



Produced by Garrett Alley, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team.




THE FIGHT FOR CONSERVATION

By

GIFFORD PINCHOT



1910




CONTENTS

Introduction

     I. Prosperity
    II. Home-building for the Nation
   III. Better Times on the Farm
    IV. Principles of Conservation
     V. Waterways
    VI. Business
   VII. The Moral Issue
  VIII. Public Spirit
    IX. The Children
     X. An Equal Chance
    XI. The New Patriotism
   XII. The Present Battle
  Index




INTRODUCTION


The following discussion of the conservation problem is not a systematic
treatise upon the subject. Some of the matter has been published
previously in magazines, and some is condensed and rearranged from
addresses made before conservation conventions and other organizations
within the past two years.

While not arranged chronologically, yet the articles here grouped may
serve to show the rapid, virile evolution of the campaign for
conservation of the nation's resources.

I am indebted to the courtesy of the editors of _The World's Work, The
Outlook_, and of _American Industries_ for the use of matter first
contributed to these magazines.




THE FIGHT FOR CONSERVATION




CHAPTER I


PROSPERITY

The most prosperous nation of to-day is the United States. Our
unexampled wealth and well-being are directly due to the superb natural
resources of our country, and to the use which has been made of them by
our citizens, both in the present and in the past. We are prosperous
because our forefathers bequeathed to us a land of marvellous resources
still unexhausted. Shall we conserve those resources, and in our turn
transmit them, still unexhausted, to our descendants? Unless we do,
those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery,
degradation, and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day.
When the natural resources of any nation become exhausted, disaster and
decay in every department of national life follow as a matter of course.
Therefore the conservation of natural resources is the basis, and the
only permanent basis, of national success. There are other conditions,
but this one lies at the foundation.

Perhaps the most striking characteristic of the American people is their
superb practical optimism; that marvellous hopefulness which keeps the
individual efficiently at work. This hopefulness of the American is,
however, as short-sighted as it is intense. As a rule, it does not look
ahead beyond the next decade or score of years, and fails wholly to
reckon with the real future of the Nation. I do not think I have often
heard a forecast of the growth of our population that extended beyond a
total of two hundred millions, and that only as a distant and shadowy
goal. The point of view which this fact illustrates is neither true nor
far-sighted. We shall reach a population of two hundred millions in the
very near future, as time is counted in the lives of nations, and there
is nothing more certain than that this country of ours will some day
support double or triple or five times that number of prosperous people
if only we can bring ourselves so to handle our natural resources in the
present as not to lay an embargo on the prosperous growth of the future.

We, the American people, have come into the possession of nearly four
million square miles of the richest portion of the earth. It is ours to
use and conserve for ourselves and our descendants, or to destroy. The
fundamental question which confronts us is, What shall we do with it?

That question cannot be answered without first considering the condition
of our natural resources and what is being done with them to-day. As a
people, we have been in the habit of declaring certain of our resources
to be inexhaustible. To no other resource more frequently than coal has
this stupidly false adjective been applied. Yet our coal supplies are so
far from being inexhaustible that if the increasing rate of consumption
shown by the figures of the last seventy-five years continues to
prevail, our supplies of anthracite coal will last but fifty years and
of bituminous coal less than two hundred years. From the point of view
of national life, this means the exhaustion of one of the most important
factors in our civilization within the immediate future. Not a few coal
fields have already been exhausted, as in portions of Iowa and Missouri.
Yet, in the face of these known facts, we continue to treat our coal as
though there could never be an end of it. The established coal-mining
practice at the present date does not take out more than one-half the
coal, leaving the less easily mined or lower grade material to be made
permanently inaccessible by the caving in of the abandoned workings.
The loss to the Nation from this form of waste is prodigious and
inexcusable.

The waste in use is not less appalling. But five per cent, of the
potential power residing in the coal actually mined is saved and used.
For example, only about five per cent, of the power of the one hundred
and fifty million tons annually burned on the railways of the United
States is actually used in traction; ninety-five per cent, is expended
unproductively or is lost. In the best incandescent electric lighting
plants but one-fifth of one per cent, of the potential value of the coal
is converted into light.

Many oil and gas fields, as in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and the
Mississippi Valley, have already failed, yet vast amounts of gas
continue to be poured into the air and great quantities of oil into the
streams. Cases are known in which great volumes of oil were
systematically burned in order to get rid of it.

The prodigal squandering of our mineral fuels proceeds unchecked in the
face of the fact that such resources as these, once used or wasted, can
never be replaced. If waste like this were not chiefly thoughtless, it
might well be characterized as the deliberate destruction of the
Nation's future.

Many fields of iron ore have already been exhausted, and in still more,
as in the coal mines, only the higher grades have been taken from the
mines, leaving the least valuable beds to be exploited at increased cost
or not at all. Similar waste in the case of other minerals is less
serious only because they are less indispensable to our civilization
than coal and iron. Mention should be made of the annual loss of
millions of dollars worth of by-products from coke, blast, and other
furnaces now thrown into the air, often not merely without benefit but
to the serious injury of the community. In other countries these
by-products are saved and used.

We are in the habit of speaking of the solid earth and the eternal hills
as though they, at least, were free from the vicissitudes of time and
certain to furnish perpetual support for prosperous human life. This
conclusion is as false as the term "inexhaustible" applied to other
natural resources. The waste of soil is among the most dangerous of all
wastes now in progress in the United States. In 1896, Professor Shaler,
than whom no one has spoken with greater authority on this subject,
estimated that in the upland regions of the states south of Pennsylvania
three thousand square miles of soil had been destroyed as the result of
forest denudation, and that destruction was then proceeding at the rate
of one hundred square miles of fertile soil per year. No seeing man can
travel through the United States without being struck with the enormous
and unnecessary loss of fertility by easily preventable soil wash. The
soil so lost, as in the case of many other wastes, becomes itself a
source of damage and expense, and must be removed from the channels of
our navigable streams at an enormous annual cost. The Mississippi River
alone is estimated to transport yearly four hundred million tons of
sediment, or about twice the amount of material to be excavated from the
Panama Canal. This material is the most fertile portion of our richest
fields, transformed from a blessing to a curse by unrestricted erosion.

The destruction of forage plants by overgrazing has resulted, in the
opinion of men most capable of judging, in reducing the grazing value of
the public lands by one-half. This enormous loss of forage, serious
though it be in itself, is not the only result of wrong methods of
pasturage. The destruction of forage plants is accompanied by loss of
surface soil through erosion; by forest destruction; by corresponding
deterioration in the water supply; and by a serious decrease in the
quality and weight of animals grown on overgrazed lands. These sources
of loss from failure to conserve the range are felt to-day. They are
accompanied by the certainty of a future loss not less important, for
range lands once badly overgrazed can be restored to their former value
but slowly or not at all. The obvious and certain remedy is for the
Government to hold and control the public range until it can pass into
the hands of settlers who will make their homes upon it. As methods of
agriculture improve and new dry-land crops are introduced, vast areas
once considered unavailable for cultivation are being made into
prosperous homes; and this-movement has only begun.

The single object of the public land system of the United States, as
President Roosevelt repeatedly declared, is the making and maintenance
of prosperous homes. That object cannot be achieved unless such of the
public lands as are suitable for settlement are conserved for the actual
home-maker. Such lands should pass from the possession of the Government
directly and only into the hands of the settler who lives on the land.
Of all forms of conservation there is none more important than that of
holding the public lands for the actual home-maker.

It is a notorious fact that the public land laws have been deflected
from their beneficent original purpose of home-making by lax
administration, short-sighted departmental decisions, and the growth of
an unhealthy public sentiment in portions of the West. Great areas of
the public domain have passed into the hands, not of the home-maker, but
of large individual or corporate owners whose object is always the
making of profit and seldom the making of homes. It is sometimes urged
that enlightened self-interest will lead the men who have acquired large
holdings of public lands to put them to their most productive use, and
it is said with truth that this best use is the tillage of small areas
by small owners. Unfortunately, the facts and this theory disagree. Even
the most cursory examination of large holdings throughout the West will
refute the contention that the intelligent self-interest of large owners
results promptly and directly in the making of homes. Few passions of
the human mind are stronger than land hunger, and the large holder
clings to his land until circumstances make it actually impossible for
him to hold it any longer. Large holdings result in sheep or cattle
ranges, in huge ranches, in great areas held for speculative rise in
price, and not in homes. Unless the American homestead system of small
free-holders is to be so replaced by a foreign system of tenantry, there
are few things of more importance to the West than to see to it that the
public lands pass directly into the hands of the actual settler instead
of into the hands of the man who, if he can, will force the settler to
pay him the unearned profit of the land speculator, or will hold him in
economic and political dependence as a tenant. If we are to have homes
on the public lands, they must be conserved for the men who make homes.

The lowest estimate reached by the Forest Service of the timber now
standing in the United States is 1,400 billion feet, board measure; the
highest, 2,500 billion. The present annual consumption is approximately
100 billion feet, while the annual growth is but a third of the
consumption, or from 30 to 40 billion feet. If we accept the larger
estimate of the standing timber, 2,500 billion feet, and the larger
estimate of the annual growth, 40 billion feet, and apply the present
rate of consumption, the result shows a probable duration of our
supplies of timber of little more than a single generation.

Estimates of this kind are almost inevitably misleading. For example,
it is certain that the rate of consumption of timber will increase
enormously in the future, as it has in the past, so long as supplies
remain to draw upon. Exact knowledge of many other factors is needed
before closely accurate results can be obtained. The figures cited are,
however, sufficiently reliable to make it certain that the United States
has already crossed the verge of a timber famine so severe that its
blighting effects will be felt in every household in the land. The rise
in the price of lumber which marked the opening of the present century
is the beginning of a vastly greater and more rapid rise which is to
come. We must necessarily begin to suffer from the scarcity of timber
long before our supplies are completely exhausted.

It is well to remember that there is no foreign source from which we can
draw cheap and abundant supplies of timber to meet a demand per capita
so large as to be without parallel in the world, and that the suffering
which will result from the progressive failure of our timber has been
but faintly foreshadowed by temporary scarcities of coal.

What will happen when the forests fail? In the first place, the business
of lumbering will disappear