may reunite, but a nation whose natural resources are destroyed must 

 inevitably pay the penalty of poverty, degradation, and decay. 



At first blush this may seem like an unpardonable misconception 

 and over-statement, and if it is not true it certainly is unpardonable. 

 Let us consider the facts. Some of them are well known, and the 

 salient ones can be put very briefly. 



The five indispensably essential materials in our civilization are 

 wood, water, coal, iron, and agricultural products. 



We have timber for less than thirty years at the present rate of 

 cutting. The figures indicate that our demands upon the forest have 

 increased twice as fast as our population. 



We have anthracite coal for but fifty years, and bituminous coal 

 for one hundred. 



Our supplies of iron ore, mineral oil, and natural gas are being 

 rapidly depleted, and many of the great fields are already exhausted. 

 Mineral resources such as these when once gone are gone forever. 



We have allowed erosion, that great enemy of agriculture, to im- 

 poverish and, over hundreds of square miles, to destroy our farms. 

 The Mississippi alone carries yearly to the sea more than 4,000,000,000 

 tons of the richest soil within its drainage basin. If this soil is worth 

 a dollar a ton, it is probable that the total loss of fertility from soil- 

 wash to the farmers and forest owners of the United States is not far 

 from a billion dollars a year. Our streams, in spite of the millions 

 of dollars spent upon them, are less navigable now than they were 

 fifty years ago, and the soil, lost by erosion from the farms and the 

 deforested mountain sides, is the chief reason. The great cattle and 

 sheep ranges of the West, because of over-grazing, are capable, in an 

 average year, of carrying but half the stock they once could support 

 and' should still. Their condition affects the price of meat in prac- 

 tically every city of the United States. 



These are but a few of the more striking examples. The diversion 

 of great areas of our public lands from the home maker to the land- 

 lord and the speculator, the national neglect of great water powers, 

 which might well relieve, being perennially renewed, the drain upon 

 our non- renewable coal; the fact that but half the coal has been taken 

 from the mines which have already been abandoned as worked out and 

 in caving-in have made the rest forever inaccessible ; the disuse of the 

 cheaper transportation of our waterways, which involves but little 

 demand upon our nonrenewable supplies of iron ore, and the use of 

 the rail instead these are other items in the huge bill of particulars 

 of national waste. 



The Disregard of the Future. 



We have a well-marked national tendency to disregard the future, 

 and it has led us to look upon all our natural resources as inexhaust- 

 ible. Even now that the actual exhaustion of some of them is forcing 

 itself upon us in higher prices and the greater cost of living, we are 

 still asserting, if not always in words, yet in the far stronger lan- 

 guage of action that nevertheless and in spite of it all, they still are 

 inexhaustible. 



It is this national attitude of exclusive attention to the present, this 



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