If they saw any money it was likely to be copper, with perhaps an occasional piece of silver.  Gold was for the rich, of whom at that period there were precious few, even among the owners of land and the wielders of power.

Country folk barely scratched the surface of the earth.  Roads were wheel tracks in the mud.  Bridges were fords that became more or less impassable with high water.

These assertions sound strange and romantic to the modern beneficiaries of asphalt and reinforced concrete.  They were the lot of most Europeans and North Americans when our great grandfathers and great grandmothers were in their prime.

What has made the difference between their use of the earth and ours?  Chiefly, the newly tapped sources of energy and the wide variety of minerals—­whose names were unknown except to scholars and scientists before 1750.  It is the new sources of energy and the only recently utilized metals that have made the difference.

Farm land can be used and abused many times before its productive possibilities are exhausted.  Even then, with foresight, technical proficiency, the investment of labor and capital, agricultural land can be restored to fertility.  Iron ore, tin, copper and tungsten are extracted from the earth, refined, put to some use or wasted as the case may be, but they are gone.  They may be replaced by other minerals.  Through geological ages they may redeposited in the earth’s crust.  But to all intents and purposes, they are finished.

It is a source of pride to promoters and propagandists for the status quo that western man has removed more metals and minerals from the earth’s crust in the past two hundred years than his predecessors removed during the previous two thousand years.  It is also a source of danger, because the possibilities of taking those particular minerals from that particular cubic foot of the earth are ended.

Replaceable natural resources such as soil fertility, grasses and trees can be restored and reproduced.  Irreplaceable natural resources are exhausted by one use.  In so far as they are concerned, that part of the earth’s crust has been impoverished—­made poorer.

Wasted through neglect and careless use, squandered in the senseless destruction of war, the earth is still a rich treasure house for its multitudinous forms of life.  Its remaining treasures can be carefully conserved.  Such replaceable resources as topsoil, vegetation and water can be husbanded.  Oceans, mountains and, deserts can be dealt with as we proceed with our programs for the most economical use of the natural resources that remain to us.

Western man is presently emerging from a boisterous era of invention, discovery, of multiplying productivity and corresponding waste of irreplaceable natural resources-temporarily justified by “national security” and “war emergency.”  The temporary loss of replaceable reserves and the permanent loss of irreplaceable resources is none the less tragic, no matter how urgent the immediate cause for their consumption.