Outdoor Equipment 
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. 
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