RESOURCES for Summary of Volume I of a Report to the President by THE PRESIDENT'S MATERIALS JUNE 1952 The full report of the P. M. P. C. consists of five volumes as le Volume I. Foundations for Growth and Security. II. The Outlook for Key Commodities. III. The Outlook for Energy Sources. V. Selected Reports to the Commission. This Summary is of Volume I only. It consists of a general out of the Materials Problem, followed by subsections on: a) Dom Resources; b) Energy Needs; c) Technology of Materials; d) M rials and Security; e) Foreign Resources; f) Preparing for Fu Policy. In these subsections most, but not all, of the Commiss recommendations will be found. Throughout the Summary c references are made to Volume I which should in all cases be const as the official document of the Commission. This Summary is vided for quick reference and is accordingly indexed. THE QUESTION, "Has the United States of America the material meas to sustain its civilization?" would never have occurred to the men who brought this nation into greatness as the twentieth century dawned. But with the twentieth century now half gone by, the question presses and the honest answers are not glib. The United States, once criticized as the creator of a crassly materialistic order of things, is today throwing its might into the task of keeping alive the spirit of Man, and helping beat back from the frontiers of the free world everywhere the threats of force and of a new Dark Age which rise from the Communist nations. In defeating this barbarian violence, moral values will count most, but an ample materials base must support them. Indeed, the interdependence of moral and material values has never been so completely demonstrated as today, when all the world has seen the narrowness of its escape from the now dead Nazi tyranny, and has yet to know the breadth by which it will escape the live Communist one-both materialistic threats aimed to destroy moral and spiritual man. The use of materials to destroy or to preserve is the very choice over which the world struggle today rages. The full report of the President's Materials Policy Commission, Resources for Freedom, has as its central task an examination of the adequacy of materials to meet the needs of the free world in the years ahead. Even a casual assessment of these years shows many causes for concern. In area after area we encounter soaring demands, shrinking resources, the consequent pressure toward rising real costs, the risk of wartime shortages, the strong possibility of an arrest or decline in the standard of living we cherish and hope to share. As a Nation, we are threatened, but not alert. The Materials Problem now demands that we give new and deep consideration to the fundamental upon which all employment, all daily activity, eventually rests: the contents of the earth and its physical environment. None of us in the United States, whether in civilian or military life, is easily accustomed to the idea that raw materials can be a problem. Indeed, America's problem today is precisely the reverse of the problem to which all our tradition has accustomed us. A hundred years ago resources seemed limitless and the struggle upward from meager conditions of life was the struggle to create the means and methods of getting these materials into use. In this struggle we have by now succeeded all too well: so efficiently have we built our high output factories and opened the lines of distribution to our remotest consumers that our sources are faltering under the constantly increasing strain of demand. As a Nation, we have always been more interested in sawmills than seedlings; we have put much more engineering thought into the layout of factories to cut up metals than into mining processes to produce them. We think about raw materials last, not first. THE CONVERGING FORCES Today, throughout the industrial world, but centering inevitably in the heavily industrialized United States, the resulting Materials Problem bears down with considerable severity. The nature of the problem can perhaps be successfully over-simplified by saying that the consumption of almost all materials is expanding at compound rates and is thus pressing harder and harder against resources which, whatever else they may be doing, are not similarly expanding. This Materials Problem is thus not the sort of "shortage" problem, local and transient, which in the past has found its solution in price changes which have brought supply and demand back into balance. The terms of the Materials Problem we face today are larger and more pervasive.7 Powerful historical streams have converged to make the problem uniquely intense today. First, there has been a profound shift in the basic materials position of the United States-a worsening relationship between our requirements and our means of satisfying them. Second, other high-consuming nations, primarily in Western Europe, are in difficulties which stem from the serious depletion of their own domestic resources coupled with the weakening or severing of their former colonial ties. Third, many resource-rich but less-developed nations, especially of former colonial status, now focus on industrialization rather than materials export. Fourth, there lingers from the Great Depression a worldwide fear of the possible collapse of markets, which dampens the willingness of private investors and resource-rich countries to develop new free world resources. Finally, a great schism divides the world between the totalitarian and democratic nations, disrupting normal trade patterns and making necessary costly measures of armed preparedness. THE TASK OF THE COMMISSION The task assigned the President's Materials Policy Commission was to explore the Materials Problem and suggest ways by which private actions and public policies in the years ahead can help avert or overcome materials shortages which might threaten the long-run economic growth and security of the United States and other free nations. This undertaking implies a survey of a multitude of raw materials and the resources from which they come. It implies consideration of the productive forces of technology and energy by which iron ore becomes an automobile, or air an explosive-and the obstacles that tend to hold these forces back. It implies thought directed at political and economic instruments-by no means confined to tariffs and taxes—which bear upon materials in domestic and world trade. Such a study must necessarily focus on the needs and problems of the United States, but it would be meaningless if it left out of consideration the needs and problems of other free nations. The Nation's economic life calls for a vast and delicate balancing of multitudinous resources against continually changing needs and demands. The American pioneers had first to destroy trees so that they could plant corn. In a more complex world, minerals, fuels, forest and agricultural products, the land on which these grow and the water that nourishes the land must be variously dug, burned, felled, cropped, and constrained in inter-actions that reach further than we are aware of when we induce them. We grow and we destroy. We concentrate and we disperse. We nurture and we abandon. A chemist makes a crucial discovery, and the resource base for the production of women's stockings shifts from mulberry leaves in Japan to bituminous coal underlying West Virginia. A war occurs, and the material for tires and teething rings no longer comes from Hevea brasiliensis in Malaya but from Texas petroleum, natural gas, or ethyl alcohol made from molasses. But these colossal interplays between resources more often take place in less dramatic ways; more often entirely within our own domestic economy and so slowly that we may be unaware of their significance for a decade. Energy for farming operations, once supplied almost entirely by draft animals, now comes chiefly from tractors, stationary gasoline engines, and electric motors. This considerable fact carries with it another, even wider ranging: in this process of change, the petroleum industry releases for other use no less than 60 million acres that would be necessary to feed draft horses to do the same work. (The nitrogen cycle is upset in the same process, and the loss of manure fertilizer must be compensated.) Per contra, farm land can be made to return the compliment by growing sugar to supply |