The recent record may have been considerably

worse than that, especially in the United States where

excesses in production, coupled with outright waste,

have brought not only the reduction of mineral deposits,

but the disappearance of large tracts of forestland,

the loss of vast amounts of fertile top soil through

erosion, and the virtual extinction or threatened

extinction of entire species. Frugal practices might

have lessened the strains of production on the land,

but the process by which the natural resources of the

United States were exploited was not characterized by

a great concern for frugality. In many cases to subdue

was to destroy.17


 17
 17Rapid exploitation of resources in a "wasteful"
manner may have represented the least-cost method of
production at the time during which wasteful methods
were practiced most widely. Their very abundance served
to reduce the cost of acquisition to a level below that
of their maintenance. Therefore, seemingly wasteful
practices, it sometimes is said, may have served to
increase production over what it might have been other-
wise, thereby increasing saving, the amount invested,
and subsequent levels of income. Under those conditions,
waste in a physical sense would not necessarily constitute
waste in an economic sense, but rather a most rational
approach given conditions of plenty. The idea might
hold true so long as what was wasted was not irrevocably
lost to future use, as in the case of soil permanently
ruined or washed into the sea, or mines permanently
closed with what would have constituted valuable resources
still inside, and if such losses (properly discounted)
did not offer a greater barrier to subsequent production
than the initial gain afforded. But, still left un-
accounted in this formulation is the ravaging of the
aesthetic qualities of our environment. The same sort
of argument might make abandonment of inner cities, in
favor of building anew in some other location, a desirable
and rational alternative.