TEACHING CONSERVATION 



EDWARD HYATT. 



But how can a teacher teach Conservation? By exuding it through 

 the pores! If it gets in it will come out! 



A wise teacher will find a hundred ways to drop good ideas into the 

 hearts of her children. 



For instance, in the careful use of the school supplies. Economy 

 and wise care are virtues greatly to be desired in all our citizenry. 

 The teacher is not Avorking for the sake of saving a few cents for the 

 school fund; but for the habits of the children, their way of looking 

 at things, during all their future lives. Carelessness, extravagance, 

 recklessness, are dangerous to the nation. The difference between con- 

 servation and reckless waste may be taught in the use of such a com- 

 mon thing as paper, for example. Indeed, paper is really one of our 

 national resources, as it is made of wood pulp, and wood pulp is made 

 from trees. A big edition of a Sunday newspaper requires perhaps 

 a dozen acres of woodland. Every sheet of paper, every desk, every 

 box, every splinter of wood that we see or use, represents trees, trees 

 that were chopped from our forests. Every one of our eighty million 

 people use more than seven times as much wood per year as do the 

 people all over Europe. Every big city fire destroys a great and 

 splendid forest. Millions upon millions of acres of woodland con- 

 tinually go into the ties along our railroad lines. Countless other 

 forests are rotting away deep under ground in the coal and other 

 mines. 



The teacher who goes into the subject with interest, himself will find 

 no lack of striking and interesting and valuable things to pass along 

 to his flock ; things that point to civic patriotism ; things more vital 

 to their fatherland than the waving of battle flags and defiance of the 

 forein foe! 



CULTIVATE THE FORESTS 



This is a clipping from a fine article upon the Statesmanship of 

 Forestry by Arthur W. Page in the World's Work Magazine. 



Many people consider the approaching timber famine with the same 

 feeling of regret and helplessness with which they listen to the story of 

 the extinction of the buffalo. They feel that both are wild things 

 which must inevitably perish before the advance of civilization. But 

 the forests, unlike the buffalo, thrive in captivity. A large proportion 

 of the trees in a wild forest are not best suited to our use. They are of 

 the wrong species like weeds in a garden are too old or crooked and 

 have a variety of other blemishes; and, while doing us little good 

 themselves, they prevent the growth of better timber. To destroy all 

 the original growth and then plant a new forest on the devastated area 

 seems illogical, but it is neither impracticable nor unprofitable, as the 

 experience of Germany and experiments in this country show. It is 

 much easier, however, and more profitable, gradually to turn the wild 

 forests into cultivated ones. 



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