These questions, offered rhetorically, have both a contemporary ring and unquestioned relevance for matters of ecological policy. In fact they were first published some 80 years ago by McGee, an advisor to Theodore Roosevelt who was once described as “the scientific brains” of the early conservation movement in the United States. In both their timelessness and their construction, these questions underscore the tension between law and ecology in our political economy.

The continuing relevance of these questions, of course, testifies to the limits to fundamental change that are inherent in all complex social organisms, whether capitalistic or socialistic or some other variant of large-scale human organization. Indeed, it is as difficult to imagine the once tightly organized Soviet political economy without its profligate corruption and inefficiencies as it is to conceive U.S. history without the tensions outlined in this book.

But all social systems possess unique histories and therefore uniquely characteristic sets of choices and constraints, themselves interrelated.