WATER CONSERVATION 91 



the time of water surfeit. 2 Again, while rivers become torrential and 

 destructive, submerging valuable farming lands and taking a toll of 

 property and lives, yet, because the spring waters were allowed to pass 

 quickly away unstored in soils or reservoirs, these same streams at other 

 periods are found to be so restricted in volume and so checkered in 

 course by accumulated drift that the pathways of natural transporta- 

 tion are more or less effectively closed. 



It is clearly within reason to say, then, that no other form of material 

 waste can be measured against the stupendous aggregate resulting from 

 the failure to conserve and control and utilize the available supplies of 

 water. It is easy to understate the importance of water conservation, 

 while overstatement would almost seem beyond our powers. Water- 

 power development and the conservation of coal deposits, soil conserva- 

 tion and the reclamation of arid and semi-arid lands by irrigation or 

 by " dry-land" methods, reforestation and flood control, reclamation 

 of overflowed lands and maintenance of inland waterways, stream 

 pollution and fisheries — these several objects, each of great importance 

 by itself, are all, in large measure, aspects of the one comprehensive 

 problem. Each of these admitted obligations has a direct relation to 

 our duty of storing the available water supply in soils or in reservoirs, 

 of regulating its flow from source to sea, and of utilizing it to the 

 maximum at all stages, for power and navigation, for farms and forestry, 

 for sanitation and fisheries. Stated in this way, with all its manifold 

 bearings, the general problem may assume an exaggerated appearance 

 of complexity. Surely water conservation is broad in its relations, and 

 surely its complete realization will not be attained in a day or in a 

 generation, and yet the stages of the solution of the entire problem may 

 be just such matter-of-fact steps as we are repeatedly taking in the 

 ordinary course of practical progress. 



Fisheries have been named just above as related to water conserva- 

 tion. The relation might be obvious and yet insignificant : this may 

 be called the prevailing impression. Fresh-water fisheries have been 

 practically entirely disregarded in connection with the conservation of 

 water; nevertheless, it can, I believe, be made apparent, first, that the 

 possibilities of food-supply from fresh-water fisheries in public waters 

 will be realized only as water conservation becomes a reality, and, 

 second, that the proper development of fish-raising as a principal or 

 incidental occupation may, in a very practical and simple way, promote 

 the general object of water conservation. 



2 Wall, Judson G., "Flood Prevention and Its Eelation to the Nation's Food 

 Supply," Science, N. S., XL., No. 1019, pp. 44-47, July 10, 1914; signed 

 as chairman of the committee on soil erosion of the Social and Economic Section 

 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A strong and 

 suggestive paper, but without mention of fisheries. 



