ABSTRACT

Conservation is regarded more as a subject of the natural sciences or the domain of the idealist and the politician than as a vital and theoretically interesting subject of economics. Economics is concerned with the relations between human wants and the means to satisfy them—especially with the limitations of means. Conservation that would try to hold agricultural productivity of a virgin soil with distant markets at the original level or try to restore it to that level may be wasteful in terms of other natural resources, labor, and equipment. The economic and social issues in conservation are different in private and in public decisions. Competitiveness through costs is implicitly recognized in a large part of the literature on conservation. Such competitiveness is the major reason why conservation can be accomplished through decrease of present use in favor of future use, that is, through "waiting."