Marion is one of those ambiguous names that makes you wonder at first contact. And this Marion only heightens the effect, pulling you into a swirl of curiosity about his land analysis. From: Appreciation: Marion Clawson’s Long View of the Land (Resource).
Clawson was among the first generation of RFF(Resources for the Future) research fellows, joining the staff in 1955, just a few years after the first Ford Foundation grant to the organization. He set a standard—and perhaps a record—for the study of agriculture, park and forest use, outdoor recreation, and land development that spanned seventy years. His interest in the land seems only natural, considering that he was born in Nevada in 1905 and raised on ranches and in small towns in that state.
Over his long career, Clawson was able to observe how we Americans have sparred and shifted in our emphasis and influence over the nature and purpose of national forests, national parks, and wildlife refuges. Methods he developed to measure the demand for and value of outdoor recreation have formed the basis of several hundred studies throughout the world. A doer as well as a thinker, he directed studies of irrigation development out West for the Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Agricultural Economics in the 1930s and ’40s and then ran the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management in the late 1940s and early ’50s before coming to RFF.
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