Outdoor Equipment 



James G. Needham 



It is a part of the public duty of those who know the value 

 of our natural endowment to protect and preserve some 

 portion of it wherever possible, and to put it to educational 

 use. We, as a people, have had the American soil in our 

 keeping for only a few generations; and yet we have well 

 nigh extinguished its native life over large areas. It is well 

 to have fields and stock-pens, for we must be fed and clothed : 

 but, it is well, also, to have something to show of the richness 

 and resourcefulness of nature, for we must be educated. 



Coming generations will need the wild things. Without 

 seeing them, they will never understand the history of their 

 own country. They will never know what things confronted 

 their forefathers to baffle them : what things gave them succor 

 and enabled them to live here and establish a new nation. 

 They will want to know what the native life of their native 

 land was like. 



There is plenty of wild life of many sorts in America still, 

 but it is getting farther and farther from the haunts of men 

 and lost to its former use. The attention of youth is occupied 

 more and more with artificialities. The wild places near at 

 hand are made unclean, and then are shunned. Our necessary 

 "improvements" are made with much unnecessary waste 

 and heedless despoiling of the beauties of nature. 



This is largely due to ignorance. That anything wild is 

 worth saving has hardly occurred to the average citizen; 

 that anything wild may be saved without hindering improve- 

 ments is an idea foreign to his experience. For he has been 

 filled with zeal to make the world over; to cut down all the 

 woods and drain all the bogs, and fill all the ravines with 

 rubbish ; to reduce it all to a neat pattern of cement sidewalks, 

 encircling lawns and cabbage patches. 



In the cities where the pressure for room has been greatest 

 and the destruction of native wild life completest, men have 

 cried out for nature and for green things growing, and parks 

 have been made. But the average park is a stretch of grass 

 to be kept off from, and the best of parks are good and whole- 

 some and inspiring and informing in proportion as they repro- 

 duce the wildwood. 



94 



