why should we think about the conservation of resources(long)
Answers
During more than a century our government has been engaged in the alienation of an enormous domain. On a scale unequaled in history, and which probably never will be equaled, we have distributed land in generous homesteads to the land‑hungry of the world, transforming a tenant peasantry into a responsible electorate. In the pursuit of this business we have enlarged a simple policy of dispersal until the public domain has become a public grab‑bag; and pleading for the more rapid and profitable "development" of what we chose to call the unlimited resources of America, we have developed, instead, a national recklessness, spendthriftness, and wasteful extravagance, in which we have thrown away everything but the very richest part of our takings. The public land and the public water, in the form of fuel, power, timber, navigable streams, irrigable plains, and valuable minerals, have been so administered as to beget both a confidence in the eternal bounty of nature and a habit of treating public property as a source of private fortune.
To‑day, a number of things coming simultaneously to our attention call a halt. Our timber resources, sufficient, if not radically conserved, for barely a score of years; our rivers suffering from deforestation; our decreasing waterpowers falling into the hands of an increasing monopoly; our mineral fuels becoming more costly to mine, and amazingly less abundant; our farm lands losing millions of tons of their most fertile portions by soil wash,—all these things, and many more, bring us face to face with the certainty that this policy of spendthrift alienation and waste must be abandoned, and that its direct converse, the utmost conservation of our remaining natural resources, public private, must be adopted. More: it must be adhered to rigidly, not only to preserve a livable land for our children's children, but even to assure a modicum of prosperity for our own old age.It is to bring this fact most startlingly to the general notice that President Roosevelt has called upon the governors of all the states and territories to meet him in conference at the White House during the present month (May), to consult and confer, not only with but with one another, and to set on foot a movement for the adoption of uniform legislation over the whole country at an early date. This is to be not only an unusual but a precedent‑making conference, since it is the first time the Chief Executive has called into consultation the coordinate officials of the states; but its importance from this point of view, great though it is, appears but slight beside the significance of the policy which it brings to public notice.It is essential that we should get very clearly in mind at the outset precisely what this new policy is intended to effect. Its inception has been so promptly followed by the withdrawal from entry of the fuel lands remaining in the public domain, and the establishment of large forest reserves, and the opposition of the executive authority to any further development of water‑power by private interests on navigable streams or on public lands, that many persons have supposed that conservation was the opposite of alienation, and have imagined that President Roosevelt's plan was to hold all remaining public property in common and develop it on a more or less socialistic basis. Nothing could be further from the truth. The resources which are to be conserved are natural, not national. He plans to direct the organization of public sentiment, and the formulation of laws by which all such resources, whether in land or in water, whether national, state, or privately owned, shall be administered in a way to preserve intact or to increase the principal of them, and to give to each succeeding generation a larger wealth from the interest.