The Citizen's Part in Conservation

AMERICANS are tremendously interested in conservation. State legislators have said that they receive more mail about conservation legislation than about all other subjects combined. Laws have been put on the statute books as a result of citizen participation in conservation planning. The result is a more advanced body of conservation legislation in America than anywhere else in the world. The greatest progress made in conservation in our generation has been growing recognition of its basic relation to human welfare-the broadening of horizons and the scope of operations and goals of the organizations working in the conservation vineyard. No longer, as a rule, can we afford to compartmentalize our thinking or action. We cannot expect thus to win, as a people, in the battle of life on this planet. No longer can we attain our ends by organizing for special purposes that represent a preferential interest conflicting with other preferential interests in the same general field. The National Audubon Society, for example, endeavors to make people aware of the steady stream of life around them; of its beauty, richness, and complexity; and, above all, aware that they are part of this exciting pageant of events; that human life is affected in all sorts of ways by every plant that forms a seed, by every prairie dog that makes a burrow, by every dragonfly that emerges from its nymphal case; that man is, in fact, part and parcel of the biological picture, and can no more escape therefrom than from birth or death. It is encouraging that we are getting down to fundamentals. Soil and water conservation is basic if our over-all

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