FORESTRY AND THE WATER PROBLEM. 475 



FORESTRY AND THE WATER PROBLEM. 



J. O. BARRETT, SEC'Y MINN. FORESTRY ASSOCIATION. 



Without water there is no life. Without water adequate to natural 

 needs, life lingers in sickly and unfruitful conditions. The de- 

 creased flow of water now-a-days has aroused a wide-spread alarm, 

 and people begin to inquire with a view to remedy the difficulty: 

 What is the reason that we do not have our usual flow of water in lake 

 and river? The opinion prevails that our precipitation is decreas- 

 ing, intensifying the alarm. This opinion may be a mistake. Ac- 

 cording to meterological records, the average precipitation, taking 

 in a series of years, is about the same during the period of its usual 

 descent in Minnesota, giving us 25 inches, water enough for all 

 practical purposes if judiciously conserved. 



In our attempts, feeble at the best, to find the cause of an apparent 

 unbalance somewhere in our water 83^stem, we should modestly 

 consider our inability by anj-^ interference to change cosmic laws. 

 What belongs in agency to sun and moon and stars, for aught we 

 know, to continental environments, oceans, electric forces inlaid in 

 frictional matter, cj'clonic winds, polar temperatures affecting all 

 climates, are things of power beyond human control; things that 

 govern meterological phenomena despite all our assumptions of 

 mastery. Summer and winter, sunshine and storin, water synthesis 

 and water transformations into living organisms have always 

 been and always will be; hence, there is no room for unfaith In 

 chances for us to live and let live if we conform our energies to the 

 divine order of nature. 



But a serious responsibility is ours as to the uses we make of our 

 natural blessings. Nature repairs our inroads upon her orders as 

 best she can, but this by no means pardons our guilt. As most of 

 our lakes are drying up and rivers diminishing, our seasons more 

 fortuitous, our drouths generally intensifying in rigor to the peril 

 of our crops, it is certain that, while we change no natural laws, we 

 have by our self-aggrandizing arts changed the channels and dis- 

 tributive direction of precipitation and its flow. 



The problem, then, is a simple one. To say, as some would-be 

 wise gentlemen do say, that the decrease in the water flow and pre- 

 vailing dryness, changable locally, is the result of certain elemental 

 or climatic conditions in space through which our planet is passing, 

 is an apologetic hypothesis which explains nothing. Such assump- 

 tion aside, plain facts and common sense ought to guide us in solv- 

 ing the problem in hand. To place it in a inore lucid light, note the 

 circulatory system of our bodies. It is enough for our purpose 

 simply to say, that by various electro-chemical and muscular activ- 

 ities the food we eat is manufactured into blood for body structure; 

 that the blood in the veins, like w^ater in rivers, is a mixture of pure 

 and impure elements flowing into the heart: from the heart to the 

 lungs, that remove the impurities in the form of breath and vitalize 

 the oxygenated pure blood that is sent back into the heart; thence, 

 by innumerable arteries to change and rebuild every impaired parti- 

 cle of our bodies, till every organ and function is quickened into new 



