The resource economics of Grover Pease Osborne : Author of America's first textbook on resource economics

Grover Pease Osborne's Principles of Economics: The Satisfaction of Human Wants in so Far as Their Satisfaction Depends on Material Resources (1893) was the first American textbook on resource economics available in the early years of our nation's initial conservation movement from 1890 to 1920. Osborne's remained the only relevant textbook for nearly a decade. Osborne intended his Principles of Economics, I assume, as a general economics textbook. However, his book addressed more thoroughly, and with more acute insight, than other economics textbooks the problem of whether the American economic system will always make wise use of its natural resources. Noting the book's uniqueness, Bernhard E. Fernow, a renowned forester and leader in America's first conservation movement, remarked: "The economics of natural resources have received only incidental and scanty consideration by English writers. The only publication known to the writer which discusses the subject in a broad manner is by G. P. Osborne, 'Principles of Economics'" (Fernow 1902: 415). Fernow knew the relevant economics literature. Richard T. Ely recalled: "In the year 1896 Dr. B. E. Fernow gave a course of lectures on the economic aspects of forestry under the auspices of the Department of Political Economy in the University of Wisconsin, said to have been the first course of forestry lectures in the United States given within a department of political economy. In these lectures he advocated conservation measures and these lectures were published in 1902 under the title, 'Economics of Forestry'" (Ely, Hess, Leith, and Carver 1917: 17). When Fernow's lectures were published as the first American textbook on forest economics, Ely edited the book. Ely knew the relevant economics literature even better than Fernow. He knew that economists such as Henry C. Carey, Henry George, Simon Newcomb, and himself, along with philosophical anarchism such as Joshua King Ingalls and Henry David Thoreau, had written on various aspects of natural resource use and conservation. Ely was in the position to have corrected Fernow's plaudit to Osborne's Principles of Economics if overstated. Though a member of the American Economic Association, Osborne (1847-1932) was an obscure economist. More accurately, I should indicate he was not a professional economist, but instead a Baptist clergyman and editor in Cincinnati. Obviously, Ely did not consider Fernow's plaudit to Osborne undeserved. Had Osborne titled his book something like Resource Economics and Policy, his audience and market in 1893 would have been limited to Ely, Fernow, and very few others. America's first conservation movement began more than a century ago without an economic rationale. The conservation movement of 1890-1920 was led by natural scientists and engineers who were concerned about the physical waste of natural resources. They didn't look to economists for aid and would have gotten little or none if they had. Even the Michigan Department of Conservation's Land Economic Survey, started in 1922 after the conservation movement ended, was predominantly a physical inventory of land resources, although containing valuable economic elements. There were no economic land classification systems until Cornell University's system in the 1930s became the first that can be truly regarded as economic land classification. Gerald Alonzo Smith indicates that prior to about 1910, the height of the first conservation movement: "Most economists did not (and do not) think that natural resources were unique factors of production but that they were similar to other factors and did not warrant special treatment in their analysis" (Smith 1979: 115). At Cornell, George F. Warren's research, writings, and intellectual development took him steadily further in the direction of agricultural economics. In 1918, a breakthrough came at the annual meeting of the American Farm Management Association held in Baltimore: Warren stated that he like many others previously had considered farm management and agricultural economics to be separate fields with little in common, but now he concluded the two fields were inextricably related and should not exist separately. …