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Show Area BLM Official Attends Seminar in California Frank C. Shields, District Manager of the Monticello . District, Bureau of Land Ma- nagement, recently spent two " weeks in Berkeley, Calif., attending at-tending an executive seminar. The seminar was presented " by the Civil Service Commis-; Commis-; sion. There were thirty-eight :; participants from twenty gov ernment agencies. The topic of the seminar was "Management of Natural Natur-al Resources" and the theme was "The Environment" on a nationwide scope. A number num-ber of speakers provided interesting in-teresting lectures with many different viewpoints on environmental en-vironmental consideratons. Speakers included Congressman Con-gressman Thomas Foley from the state of Washington, Harold Ha-rold Gilliam of the San Fran- -cisco Chronicle and 11 Eric Hoffer, longshoreman turned philosopher, of Berkeley. Viewpoints of the various speakers differed a great deal on certain aspects such as how serious is man's polu-tion polu-tion of the earth. All the speakers agreed, however, that man will have to improve im-prove on his use of resources. In other words, all agreed there is a problem with pollution pol-lution of our environment today, to-day, but there was less agreement agree-ment as to how serious the problem is as well as solutions solu-tions to the problem. Certain statistics are interesting, in-teresting, Mr. Shields said. For example, the United States uses approximately 50 to 60 per cent of the world's resources, yet has only 5 to 6 per cent of the world's population. pop-ulation. The United States' use of electrical power doubles dou-bles each 10 years, while the population is doubling at a slower rate. Mr. Shields says the seminar sem-inar was successful because it is easier to understand now why we have environmental environ-mental problems, and he feels there is hope for the future providing people are willing to work together in solving them. "We need to give private industry a chance to develop the technology necessary ne-cessary to curtail air, water, and land pollution," Mr. Shields said. "But we must continue to focus attention on the environment or we'll concentrate on other things such as the gross national product, big city problems, etc., and forget about the importance im-portance of a clean world," he concluded. |