The Fight for Conservation | Page 2

have already been exhausted, as in portions of
Iowa and Missouri. Yet, in the face of these known facts, we continue
to treat our coal as though there could never be an end of it. The
established coal-mining practice at the present date does not take out
more than one-half the coal, leaving the less easily mined or lower
grade material to be made permanently inaccessible by the caving in of
the abandoned workings. The loss to the Nation from this form of
waste is prodigious and inexcusable.
The waste in use is not less appalling. But five per cent, of the potential
power residing in the coal actually mined is saved and used. For
example, only about five per cent, of the power of the one hundred and
fifty million tons annually burned on the railways of the United States
is actually used in traction; ninety-five per cent, is expended
unproductively or is lost. In the best incandescent electric lighting
plants but one-fifth of one per cent, of the potential value of the coal is
converted into light.
Many oil and gas fields, as in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and the
Mississippi Valley, have already failed, yet vast amounts of gas
continue to be poured into the air and great quantities of oil into the
streams. Cases are known in which great volumes of oil were
systematically burned in order to get rid of it.
The prodigal squandering of our mineral fuels proceeds unchecked in
the face of the fact that such resources as these, once used or wasted,

can never be replaced. If waste like this were not chiefly thoughtless, it
might well be characterized as the deliberate destruction of the Nation's
future.
Many fields of iron ore have already been exhausted, and in still more,
as in the coal mines, only the higher grades have been taken from the
mines, leaving the least valuable beds to be exploited at increased cost
or not at all. Similar waste in the case of other minerals is less serious
only because they are less indispensable to our civilization than coal
and iron. Mention should be made of the annual loss of millions of
dollars worth of by-products from coke, blast, and other furnaces now
thrown into the air, often not merely without benefit but to the serious
injury of the community. In other countries these by-products are saved
and used.
We are in the habit of speaking of the solid earth and the eternal hills as
though they, at least, were free from the vicissitudes of time and certain
to furnish perpetual support for prosperous human life. This conclusion
is as false as the term "inexhaustible" applied to other natural resources.
The waste of soil is among the most dangerous of all wastes now in
progress in the United States. In 1896, Professor Shaler, than whom no
one has spoken with greater authority on this subject, estimated that in
the upland regions of the states south of Pennsylvania three thousand
square miles of soil had been destroyed as the result of forest
denudation, and that destruction was then proceeding at the rate of one
hundred square miles of fertile soil per year. No seeing man can travel
through the United States without being struck with the enormous and
unnecessary loss of fertility by easily preventable soil wash. The soil so
lost, as in the case of many other wastes, becomes itself a source of
damage and expense, and must be removed from the channels of our
navigable streams at an enormous annual cost. The Mississippi River
alone is estimated to transport yearly four hundred million tons of
sediment, or about twice the amount of material to be excavated from
the Panama Canal. This material is the most fertile portion of our
richest fields, transformed from a blessing to a curse by unrestricted
erosion.

The destruction of forage plants by overgrazing has resulted, in the
opinion of men most capable of judging, in reducing the grazing value
of the public lands by one-half. This enormous loss of forage, serious
though it be in itself, is not the only result of wrong methods of
pasturage. The destruction of forage plants is accompanied by loss of
surface soil through erosion; by forest destruction; by corresponding
deterioration in the water supply; and by a serious decrease in the
quality and weight of animals grown on overgrazed lands. These
sources of loss from failure to conserve the range are felt to-day. They
are accompanied by the certainty of a future loss not less important, for
range lands once badly overgrazed can be restored to their former value
but slowly or not at all. The obvious and certain remedy is for the
Government to hold and control the public range until it can pass into
the hands of settlers