Environmental quality, through what some have described as a new Conservation Movement, has captured public awareness in the past three to four years. Public policy decisions affecting the environment are receiving increased attention, and economic information is a crucial input to such policy. We, both as citizens and as professionals, must look ahead and prepare to grapple with environmental problems for years to come.

More accurate prediction of future demand (or needs) for land for outdoor recreational activities would significantly improve land use planning. Unfortunately, prediction of demand (or projected use) is difficult. Most standard predicting measures have little or questionable relevance to outdoor recreation. Straightline projections of past outdoor activities are of limited use as technology, income, leisure time, mobility, and habits are changing so fast that it is doubtful if the past may be used to predict the future. In fact, all methods of predicting (or projecting) future demand (or needs) on the basis of past trends are inoperative in periods when there is rapid change in all the components influencing the trend, as well as in life styles. Surveys and questionnaires are of some use, but their value is limited by the propensity of respondents to give answers which they think are expected and the fact that they cannot appraise their future attitude towards activities with which they are now unfamiliar.

The beginning of the last third of the twentieth century can generally be characterized by a broad public awareness of the increasing deterioration of the natural environment, especially of the quality of air and water resources. The degradation of the quality of the natural resources has thus emerged as a public policy issue. The Federal and state governments responded to this public concern through the creation of various policy programs and administrative agencies. The environmental protection agency of the federal government is an example of a nationwide effort to establish policies related to the quality of the environmental resources. Many states established the legal framework within which administrative agencies could execute policies and ordinances related to the quality of environmental resources. Legislation recently passed by the Maine Legislature will be cited as examples. The site selection law specifies that the Environmental Improvement Commission must issue or deny a license for any commercial or industrial development which requires a land area of 20 or more acres; for structures in excess of a ground area of 60,000 square feet, for drilling or excavating natural resources (pits requiring an area of more than 5 acres). The recent denial of the application of Maine Clean Fuels, Inc., to construct a $200 million oil refinery on Sears Island, off the coast, attracted national attention. The vast majority of the project applications processed, however, are small in value and in size though their total impact on the environmental resource of the state are potential.

The major portion of this paper is about railroads and the old saying, “That's a hell-of-a-way to run a railroad,” still obtains.

The subject of “farmer bargaining” is studied by econmists from the viewpoint of economics. Scant attention is given to the sociological aspects of bargaining even though bargaining is usually defined as “negotiation over the terms of trade on a contract.” With this in mind, the Departments of Resource Economics and Sociology at the University of Vermont initiated a study to determine both the economic and social objectives of farmer bargaining in the market place. Special attention was given to aspiration levels and attitudes toward bargaining structures and institutions of Vermont farmers.

The focus of this paper is on the system of assembling food products from manufacturers and processors and distributing these products through warehouses to retail stores and eventually to the consuming public. More specifically, the paper attempts to (l) assess the problems in and potential for improving productivity within this system and (2) suggest needed research efforts to achieve productivity improvements.

The Federal Trade Commission has recently charged that four corporations, Kellogg, General Foods, General Mills and Quaker Oats, have maintained monopoly power in the ready-to-eat cereal industry for over 30 years. The case against the cereal industry has set off a widespread wave of public reaction. Anti-business groups are anxious to prove that after all these years, America is not really dominated by big business interests after all. Consumerists are clamoring for the head of another conglomerate monster who has, so they say, been filling society's collective stomach with food products which are as expensive as they are non-nutritive. Business advocates are plaintively crying that it is high time that Americans recognized that big business is necessary both socially and economically, and that our national posture toward big business should be changed in order to protect it from periodic public witch hunting which is rooted in a system of values that became antiquated with the horse and buggy.

Rapid changes are taking place in the commercial apple industry. Recent years have seen the development of controlled atmosphere and Tectrol storage, changes in the type of rootstock grown and changes in the techniques of packing. Furthermore, buyers of fresh apples are much more conscious of quality and demand a more uniform, higher quality pack. Certain problems relating to storage, packing, distribution, processing, and point of sale representation of grower interests have been of concern to the industry. Many of these problems are appearing due to the reflection of these industry changes in the New England commercial apple industry.

We see our large manufacturing industries getting bigger and bigger and our economic theory getting weaker and weaker. When a corporation controls more wealth than most countries in the world, it makes us uncomfortable. When some companies are large enough to spend millions of dollars exploring the Alaskan oil fields, while other companies struggle to maintain their business, inequalities, imagined or real, are present, which go against our “common-sense nature.”

Housing needs in the U.S. since World War II have experienced tremendous expansion and this expansion has been accompanied by a myriad of problems—transportation lags, urban blight and sprawl, decay of central cities, poverty, pollution, racial discrimination, rural slums, and the like.

The single most important source of financial support for public education today is the local property tax. It accounted for an estimated 52 percent of all revenues received by U. S. public schools in the 1970–71 school year. Despite this fact, the property tax is increasingly under attack. Local school districts are asked to finance the increasing demands placed on their school systems from a tax whose base is sharply eroded by exemptions. To make matters worse, the property tax may be inelastic with respect to income. That is, the rate of increase in market value of taxable property may be less than the rate of increase in income. In addition, some opponents claim that the property tax is regressive; that is, it places a greater burden on the poor than on the rich because the poor pay a greater proportion of their income in property taxes. They argue that real property is not a completely reliable indicator of wealth or ability to pay. The property tax is thus unacceptable to those who believe that schools should be financed by those best able to pay. In addition, the property tax is unacceptable to those who believe that schools should be financed by those who receive the benefits. However, since society in general benefits from education, allocation of benefits and costs is a difficult task.

For the past three years I have participated in an interesting experiment conducted by the U.S. Government. The program was experimental in that it was one of the few, perhaps the only, program operated by the Federal Government where a direct federal-local relationship exists. States have no direct authority in the program; the Governor is given only veto power over the federal funds entering the state.

The Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics began deliberating upon rural development in early 1970. At that time the President's Commission on Rural Development issued its report, A New Life for the Country, and the Congress was considering various bills in support of better life for non-metropolitan residents. Two circumstances drew our attention.

Empirical estimates of some of the external diseconomies from polluting activities have posed difficult measurement problems for economists. Yet it is important to have some notion of the probable magnitude of the costs of pollution if society is to rationally and efficiently allocate resources to pollution abatement. Otherwise, one would not know whether too many or too few resources were being used for such purposes in terms of marginal optimality.

There has been increasing concern over the past decade about the lack of economic activity in a number of major cities, many intermediate and small sized cities, and a significant number of rural areas within various regions of the United States. This concern about the depressed conditions in these urban and rural areas, relative to the nation, has attracted country-wide attention.