Preface

The Energy Policy Project was initiated by the Ford Foundation in 1971 to explore alternative national energy policies. The papers in this book are part of a series of studies commissioned by the Project, and they are presented here as a timely and carefully prepared contribution to today's public discussion about oil spills. It is our hope that each of these special reports will stimulate further thinking and questioning in the specific areas that it addresses. In the interest of timeliness, we are releasing the special reports as they are completed rather than delaying their release until the final report of the Energy Policy Project. However, each special report deals with only a part of the energy puzzle; our final report, to be published later in 1974, will attempt to integrate these parts into a comprehensible whole, setting forth the nation's energy policy options as we see them.

The papers in this book, like the others in the series, have been reviewed by scholars and experts in the field not otherwise associated with the Project in order to be sure that differing points of view were considered. With each book in the series, we offer reviewers the opportunity of having their comments published in an appendix, but in this case no reviewer chose to do so.

The papers in Oil Spills And The Marine Environment are the authors' reports to the Ford Foundation's Energy Policy Project, and neither the Foundation, its Energy Policy Project, nor the Project's Advisory Board necessarily endorse their contents or conclusions.

S. David Freeman
Director
Energy Policy Project