Century of Progress

Century of Progress is a consulting business to develop scientific, technical, historical, and economic content to describe progress made in the past century in the United States on natural resource conservation and environmental quality.

Projecting forward, Century of Progress will work from the progress documented over the past century to develop plans for public and private actions to meet the needs for future resource conservation and environmental quality, global and national.

The first project of Century of Progress will be a conference commemorating the 100th anniversary of President Theodore Roosevelt’s national conservation conference of May 1908 (known as the “Governors Conference”). The photograph of the Governors and the President in front of The White House is at the top of the "Conference" page here on this site.  

The 100^th anniversary conference can be structured to commemorate not only the May 1908 Governors Conference but also the February 1909 report of the National Conservation Commission which TR had setup after it was recommended by the Governors Conference.

The objectives of the conference would be as follows:

1. Commemorate the events of 1908/09 by presenting the topics that were addressed by the 1908/09 conference, commission meetings, and reports.  This can be done in relation to the background in 1908/09 – the background that led to those topics and involved the speakers, researchers, industrialists and advocates associated with those topics.
2. Evaluate the progress toward conservation and environmental protection since 1908, in general and on selected topics of the 1908 conference.
3. Update the topics of 1908 with ones that we would now add, and assess both the needs and the prospects, going forward, for selected old (1908) and new (post 1908) topics, and in general. Take note of the context of the different (in some ways), but, perhaps, even more pressing needs of our time.