definition are noncrit-
ical, the conservationists are not much needed.
But if conservation is an issue, then we have
no honest and logical course but to measure the
means for restraining use against the means for
insuring a continuing sufficiency of supply and
taking the appropriate action. There is no justi-
fication for ruling consumption levels out of the
calculation.
What would be the practical consequences
of this calculation—taken honestly and without
the frequent contemporary preoccupation not
with solution but with plausible escape—I do
not pretend to say.... I am impressed by the
opportunities for resource substitution and by
the contribution of technology in facilitating it.
But the problem here is less one of theory than
of technical calculation and projection.
[I]t would seem to me that any concern for
materials use should be general. It should have as
its aim the shifting of consumption patterns from
those which have a high materials requirement to
Document 96: David Brower Demands Support for the Wilderness Act (1959)
David Brower, who was part of a group that reinvigorated the Sierra Club and moved it to the forefront of
environmental activism, raised our sensitivity to the importance of wilderness for the health of our civilization.
After leaving the Sierra Club in 1969, Brower founded Friends of the Earth and the Earth Island Institure.
The Wilderness Act was a great victory for the preservationist school of environmentalists, but by the time
it was passed in 1964, the original text of the act had been changed in order to delay prohibitions on mining in
wilderness areas. In the final version, the proposed wilderness council, which was to publish public reports on
the status of the wilderness system, was also eliminated.The most important source of the vital organic
forms constituting the chain of life is the gene bank
that exists in wilderness, where the life force has
gone on since the beginning uninterrupted by
man and his technology. For this reason alone, it is
important that the remnants of wilderness which
we still have on our public lands be preserved by
the best methods our form of government can
find. The proposed National Wilderness Preserva-
tion System (now before the Congress) provides an
excellent route to that goal, and especially dynamic
leadership in the Congress and the administra-
tion will be required during the next decade to
achieve the goal of wilderness preservation which