INTRODUCTION

The following discussion of the conservation problem is not a systematic treatise upon the subject.  Some of the matter has been published previously in magazines, and some is condensed and rearranged from addresses made before conservation conventions and other organizations within the past two years.

While not arranged chronologically, yet the articles here grouped may serve to show the rapid, virile evolution of the campaign for conservation of the nation’s resources.

I am indebted to the courtesy of the editors of The World’s Work, The Outlook, and of American Industries for the use of matter first contributed to these magazines.

THE FIGHT FOR CONSERVATION

CHAPTER I

PROSPERITY

The most prosperous nation of to-day is the United States.  Our unexampled wealth and well-being are directly due to the superb natural resources of our country, and to the use which has been made of them by our citizens, both in the present and in the past.  We are prosperous because our forefathers bequeathed to us a land of marvellous resources still unexhausted.  Shall we conserve those resources, and in our turn transmit them, still unexhausted, to our descendants?  Unless we do, those who come after us will have to pay the price of misery, degradation, and failure for the progress and prosperity of our day.  When the natural resources of any nation become exhausted, disaster and decay in every department of national life follow as a matter of course.  Therefore the conservation of natural resources is the basis, and the only permanent basis, of national success.  There are other conditions, but this one lies at the foundation.

Perhaps the most striking characteristic of the American people is their superb practical optimism; that marvellous hopefulness which keeps the individual efficiently at work.  This hopefulness of the American is, however, as short-sighted as it is intense.  As a rule, it does not look ahead beyond the next decade or score of years, and fails wholly to reckon with the real future of the Nation.  I do not think I have often heard a forecast of the growth of our population that extended beyond a total of two hundred millions, and that only as a distant and shadowy goal.  The point of view which this fact illustrates is neither true nor far-sighted.  We shall reach a population of two hundred millions in the very near future, as time is counted in the lives of nations, and there is nothing more certain than that this country of ours will some day support double or triple or five times that number of prosperous people if only we can bring ourselves so to handle our natural resources in the present as not to lay an embargo on the prosperous growth of the future.

We, the American people, have come into the possession of nearly four million square miles of the richest portion of the earth.  It is ours to use and conserve for ourselves and our descendants, or to destroy.  The fundamental question which confronts us is, What shall we do with it?