Page 68 - The Drucker Lectures

6

Politics and Economics

of the Environment

1971

am a very old environmentalist. Way back around 1947 or
I1948, when I taught at a small women’s college in Vermont
[Bennington], I offered what was perhaps the first course in the
environment. I did not get a single student then for such a course;
nor could I find any reading matter. It seemed a very strange and
wildly reactionary notion at that time that we have to make sure
of not destroying too much of the natural inheritance of man.
Having been concerned with ecology for a long time, I should
be exceedingly pleased by the sudden rush of interest in the en-
vironment—to the point where one cannot open any magazine
without finding an article on ecology in it. And in a way I am,
of course, grateful. It is very nice to see that one was not entirely
wrong a long time back.
But I am also rather perturbed. I see an enormous amount of
busyness and an enormous amount of headlines and an enormous
amount of rhetoric, but the only thing I don’t see are results.
Maybe I demand too much. But I do not see much progress. I
see a lot of money being spent. But I have long ago learned that
one does not equate the size of a budget with accomplishment.
Money is no substitute for thinking; indeed, to substitute money
for thinking always does damage. I see a lot of bills being passed,

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