Conservation Caretaker

As his first official act of the new decade, President Nixon signed into law the Environmental Policy Act of 1969, which made protection of U.S. natural resources a matter of national policy. The bill also established a three-man Council on Environmental Quality empowered to review all federal activities that affect the quality of life and make reports directly to the President. Last week President Nixon named the first chairman of the new council: Russell E. Train, Under Secretary of the Interior, who firmly believes that "the people of this country want a cleaner environment, and they are ready to pay for it."

Train's appointment had been expected by many Administration watchers. They detected a growing coolness between Train and his boss, Interior Secretary Walter J. Hickel, who was said to resent reports that Train was actually running the department. Chairman Train's fellow members will be Geophysicist Gordon J. F. MacDonald, 40, vice chancellor for research and graduate affairs at the University of California (Santa Barbara), and Robert Cahn, 52, a Pulitzer-prizewinning reporter for the Christian Science Monitor who has specialized in conservation stories. All three nominees must be approved by the Senate, but little opposition is likely.

Second Career. Train, 49, is a Princeton graduate ('41) who started his career as a tax lawyer, served as a Treasury Department official, and was appointed by President Eisenhower in 1957 as a judge of the U.S. Tax Court. The judge soon became a conservationist. After a hunting trip to Africa, he started a foundation to train Africans in wildlife management, became so engrossed in environmental issues that in 1965 he resigned his judgeship and started a second career as president of the nonprofit Conservation Foundation. During the 1968 presidential campaign he headed Candidate Nixon's Task Force on the Environment. Last January, Train's appointment as No. 2 man at Interior was hailed by conservationists, who then feared (but no longer) that Secretary Walter J. Hickel was unsympathetic to their cause. Now Train, whom Hickel often bypassed on policy matters, may be in a position to bypass Hickel.

Like its prototype, the Council of Economic Advisers, Train's council could become a key architect of national policy. But that depends on President Nixon, who was lukewarm to the council when Congress proposed it last summer and has not endorsed a pending bill that would give it ample funds and a staff to carry out its impressive paper responsibilities. Even so, Nixon has lately seized environment as a major political issue, and Congress is unlikely to let him neglect it. As Senator Henry M. Jackson, principal author of the Environmental Policy Act, put it last week: "The council was not designed to be an academic exercise."

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