88 Conservation of Natural Resources in California. 



A WORLD PROBLEM. 



Report of the Secretary of Agriculture for 1912. 



It may fairly be said that half a generation ago the fear of a wood 

 famine was a matter that had not entered the field of vision of the 

 average man. Some sagacious ones, it is true, were giving practical 

 but unostentatious evidence of their capacity to see ahead by gather- 

 ing into their ownership all the cheap timberlands that they could 

 acquire. Thus were laid the foundations of great fortunes. Timber 

 reservations by no means began with the Government. The proceeds 

 of lumbering in the virgin forests of the Northeast and in the match- 

 less Lake State pineries, once Government owned, were often rein- 

 vested in southern yellow-pine lands or in the cream of western timber. 

 This, however, was foresight exercised for private ends. Those who 

 put their money into such investments counted and with reason- 

 on diminishing supplies to force up the value of their holdings. But 

 those who urged the necessity of public action to provide for future 

 public needs were thought to be disturbing themselves unduly in mat- 

 ters which were proper subjects for the attention of Providence rather 

 than of men. To concern oneself overmuch lest wasteful use of the 

 resources placed at human disposal might leave posterity with nothing 

 to use argued a lack of confidence in the Divine wisdom which had put 

 us in a world designed for the satisfaction of all essential needs. If 

 the forests should ever fail, there would be something better to take 

 their place. 



This optimistic point of view was fostered by the very circumstances 

 which in reality gave greatest cause for apprehension. Unexpected 

 and momentous changes had revolutionized the conditions on which 

 had been predicated the early forecasts of approaching need. While 

 by falsifying these forecasts they had operated to lull the public mind 

 into a feeling of unjustified security, they had actually created a 

 situation a hundredfold more serious than before. In the eighteenth 

 and early nineteenth centuries the question of forest supplies was purely 

 local. Transportation except by water for any great distance was out 

 of the question for so bulky a commodity. 



Awakening to the Problem. 



With the development of railroads affairs took on a wholly new 

 aspect. Continental supplies were substituted for local. In the mid 

 century the forests about the Great Lakes began to melt away, going 

 east, west, and south, to rise again in the countless homes of an expand- 

 ing nation. From open .prairie to seaboard cities, from the factory 

 towns and hamlets of New England to the growing commercial centers 



