OCR Text |
Show A PROGRAM TO STRENGTHEN THE SCIENTIFIC FOUNDATION IN NATURAL RESOURCES. House Document No. 706, Eighty- First Congress, Second Session, November, 1950. Foreword Early in the first session of the Eighty- first Congress ( March, 1949), the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs of the United States Senate, in cooperation with the House Committee on Public Lands, conducted hearings in search of an improved policy for the conservation, development, and administration of the natural resources of the United States. Various Federal agencies participated in the hearings and submitted reports on the problems in their respective departments and bureaus. Following these hearings, the committee chairmen requested that Dr. J. R. Mahoney, senior specialist in natural resources of the Legislative Reference Service of the Library of Congress, undertake, in collaboration with the executive agencies, a reappraisal of natural resource policies and programs and bring before the committees proposals for needed changes and improvements. The scientific program in natural resources was selected as the first field for examination. After a series of conferences with the executive agencies, two programs were formulated and embodied in bills introduced into Congress: An Accelerated Program for Surveying and Mapping of the United States, Its Territories and Possessions and A Comprehensive and Adequate Water Resources Basic- Data Program. These are designed to strengthen the scientific foundation in natural resources, generally recognized to be inadequate and lagging behind the rapidly accelerating projects for the control and use of natural resources. Since materials on various parts of these programs are not generally available, a supplement to the committee hearings was approved for publication as a House document, to contain special reports by the agencies, explanations of the programs, and introductory statements by the chairmen of the committees. In order to permit an effective display of charts and maps, the Joint Committee on Printing approved a special form and size for the report. 11 |