New plains frontier was politically organized and opened and settled with little, if any, heed to its natural features of climate and land cover. - John M. Gaus

You who are apprentices in the field of public administration share with me who am older the task of trying to understand the new conditions in our field. Within a single generation, two world wars and a major depression have engulfed mankind. Within the past few months, the successful trial of the atomic bomb has opened the minds of the thoughtful to new possibilities, threats and coercions, and the defeat of Germany and Japan has abruptly presented the problems of peacemaking and reconstruction to war- weary masses of people. They seek release from their tragedies, deprivations and tensions, often in ways that defeat efforts to understand and attack the problems that confront them. To make progress in such a time, we must recruit widely and work as a guild, young and old together, to achieve a co-operative and cumulative effort whether in academic or governmental posts.

The study of public administration must include its ecology. "Ecology," states the Webster Dictionary, "is the mutual relations, collectively, between organisms and their environment." J. W. Bews points out that "the word itself is derived from the Greek oikos a house or home, the same root word as occurs in economy and economics. Economics is a subject with which ecology has much in common, but ecology is much wider. It deals with all the inter-relationships of living organisms and their environment." Some social scientists have been returning to the use of the term, chiefly employed by the biologist and botanist, especially under the stimulus of studies of anthropologists, sociologists, and pioneers who defy easy classification, such as the late Sir Patrick Geddes in Britain.

The task will be more fruitfully performed if the citizen, and his agents in public offices, understand the ecology of government.