Reuben G. Gustavson retired last month as the founding President and Executive Director of Resources for the Future (RFF). During the some six years of his administration Dr. Gustavson faced the full range of problems that come with getting a new organization under way: clarifying its purposes, attracting key staff people, establishing policies, launching the program, and establishing its place on the national scene.
To this challenge "Dr. Gus" brought imagination, the wisdom more than forty years' experience in science and education, an out-giving warmth of personality, and an incredible knack for making the right decision on matters of the first importance. Or, more accurately, helping others to make the right decisions as to fundamental values and directions of growth.
He has led us to regard devotion to objective research as a means of arriving at what is truly in the public interest, to search out the problems which underlie more immediately vexing difficulties, to with a sense of comradeship and accomplishment with scholars and teachers in the universities, to insist on high levels of integrity and competence. Thus to state the aims and established basic policies of RFF is to realize again that they are but expressions of Dr. Gustavson's own character.
RFF, happily, will not lose Dr. Gus, since he will continue as member of its Board of Directors. He expects to remain active in affairs; indeed, I have maneuvered shamelessly on numerous occasion to get him committed to this. He and Mrs. Gustavson have moved Tucson, where he is now professor of chemistry at the University of Arizona. Thus, he is "retiring" to the work he probably loves best—teaching science. Arizona gains a great teacher while we in RFF miss day-to-day contact with an altogether wonderful friend. His beneficial impact on us and in the field of natural resources to which RFF is devoting its effort will continue and will last.
—Joseph L. Fisher
A version of this article appeared in print in the September 1959 issue of Resources magazine.
