388 



FORESTRY AND IRRIGATION 



coal began to be mined, and in large 

 sections of the country, natural gas sup- 

 planted coal. In the use of all these — 

 wood, coal, and gas — the same spirit of 

 criminal wastefulness prevailed, and 

 now the evil results are becoming mani- 

 fest. Indeed, to thinking, seeing men, 

 these results have been apparent for 

 years. Who among those who read this 

 ever use wood as fuel, excepting it be 

 while on a camping or vacation trip .' 

 But turn your mind's eye back a few 

 years; think of the time when you, 

 reader, lived at home with father and 

 mother, perhaps on the old farm. What 

 was the fuel then? Wood, most likely 

 burned in the old-fashioned fireplace, in 

 the form of great logs. Later came 

 coal, and the grates, coal stoves, and 

 "base burners."' Then, for those of you 

 who live west of the Alleghanies and 

 east of the Mississippi, came the gas. 

 Now, you have gone back to coal again. 

 You haven't wood any longer; you 

 wasted the gas, of which there was 

 enough, had it been properly used, to 

 last five hundred years, and now you 

 are burning coal. Two of your candles 

 are gone, and you are burning the third 

 at both ends. 



The days when our rivers and water- 

 ways were crowded with a vast and 

 ceaselessly busy traffic are well within 

 the memory of living men. Shrunken 

 as it is to a small fraction of its former 

 magnitude, the inland water traffic of 

 the United States is still magnificent. 

 But American heedlessness, American 

 wastefulness American carelessness 

 has brought this water traffic to its 

 present pitiable state — pitiable as com- 

 pared to its former immensity. Hill- 

 sides ravished with ax and saw and fire, 

 laid bare to the storms and the floods, 

 have vomited their soil into the rivers, 

 there to form bars and shallows that 

 turn former water-highways into suc- 

 cessions of pools. Low water, in the 

 Ohio and the Mississippi, the Wabash 

 and the Kanawha, and all the other riv- 

 ers of the Middle West — to say nothing 

 • of those farther east or farther west — 

 lasts now from May to December ; the 

 rest of the year the rivers are raging 

 floods, that each year devour more and 



more of the land and take a larger and 

 still larger toll of human life and man- 

 made wealth. And it is all our fault ; 

 it is all because we Americans have not 

 seen, and will not see, the folly of the 

 course we are following. 



Men of science tell us that the coal in 

 our mines is approaching exhaustion, 

 and that a very few hundred years will 

 see the end of the supply. Wasteful 

 methods of mining, wastefulness in con- 

 sumption, go on unchecked — absolutely 

 unheeded. Who cares? If we lose, in 

 power production, ninety per cent, of 

 our coal, why worry? There will be 

 plenty for us. and "after us, the 

 deluge." Let those who follow us warm 

 themselves by the rays of the sun ; let 

 our descendants invent sun motors for 

 transportation and power purposes ; we 

 shall not be here to sufifer, and if the 

 children of our children are made mis- 

 erable, we shall not know it. There is 

 your American spirit — a spirit as far 

 from altruism as is the North Pole from 

 the South. 



But now this orgy of destruction, this 

 saturnalia of extravagance, is to be 

 ended. The whisperings of a new Na- 

 tional policy have been running through 

 the land for years, and at last these 

 whisperings are growing more distinct. 

 A few years ago they began to take 

 definite form — to become coherent and 

 audible, and then we set about preserv- 

 insf, as best we could, the forests that 

 remained to us. Then they grew loud- 

 er, and the Inland Waterways Commis- 

 sion was born. The fuller note was 

 heard in the Conference of the Govern- 

 ors ; and now comes the deep-hmged 

 challenge to the Spirit of Unthrift in 

 the appointment of the Commission for 

 the Conservation of Natural Resources. 

 A new commandment has been given 

 unto the American people, and it is 

 this : "Thou shalt not waste the lands 

 nor the resources that the Lord has 



given thee." 



fc' i^ 5« 



"United We Stand" 



AMONG the most noticeable features 

 of the White House Conference 

 was the idea, often repeated, that no 



