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everything else, I thought that there ought to be a place in the Times for a column dealing with conservation, conservation news, which I felt we were neglecting totally in our news columns, although I was in the process of trying to beef it up in the editorial field. We'd always been pretty good in the Times on conservation, but on a spasmodic basis, and only on certain particular areas, like the Adirondacks.

I persuaded Lester Markel, who was very dubious and almost thought it was kind of a joke, to allow me to run a column on environment news or conservation news in the Sunday Times, once a month only. He did it almost to humor me, I think, because he certainly wasn't very interested in it. But he did at least agree, and he put it into the travel section of the Times. He said maybe that had some relevance.

In any case, I had gotten an okay, so once a month entirely apart from my regular duties, which were, by this time, 1951, I was on the editorial board, writing editorials for the Times. Once a month for the next ten years I produced a column dealing with conservation, what we would today call environmental matters. And I think, although, goodness, I couldn't take an oath on this, but I think it was the first environment column to appear in a major American newspaper. And it dealt entirely with what I considered conservation news. Sometimes just tidbits, sometimes longer pieces on some area that was being protected or that needed to be protected, and it was much more on land and natural history and wildlife protection than it was on some of the other aspects of what we call environmental protection now, like clean water. Also very strong against giant dams, which I also wrote about editorially -- the construction of these huge dams was going on at a great rate in the '50s -- because of their very adverse environmental effects.