often, making sense of a number of presentations is left to the individual or the presentations are summarized at the end of the conference (when attendance and intellectual carrying capacity have dwindled significantly). Presenting...
moreoften, making sense of a number of presentations is left to the individual or the presentations are summarized at the end of the conference (when attendance and intellectual carrying capacity have dwindled significantly). Presenting overviews initially and roundups following the sessions worked well. By attending a broadly based conference such as the SRM over the years, I have had the opportunity to see the flow and meandering of research activity dealing primarily with natural resource management. A conference of this size and scope is a collection of hundreds of individual papers--thousands over the last decade--representing a significant amount of the knowledge generated within many fields related to natural resources. When the symposia are seen as a whole over time (independent of geographical and sponsor influences for a given symposium), subtle yet characteristic themes can be generally inferred. These themes are particularly evident, perhaps because of the biennial nature of the gathering. Attending SRM every two years has provided me a perspective of something quite familiar yet certainly evolving and often reflecting the fashionable or at least topical themes of the day. The last symposium, held in 1992 in Madison, Wisconsin, seemed to be characterized by biological and physical resource issues such as ecological and wildlife resource policy, management, and planning, to name a few. In contrast, the fifth SRM clearly reflected a shift toward human-based resource management issues, albeit using much of the ecological jargon currently in vogue. It remains to be seen whether the pronounced emphasis on the Recreation Opportunity Spectrum and its successors, experience-based management practices and the like, suggests a significant long-term shift in resource management directions or simply current funding for research. What is encouraging, however, is that whatever the trend the overall quality of the work presented at these symposia remains consistently high. After three full days of concurrent sessions, the close of the symposium featured a plenary address given by Charles R.Jordan, director of the Bureau of Parks and Recreation, City of Portland.Jordan spoke on "Multicultural Diversity and Land Management: A Difficult Challenge."Jordan has a reputation for delivering an inspirational message, and he did. Speaking about the necessity of providing recreational opportunities for a diverse population, he called for the inclusion of all people in the decisionmaking process, something hard not to agree with and perhaps a fitting finale to a conference featuring "partnerships" in its title. Two years ago, in my review of the fourth SRM for this journal I noted that these symposia offer a rare opportunity for academics and professionals from many disciplines to exchange information and more importantly to share world views. Most conferences are specialized because specialization of information is often equated with current knowledge and depth. The SRM, I believe, is unique in that, rather than being broad in content and shallow in substance, it is the very broadness of content that makes this conference relevant and worthwhile. The SRM manages to excel as a conference because it is directed at understanding one of the broadest issues possible-the relationship between society and natural resources. No single discipline could possibly cover so much ground. Rather than being devoted to extending knowledge in a clearly defined and bounded subset of the whole, the SRM has by choice or accident come the closest to a multidisciplinary gathering that I am aware of. The multiplicity of expertise and diversity of viewpoints that participants bring to the SRM has in turn led to connections being formed among people from a variety of disciplines. For this reason alone, although there are many reasons, attending the next SRM should be considered by anyone reading this journal. For details on obtaining a book of the fifth symposium abstracts for $15, call Jennifer Pate at (303) 4917729. The next SRM will be held in 1996 at Pennsylvania State University in College Station, Pennsylvania. Nathan Perkins is an Assistant Professor in the School of Landscape Architecture at the University of Guelph and director of the Landscape Research Group at Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1, Canada.