Is mankind's engagement with the issues of environmental quality and resource management likely to fade? Has concern over these matters been largely the expression of a minority who have managed to dramatize polluted lakes, endangered species, oil spills, and stripped land? Skeptics see a backlash against recent prohibitions of environmentally damaging activities, particularly as energy shortages disrupt our pace and style of living. Besides, they say, the attention span of most people on such issues is short. Earth Day and the movements that ensued will, they say, turn out to have been just another fad.

We think this notion is dead wrong. The impact of environmental issues on the day-to-day affairs of the world will not slacken in the years ahead; indeed, all the evidence points to the increasing severity and complexity of resource constraints and to the need for environmental protection. These issues will turn up in business, town councils, state legislatures, regional planning boards, and in a broad range of national government agencies. They will infiltrate our schools and colleges as well as our churches and other institutions in which our values are reviewed. They will not be limited to the United States; increasingly, we believe, they will intrude on the lives of the peoples of the developing countries and the affairs of international organizations and multinational corporations.

Man has always lived in tension with his environment; he has always exploited nature and he has always polluted. The critical elements in the world today are that mankind has become so ubiquitous and so powerful in satisfying its appetite for resources. Nor is man usually careful in assessing the long-run consequences of his actions. But this does not mean a linear and inevitable trend toward self-destruction. Man also makes conscious choices—if he can figure out what they are. He can improve conditions. It is no accident that London today has twice as many sunny days in winter as in the 1930s or that Pittsburgh no longer has to keep its streetlights on at midday. But such conscious and deliberate changes are not easy or cheap.

The world has been ill-prepared to deal with many of the swiftly emerging events that have raised hard questions about the way we misuse our resources and neglect the environment in which we live and work. Besides the most recent and dramatic case—the energy crisis—we are also being forced to confront water shortages, the growing pollution of our ocean basins, disposal of enormous amounts of waste, depletion of natural resources, loss of ecologically productive natural areas such as forests and wetlands, and the need to find suitable places for new industrial plants, roads, and other structures of modern life. Some of these problems loom larger in the industrial countries, others in the developing countries, and many in all countries.

Several major factors limit society's ability to deal early and effectively with these issues:

• our knowledge of the economic, social, biological, physical, esthetic, or cultural consequences of man-wrought changes of the environment is often imprecise, inadequate, or erroneous.

• someone stands to gain or lose from most environmental decisions, and our knowledge about how to resolve the resulting conflicts is often inadequate.

• even when we know generally what we want, we often lack the managerial skills to make it happen.

These constraints are the target of the Foundation's work in the resources and environment field. In tackling them we try to help generate and disseminate the knowledge that societies need to deal with current problems and thereby lay a basis for the next generation to deal with issues that we can only dimly perceive. We try to approach them with the international perspective that the underlying problems demand and we give special attention to the slow cumulative process by which important knowledge grows.