Conservationists must begin to address some tough, new policy questions
Excerpt
FOR soil and water conservationists this is a time of ferment. Throughout the conservation community old perceptions are being questioned and new policy directions debated. How important is the erosion problem? How much should we spend to deal with it, and how should we spend it? Do soil loss tolerance (T) values tell us what we need to know, either to advise farmers or to make policy? New concepts, or old concepts in new dress, have entered the debate—targeting and cross-compliance—and already they are having an impact on policy.
Out of all this will likely come new perceptions of the erosion problem in the United States and how we as a society should respond to it. Here, I sketch the outlines of these new perceptions and discuss the conditions leading the nation toward them. I pretend to no final answers. My aim is to argue that as conservationists we must begin to address some new questions.
The information base
The current ferment owes much to studies of erosion-soil productivity relationships using erosion data collected by the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) in the 1977 National Resources Inventory (NRI).
Earlier studies of these relationships yielded valuable …
Footnotes
Pierre Crosson is a senior fellow at Resources for the Future, 1755 Massachusetts Avenue. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036. This article is based on a paper presented at a workshop on soil conservation policy in Rochester. Minnesota. January 25, 1984, sponsored by the University of Minnesota.
- Copyright 1984 by the Soil and Water Conservation Society
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