FINAL ACT OF SECOND PAN AMERICAN SCIENTIFIC CONGRESS. 67 



reduced cost of labor, before they could undertake the additional 

 expense needed to bring about such an increased yield. The problem 

 is -therefore to adjust what may be regarded as due to posterity with 

 what is a necessity to the present generation. "Conservation means 

 the greatest good to the greatest number and that for the longest time.'' 



Thirty years ago, when the great farming area of the United States 

 west of the Mississippi River was being developed so rapidly that the 

 world could hardly consume its output, corn (maize) was worth so little 

 to the farmer that he found it cheaper to use it as a source of fuel than to 

 buy coal. At the same time hogs were relatively so numerous that the 

 ravages of hog cholera acted as a check on ruinous price depression. 

 Water power remotely located from the center of industry is only poten- 

 tially valuable. Low-grade ores and the waste from mines may be of 

 no value until the demands of commerce develop more economic methods 

 of extraction and utilization, or increase the prices quoted so that it 

 becomes profitable to work them. The high consumption of meat per 

 capita in some of the American countries and in Australia is economically 

 impossible in the thickly settled countries of Continental Europe. 



The growth of population has warranted the rejuvenation of the 

 Nile Valley, the building of the Assouan Dam, the Roosevelt Dam, and 

 similar projects, the new irrigation projects in the Province of Buenos 

 Aires, and will in time demand the restoration and use of the irrigation 

 canals of the Incas. Plant diseases, such as smuts and rusts of wheat, 

 citrus canker, white pine blister rust, and parasites, such as the San Jos6 

 scale and the gipsy moth, would not concern a territory so sparsely 

 settled as was the United States during the first half of the Nineteenth 

 Century, but their prevalence now demands the most vigorous efforts of 

 private and public agencies for their control. A system of pitiless and 

 wasteful competitive marketing of agricultural products may serve the 

 purposes of a community in which good prices and never-failing crops 

 insure a profit to the producer, but, with the increase in the value of land 

 and the cost of labor, the elimination of marketing wastes is imperative 

 in order that food may be produced at prices which those who eat it can 

 afford to pay. 



These statements are self-evident to anyone familiar with the in- 

 dustries in question, but a failure to give proper consideration to the 

 economic laws underlying them is largely responsible for much of the 

 loose thinking which often prevails in discussions on conservation. 

 What may be a proper use of resources in the present generation may be 

 reckless waste in the next. The problem of each generation is therefore 

 to determine how far to meet its demands for the necessities of life, and 



