Conservation of Natural Resources in California. 25 



Our ranges in the West, from which we first drove the buffalo to cover 

 them again with cattle and sheep, are capable of supporting but about 

 one half what they could under intelligent management, and the price 

 of beef is raised accordingly. Nearly every one of our wonderful 

 resources we have used without reasonable foresight or reasonable care, 

 and as each becomes exhausted a heavier burden of hardship will be 

 laid upon us as a people. 



Now what is our remedy? The remedy is the perfectly simple one 

 of common sense applied to national affairs as common sense is applied 

 to personal affairs. This is no abstruse or difficult question. We have 

 hitherto as a nation taken the same course as did at first the young man 

 who came into possession of his new property. It is time for a change. 



It is true that some natural resources renew themselves while others 

 do not. Our mineral resources once gone are gone forever. It may 

 appear, therefore, at first thought that conservation does not apply to 

 them, since they can be used only once. But this is far from being the 

 fact. Methods of coal mining, for instance, hav been permitted in 

 this country which take out on the average but half of the coal. Then 

 in a short time the roof sinks in on the other half, which thereafter can 

 never be mined. Oil and natural gas also have been and are being 

 exploited with great waste and as though there never could be an end 

 to them. The forests we can replace at great cost and with an interval 

 of suffering. 



Soil Waste. The soil which is washed from the surface of our farms 

 eve'ry year to the amount of a billion tons, making, with the further loss 

 of fertilizing elements carried away in solution, the heaviest tax the 

 farmer has to pay, may in the course of centuries be replaced by the 

 chemical disintegration of the rock; but it- is decidedly wiser to keep 

 what we have by careful methods of cultivation. We may very profit- 

 ably stop putting our farms into our streams, to be dug out at great 

 expense " through river and harbor appropriations. Fertile soil is not 

 wanted in the bed of a stream, and it is wanted on the surface of the 

 farms and the forest-covered slopes of the mountains. Yet we spend 

 millions upon millions of dollars every year removing from our rivers 

 what ought never to have got into them. 



Waste Through Piecemeal Planning. 



Besides exhausting the unrenewable and impairing the renewable 

 resources, we have left unused vast resources which are capable of 

 adding enormously to the wealth of the country. Our streams have 

 been used in the West mainly for irrigation and in the East mainly for 

 navigation. It has not occurred to us that a stream is valuable, not 

 merely for one, but for a considerable number of uses; that these uses 



