The Fight for Conservation | Page 3

who will make their homes upon it. As methods of
agriculture improve and new dry-land crops are introduced, vast areas
once considered unavailable for cultivation are being made into
prosperous homes; and this-movement has only begun.
The single object of the public land system of the United States, as
President Roosevelt repeatedly declared, is the making and
maintenance of prosperous homes. That object cannot be achieved
unless such of the public lands as are suitable for settlement are
conserved for the actual home-maker. Such lands should pass from the
possession of the Government directly and only into the hands of the
settler who lives on the land. Of all forms of conservation there is none
more important than that of holding the public lands for the actual
home-maker.
It is a notorious fact that the public land laws have been deflected from
their beneficent original purpose of home-making by lax administration,
short-sighted departmental decisions, and the growth of an unhealthy
public sentiment in portions of the West. Great areas of the public
domain have passed into the hands, not of the home-maker, but of large
individual or corporate owners whose object is always the making of
profit and seldom the making of homes. It is sometimes urged that
enlightened self-interest will lead the men who have acquired large
holdings of public lands to put them to their most productive use, and it

is said with truth that this best use is the tillage of small areas by small
owners. Unfortunately, the facts and this theory disagree. Even the
most cursory examination of large holdings throughout the West will
refute the contention that the intelligent self-interest of large owners
results promptly and directly in the making of homes. Few passions of
the human mind are stronger than land hunger, and the large holder
clings to his land until circumstances make it actually impossible for
him to hold it any longer. Large holdings result in sheep or cattle
ranges, in huge ranches, in great areas held for speculative rise in price,
and not in homes. Unless the American homestead system of small
free-holders is to be so replaced by a foreign system of tenantry, there
are few things of more importance to the West than to see to it that the
public lands pass directly into the hands of the actual settler instead of
into the hands of the man who, if he can, will force the settler to pay
him the unearned profit of the land speculator, or will hold him in
economic and political dependence as a tenant. If we are to have homes
on the public lands, they must be conserved for the men who make
homes.
The lowest estimate reached by the Forest Service of the timber now
standing in the United States is 1,400 billion feet, board measure; the
highest, 2,500 billion. The present annual consumption is
approximately 100 billion feet, while the annual growth is but a third of
the consumption, or from 30 to 40 billion feet. If we accept the larger
estimate of the standing timber, 2,500 billion feet, and the larger
estimate of the annual growth, 40 billion feet, and apply the present rate
of consumption, the result shows a probable duration of our supplies of
timber of little more than a single generation.
Estimates of this kind are almost inevitably misleading. For example, it
is certain that the rate of consumption of timber will increase
enormously in the future, as it has in the past, so long as supplies
remain to draw upon. Exact knowledge of many other factors is needed
before closely accurate results can be obtained. The figures cited are,
however, sufficiently reliable to make it certain that the United States
has already crossed the verge of a timber famine so severe that its
blighting effects will be felt in every household in the land. The rise in

the price of lumber which marked the opening of the present century is
the beginning of a vastly greater and more rapid rise which is to come.
We must necessarily begin to suffer from the scarcity of timber long
before our supplies are completely exhausted.
It is well to remember that there is no foreign source from which we
can draw cheap and abundant supplies of timber to meet a demand per
capita so large as to be without parallel in the world, and that the
suffering which will result from the progressive failure of our timber
has been but faintly foreshadowed by temporary scarcities of coal.
What will happen when the forests fail? In the first place, the business
of lumbering will disappear. It is now the fourth greatest industry in the
United States. All forms of building industries will suffer with it, and
the occupants of houses, offices, and stores must pay