One more thing, how does one organize such an institution? Well, the
worst thing you can do, of course, is to make a government department, and
so how could you devolve this responsibility in such a way as to avoid the
atrophying effects of government institutions? It might very well be that
a very, very small government corps would be created, but the whole
responsibility for collecting the data, monitoring the data, interpreting the
data, and making the data accessible would be devolved to universities.
I mean, universities, as we know, have all sorts of serious problems, but
they're not of the same dimension of menace to human health or well-being or
survival that the government institutions represent. And so perhaps then
the idea would be a National Environmental Lab getting this charge, and the
charge, of course, would be the development of such information as to allow
the management of these United States in such a way as to enhance the
inhabitants.

 I forgot one terribly important thing, God bless my soul, it is an issue
which I have raised before, that is, what constitutes a cost and benefit
cannot in fact be predetermined, it cannot be attributed. Attribution of
values to people is bigotry, whether you say Scotsmen are stupid or Scotsmen
are mean or Scotsmen don't wear anything under their kilts. In the absence
of either eliciting this information from a Scotsman, or directly observing
it, it can't be said. However, you can elicit from people what their values
are and it would seem to me, one of the most important things of this national
ecological entity would be not only to do an ethnographic history so you
could causally show who the people are, where they are, and what they're
doing, but more, that you would actually elicit from them, as the Gallup Poll
does in a very hamhanded way now. You continually elicit from them their
attitudes, their issues; and from their attitudes and issues you then infer
their values. I think there's a better way of getting values than to ask
people whether they believe in promiscuity (people don't believe in
promiscuity, but many people need to practice it). So I think it's much,
much better to elicit people's values by asking their position on issues
and then from the position on issues, determine their values.

 The institution cannot work until such time as not only you have the
latest and best information on all the regions in the United States; on
the whole United States, but you also have the United States divided into
social constituencies which would seem to be coterminous with physiographic
and/or other natural regions. With this information you are able to show
that people do have characteristic institutions and do have characteristic
values, which then allow you to use the value system of the people who are
about to be impacted by any proposal, and determine a different sum of costs
and benefits for any one single proposal as a function of the discrete value
systems of these different people. Now this, of course, has a possibility
for an informed citizenry, which certainly does not exist now. Our
educational system denies people understanding of the geology, the
physiography, the hydrology, the soils, the plants, and the animals, the
social history or natural history of the place they live on. This is not
believed to be essential for the education of an intelligent person, and
so this information does not repose.

 In my good and proper world, the information would, in fact, repose.
There would be a possibility of an informed citizenry, and you can see,