Cheryl Knott Malone
Associate Professor, School of Information Resources & Library Science
University of Arizona

Stewart Lee Udall, Secretary of the Interior under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, in 1963 published The Quiet Crisis, a book that provided a history of the American conservation movement, discussed the degradation of the nation's natural resources, and called for more responsible stewardship in the future. It became a New York Times bestseller widely reviewed in the popular press and in scientific journals. Twenty-five years later Udall updated the first edition with eight additional chapters. In his introduction to the new edition, Udall expressed regret and embarrassment for asserting in the first edition's penultimate chapter his belief in the power of science and technology as positive forces for resource conservation. That chapter, titled "Conservation and the Future," relied on seven reports published in 1962 by the Committee on Natural Resources of the National Research Council-National Academy of Sciences at President Kennedy's request and on a massive independent study produced by the Resources for the Future think tank. In an effort to begin to understand the network of print that influenced environmental policy of the 1960s, this paper evaluates the ways in which Udall interpreted and used the information in these publications to write about what he called "the myth of scientific supremacy."

Cheryl Knott Malone is an associate professor in the School of Information Resources and Library Science at the University of Arizona. Her most recent research focuses on the print culture of the environmental movement in the U.S. with an emphasis on influential books published during the twentieth century.
--