84 The Barrier of Cost 



portion lies thousands of feet under river valleys and mountain ranges 

 and cannot be mined except at prohibitively high cost. Dr. Nolan 

 estimates that in addition to phosphate, there might be extracted 

 about $5.00 worth of other values from every ton of the enormous 

 quantity of rock in the Phosphoria formation. He doesn't venture a 

 guess as to what it might cost to recover those values, but it would 

 certainly be more than they are worth, and one cannot afford to lose 

 much money per ton of rock processed if millions, or billions, or 

 trillions of tons of rock are to be handled. So I think that those values 

 are likely to remain undisturbed for quite a while. It is comforting to 

 know that we have something left in the cupboard, as the old lady 

 said of the rotten apple. 



Dr. Nolan has presented an interesting paper. His calm assurance 

 that all is well with our natural resources comes like a cooling breeze 

 from the mountain tops to the fevered brows of those of us who worry 

 over water supplies for American cities, over soil erosion, over the 

 wasteful mining of potash in New Mexico and of phosphate in 

 Florida, over the desert that is moving into eastern Colorado, over 

 the encroachment of sprawling cities and superhighways and military 

 reservations on the agricultural lands of the country, over the waste 

 of water storage potential and power development in the Hells Can- 

 yon fiasco, and over the coming exhaustion of high-grade ore deposits, 

 just as our fellow worriers did back in 1908. 



editor's note Mr. Nolan, in responding to comments made 

 upon his paper, pointed out that he had chosen to restrict himself to 

 the physical impacts of science and technology upon natural resources, 

 and that this did not imply that he felt the social and economic aspects 

 were unimportant. Other papers in the forum series, he said, would 

 deal with these aspects. "I wish to correct what I believe was implied by 

 both Dr. Cook and Dr. Curtis: that my thesis is in effect a negation of 

 conservation. My own belief — which I hold strongly — is that my conclu- 

 sions place the conservation movement on a much firmer basis than could 

 be provided by the original concepts of conservation. I certainly had no 

 intention of implying that the original attendants at the 1908 conference 

 were either unsound in their conclusions or were poorly advised in their 

 motivation. I have a great deal of admiration for what they did. In calling 

 attention to some of the changes that seem to me to have occurred, it was 



