SOUTHERN HORIZONS 



tires are fine and so are new plastics, but come now, 

 Brother Chemist, be reasonable. If you are going to 

 make a million tons of rubber and start building cars 

 and planes and the promised homes of the future out 

 of your new plastics, what about gas for my car and 

 oil for my burner?" 



The chemists have their answers ready. Constitution- 

 ally they are an optimistic breed and having so many 

 times duplicated nature's products and often improved 

 them markedly they have their own ideas about natu- 

 ral raw materials. Twenty years ago, one of the greatest 

 of them, the late John Teeple, told an international con- 

 ference on world resources: "The silliest thing we can 

 do is to save anything for our grandchildren. The 

 chances are 25-to-l they will not want it." 



Almost instinctively chemists believe this is a sound 

 principle. Future generations, they point out, will not 

 need many materials we consider critical, for the simple 

 reasons that either they will have stopped using them 

 or found better ones. Teeple cited chapter and verse 

 of the great wail our own grandfathers raised over the 

 vanishing supply of whale oil for their lamps. Leviathan 

 was being harpooned to extinction just before kerosene 

 was successfully distilled out of Pennsylvania crude oil! 

 Good scientists are like Teeple: their beliefs are well 

 buttressed with facts. 



Since the chemists, the geologists, the engineers of 

 the petroleum field refuse to become panicky over the 



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