MINERALS OF THE UNITED STATES — PEHRSON 199 



Conservation. — A review of our mineral position requires some gen- 

 eral comment on conservation. History shows that as a nation we talk 

 a great deal about conservation but are unwilling to put up much cash 

 for it. In the lush days of our industrial growth, we were little con- 

 cerned about the extravagant use of resources to achieve low-cost 

 production. Now that we are beginning to feel the effects of exhaus- 

 tion perhaps a more far-sighted view may prevail. Some waste of 

 resources occurs through lack of techniques with which to do the job 

 of producing and using minerals better. Much progress has been made 

 along this line through research and the efforts of our profession. 

 Research and engineering and the scrap-metal industry should be 

 recognized as the greatest conservational forces at work today, and 

 the Nation owes a debt of gratitude for their accomplishments. Fur- 

 ther progress in these lines may be expected. On the other hand in- 

 creasing labor costs and taxation are decidedly anticonservational. 

 Painstaking efforts to reduce costs to permit mining of marginal ores 

 by technical improvements can be wiped out by wage and tax increases. 

 Yet the latter are inevitable consequences of our social progress. I 

 see no easy answer to this conflict of objectives. 



Cooperation between Government and industry can do much to 

 smooth out the economic factors that are the cause of most of the 

 harmful waste in the utilization of mineral resources today. Elimina- 

 tion of the extremes of competition, the stabilization of prices and pro- 

 duction, and some controls to prevent frivolous uses of scarce minerals 

 that are of strategic importance to the Nation will promote conserva- 

 tion and at the same time improve the economic condition of the indus- 

 try. We gained some experience along this line in coal and petroleum 

 before the war and a lot more during the war. If we can maintain 

 this teamwork in the postwar years conservation can be achieved on a 

 worth-while scale. In view of the rapid rates at which we are ex- 

 hausting our mineral deposits, such conservation is very much in order, 

 but its ultimate effect on our basic mineral position will not be highly 

 significant. Our best hope for substantial improvement in those min- 

 erals where exhaustion is near lies in research on our submarginal 

 resources and in taking the risk of prospecting for concealed deposits 

 that now lie hidden in the earth's crust. These measures should be 

 carried on vigorously, but while we hope for successful accomplish- 

 ment we should also take measures to facilitate the procurement of 

 more of our mineral requirements from foreign sources. 



