The Fight For Conservation by Gifford Pinchot
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6 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. It is now the fourth greatest industry in
the United States. All forms of building industries will suffer with it,
and the occupants of houses, offices, and stores must pay the added
cost. Mining will become vastly more expensive; and with the rise in the
cost of mining there must follow a corresponding rise in the price of
coal, iron, and other minerals. The railways, which have as yet failed
entirely to develop a satisfactory substitute for the wooden tie (and
must, in the opinion of their best engineers, continue to fail), will be
profoundly affected, and the cost of transportation will suffer a
corresponding increase. Water power for lighting, manufacturing, and
transportation, and the movement of freight and passengers by inland
waterways, will be affected still more directly than the steam railways.
The cultivation of the soil, with or without irrigation, will be
hampered by the increased cost of agricultural tools, fencing, and the
wood needed for other purposes about the farm. Irrigated agriculture
will suffer most of all, for the destruction of the forests means the
loss of the waters as surely as night follows day. With the rise in the
cost of producing food, the cost of food itself will rise. Commerce in
general will necessarily be affected by the difficulties of the primary
industries upon which it depends. In a word, when the forests fail, the
daily life of the average citizen will inevitably feel the pinch on
every side. And the forests have already begun to fail, as the direct
result of the suicidal policy of forest destruction which the people of
the United States have allowed themselves to pursue.
It is true that about twenty per cent, of the less valuable timber land
in the United States remains in the possession of the people in the
National Forests, and that it is being cared for and conserved to supply
the needs of the present and to mitigate the suffering of the near
future. But it needs no argument to prove that this comparatively small
area will be insufficient to meet the demand which is now exhausting an
area four times as great, or to prevent the suffering I have described.
Measures of greater vigor are imperatively required.
The conception that water is, on the whole, the most important natural
resource has gained firm hold in the irrigated West, and is making rapid
progress in the humid East. Water, not land, is the primary value in the
Western country, and its conservation and use to irrigate land is the
first condition of prosperity. The use of our streams for irrigation and
for domestic and manufacturing uses is comparatively well developed.
Their use for power is less developed, while their use for
transportation has only begun. The conservation of the inland waterways
of the United States for these great purposes constitutes, perhaps, the
largest single task which now confronts the Nation. The maintenance and
increase of agriculture, the supply of clear water for domestic and
manufacturing uses, the development of electrical power, transportation,
and lighting, and the creation of a system of inland transportation by
water whereby to regulate freight-rates by rail and to move the bulkier
commodities cheaply from place to place, is a task upon the successful
accomplishment of which the future of the Nation depends in a peculiar
degree. We are accustomed, and rightly accustomed, to take pride in the
vigorous and healthful growth of the United States, and in its vast
promise for the future. Yet we are making no preparation to realize what
we so easily foresee and glibly predict. The vast possibilities of our
great future will become realities only if we make ourselves, in a
sense, responsible for that future. The planned and orderly development
and conservation of our natural resources is the first duty of the
United States. It is the only form of insurance that will certainly
protect us against the disasters that lack of foresight has in the past
repeatedly brought down on nations since passed away.
CHAPTER II
HOME-BUILDING FOR THE NATION
The most valuable citizen of this or any other country is the man who
owns the land from which he makes his living. No other man has such a
stake in the country. No other man lends such steadiness and stability
to our national life. Therefore no other question concerns us more
intimately than the question of homes. Permanent homes for ourselves,
our children, and our Nation--this is a central problem. The policy of
national irrigation is of value to the United States in very many ways,
but the greatest of all is this, that national irrigation multiplies the
men who own the land from which they make their living. The old saying,
"Who ever heard of a man shouldering his gun to fight for his boarding
house?" reflects this great truth, that no man is so ready to defend his
country, not only with arms, but with his vote and his contribution to
public opinion, as the man with a permanent stake in it, as the man who
owns the land from which he makes his living.
Our country began as a nation of farmers. During the periods that gave
it its character, when our independence was won and when our Union was
preserved, we were preeminently a nation of farmers. We can not, and we
ought not, to continue exclusively, or even chiefly, an agricultural
country, because one man can raise food enough for many. But the farmer
who owns his land is still the backbone of this Nation; and one of the
things we want most is more of him. The man on the farm is valuable to
the Nation, like any other citizen, just in proportion to his
intelligence, character, ability, and patriotism; but, unlike other
citizens, also in proportion to his attachment to the soil. That is the
principal spring of his steadiness, his sanity, his simplicity and
directness, and many of his other desirable qualities. He is the first
of home-makers.
The nation that will lead the world will be a Nation of Homes. The
object of the great Conservation movement is just this, to make our
country a permanent and prosperous home for ourselves and for our
children, and for our children's children, and it is a task that is
worth the best thought and effort of any and all of us.
To achieve this or any other great result, straight thinking and strong
action are necessary, and the straight thinking comes first. To make
this country what we need to have it, we must think clearly and directly
about our problems, and above all we must understand what the real
problems are. The great things are few and simple, but they are too
often hidden by false issues, and conventional, unreal thinking. The
easiest way to hide a real issue always has been, and always will be, to
replace it with a false one.
The first thing we need in this country, as President Roosevelt so well
set forth in a great message which told what he had been trying to do
for the American people, is equality of opportunity for every citizen.
No man should have less, and no man ought to ask for any more. Equality
of opportunity is the real object of our laws and institutions. Our
institutions and our laws are not valuable in themselves. They are
valuable only because they secure equality of opportunity for happiness
and welfare to our citizens. An institution or a law is a means, not an
end, a means to be used for the public good, to be modified for the
public good, and to be interpreted for the public good. One of the great
reasons why President Roosevelt's administration was of such enormous
value to the plain American was that he understood what St. Paul meant
when he said: "The letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life." To
follow blindly the letter of the law, or the form of an institution,
without intelligent regard both for its spirit and for the public
welfare, is very nearly as dangerous as to disregard the law altogether.
What we need is the use of the law for the public good, and the
construction of it for the public welfare.
It goes without saying that the law is supreme and must be obeyed.
Civilization rests on obedience to law. But the law is not absolute. It
requires to be construed. Rigid construction of the law works, and must
work, in the vast majority of cases, for the benefit of the men who can
hire the best lawyers and who have the sources of influence in lawmaking
at their command. Strict construction necessarily favors the great
interests as against the people, and in the long run can not do
otherwise. Wise execution of the law must consider what the law ought
to accomplish for the general good. The great oppressive trusts exist
because of subservient lawmakers and adroit legal constructions. Here is
the central stronghold of the money power in the everlasting conflict of
the few to grab, and the many to keep or win the rights they were born
with. Legal technicalities seldom help the people. The people, not the
law, should have the benefit of every doubt.
Equality of opportunity, a square deal for every man, the protection of
the citizen against the great concentrations of capital, the intelligent
use of laws and institutions for the public good, and the conservation
of our natural resources, not for the trusts, but for the people; these
are real issues and real problems. Upon such things as these the
perpetuity of this country as a nation of homes really depends. We are
coming to see that the simple things are the things to work for. More
than that, we are coming to see that the plain American citizen is the
man to work for. The imagination is staggered by the magnitude of the
prize for which we work. If we succeed, there will exist upon this
continent a sane, strong people, living through the centuries in a land
subdued and controlled for the service of the people, its rightful
masters, owned by the many and not by the few. If we fail, the great
interests, increasing their control of our natural resources, will
thereby control the country more and more, and the rights of the people
will fade into the privileges of concentrated wealth.
There could be no better illustration of the eager, rapid, unwearied
absorption by capital of the rights which belong to all the people than
the water-power trust, perhaps not yet formed but in process of
formation. This statement is true, but not unchallenged. We are met at
every turn by the indignant denial of the water-power interests. They
tell us that there is no community of interest among them, and yet they
appear by their paid attorneys, year after year, at irrigation and other
congresses, asking for help to remove the few remaining obstacles to
their perpetual and complete absorption of the remaining water-powers.
They tell us it has no significance that there is hardly a bank in some
sections of the country that is not an agency for water-power capital,
or that the General Electric Company interests are acquiring great
groups of water-powers in various parts of the United States, and
dominating the power market in the region of each group. And whoever
dominates power, dominates all industry.
Have you ever seen a few drops of oil scattered on the water spreading
until they formed a continuous film, which put an end at once to all
agitation of the surface? The time for us to agitate this question is
now, before the separate circles of centralized control spread into the
uniform, unbroken, Nation-wide covering of a single gigantic trust.
There will be little chance for mere agitation after that. No man at all
familiar with the situation can doubt that the time for effective
protest is very short. If we do not use it to protect ourselves now, we
may he very sure that the trust will give hereafter small consideration
to the welfare of the average citizen when in conflict with its own.
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