The Fight for Conservation

The Fight for Conservation

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Fight For Conservation, by
Gifford Pinchot This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no
cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give
it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License
included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net
Title: The Fight For Conservation
Author: Gifford Pinchot
Release Date: February 23, 2004 [EBook #11238]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE FIGHT
FOR CONSERVATION ***

Produced by Garrett Alley, and the Online Distributed Proofreading
Team.

THE FIGHT FOR CONSERVATION
By
GIFFORD PINCHOT

1910

CONTENTS
Introduction
I. Prosperity II. Home-building for the Nation III. Better Times on the
Farm IV. Principles of Conservation V. Waterways VI. Business VII.
The Moral Issue VIII. Public Spirit IX. The Children X. An Equal
Chance XI. The New Patriotism XII. The Present Battle Index

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?

That question cannot be answered without first considering the
condition of our natural resources and what is being done with them
to-day. As a people, we have been in the habit of declaring certain of
our resources to be inexhaustible. To no other resource more frequently
than coal has this stupidly false adjective been applied. Yet our coal
supplies are so far from being inexhaustible that if the increasing rate of
consumption shown by the figures of the last seventy-five years
continues to prevail, our supplies of anthracite coal will last but fifty
years and of bituminous coal less than two hundred years. From the
point of view of national life, this means the exhaustion of one of the
most important factors in our civilization within the immediate future.
Not a few coal fields