The conservation movement is the expression of the idea that the materials and agencies that are part of the furniture of the planet are to be utilized by each generation carefully, and with real regard to the welfare of those who are to follow us. The country-life movement is the expression of the idea that the policies, efforts, and material well-being of the open country must be highly sustained, as a fundamental essential of a good civilization; and it recognizes the fact that rural society has made relatively less progress in the past century than has urban society. Both movements are immediately economic, but in ultimate results they are social and moral. They rest on the assumption that the welfare of the individual man and woman is to be conserved and developed, and is the ultimate concern of governments; both, therefore, are phases in a process of social evolution.
These are the twin policies of the Roosevelt administration, an economic and social movement for which that administration will be first remembered after the incidents and personalities of the time have lost their significance.
Not only the welfare but the existence of the race depends on utilizing the products and forces of the planet wisely, and also on securing greater quantity and variety of new products. These are finally the most fundamental movements that government has yet attempted to attack; for when the products of the earth shall begin to disappear or the arm of the husbandman to lose its skill, there is an end to the office of government. At the bottom, therefore, the conservation and country-life movements rest on the same premise; but in their operation and in the problems that are before them they are so distinct that they should not be confounded or united. These complementary phases may best work themselves out by separate organization and machinery, although articulating at every point; and this would be true if for no other reason than that a different class of persons, and a different method of procedure, attach to each movement. The conservation movement finds it necessary, as a starting-point, to attack intrenched property interests, and it therefore discovers itself in politics, inasmuch as these interests have become intrenched through legislation. The country-life movement lacks these personal and political aspects, and proceeds rather on a broad policy of definite education and of redirection of imagination.
These subjects have a history.
Neither conservation nor country life is new except in name and as the subject of an organized movement. The end of the original resources has been foreseen from time out of mind, and prophetic books have been written on the subject. The need of a quickened country life has been recognized from the time that cities began to dominate civilization; and the outlook of the high-minded countryman has been depicted from the days of the classical writings until now. On the side of mineral and similar resources, the geologists amongst us have made definite efforts for conservation; and on the side of soil fertility the agricultural chemists and the teachers of agriculture have for a hundred years maintained a perpetual campaign of conservation. So long and persistently have those persons in the agricultural and some other institutions heard these questions emphasized, that the startling assertions of the present day as to the failure of our resources and the coÖrdinate importance of rural affairs with city affairs have not struck me with any force of novelty.
But there comes a time when the warnings begin to collect themselves, and to crystallize about definite points; and my purpose in suggesting this history is to emphasize the importance of the two formative movements now before us by showing that the roots run deep back into human experience. It is no ephemeral or transitory subject that we are now to discuss.
They are not party-politics subjects.
I have said that these are economic and social problems and policies. I wish to enlarge this view. They are concerned with saving, utilizing, and augmenting, and only secondarily with administration. We must first ascertain the facts as to our resources, and from this groundwork impress the subject on the people. The subject must be approached by scientific methods. The "political" phase, although probably necessary, is only temporary, till we remove impedimenta and clear the way.
It would be unfortunate if such movement became the exclusive program of a political party, for then the question would become partisan and probably be removed from calm or judicial consideration, and the opposition would equally become the program of a party. Every last citizen should be naturally interested in the careful utilization of our native materials and wealth, and it is due him that the details of the question be left open for unbiased discussion rather than to be made the arbitrary program, either one way or another, of a political organization. Conservation is in the end a plain problem involving economic, educational, and social situations, rather than a political issue.
The country-life movement is equally a scientific problem, in the sense that it must be approached in the scientific spirit. It will be inexcusable in this day if we do not go at the subject with only the desire to discover the facts and to arrive at a rational solution, by non-political methods.
The soil is the greatest of all resources.
The resources that sustain the race are of two kinds,—those that lie beyond the power of man to reproduce or increase, and those that may be augmented by propagation and by care. The former are the mines of minerals, metals, and coal, the water, the air, the sunshine; the latter are the living resources, in crop and live-stock.
Intermediate between the two classes stands the soil, on which all living resources depend. While the soil is part of the mineral and earthy resources of the planet, it nevertheless can be increased in its producing power. Even after all minerals and metals and coal are depleted, the race may sustain itself in comfort and progress so long as the soil is productive, provided, of course, that water and air and sunshine are still left to us. The greatest of all resources that man can make or mar is the soil. Beyond all the mines of coal and all the precious ores, this is the heritage that must be most carefully saved; and this, in particular, is the country-life phase of the conservation movement.
To my mind, the conservation movement has not sufficiently estimated or emphasized this problem. It has laid stress, I know, on the enormous loss by soil erosion and has said something of inadequate agricultural practice, but the main question is yet practically untouched by the movement,—the plain problem of handling the soil by all the millions who, by skill or blundering or theft, produce crops and animals out of the earth. Peoples have gone down before the lessening fertility of the land, and in all probability other peoples will yet go down. The course of empire has been toward the unplundered lands.
The soil crust.
Thinner than a skin of an apple is the covering of the earth that a man tills. The marvelously slight layer that the farmer knows as "the soil," supports all plants and all men, and makes it possible for the globe to sustain a highly developed life. Beyond all calculation and all comprehension are the powers and the mysteries of this soft outer covering of the earth. For all we know, the stupendous mass of materials of which the planet is composed is wholly dead, and only on the surface does any nerve of life quicken it into a living sphere. And yet, from this attenuated layer have come numberless generations of giants of forests and of beasts, perhaps greater in their combined bulk than all the soil from which they have come; and back into this soil they go, until the great life principle catches up their disorganized units and builds them again into beings as complex as themselves.
The general evolution of this soil is toward greater powers; and yet, so nicely balanced are these powers that within his lifetime a man may ruin any part of it that society allows him to hold; and in despair he throws it back to nature to reinvigorate and to heal. We are accustomed to think of the power of man in gaining dominion over the forces of nature,—he bends to his use the expansive powers of steam, the energy of the electric current, and he ranges through space in the light that he concentrates in his telescope; but while he is doing all this, he sets at naught the powers in the soil beneath his feet, wastes them, and deprives himself of vast sources of energy. Man will never gain dominion until he learns from nature how to maintain the augmenting powers of the disintegrating crust of the earth.
We can do little to control or modify the atmosphere or the sunlight; but the epidermis of the earth is ours to do with it much as we will. It is the one great earth-resource over which we have dominion. The soil may be made better as well as worse, more as well as less; and to save the producing powers of it is far and away the most important consideration in the conservation of natural resources.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to devise a system of farm accounting that shall accurately represent the loss in producing power of the land (or depreciation in actual capital stock). The rising sentiment on the fertility question is just now reflected in the proposal to ask Congress and the states to make it a misdemeanor for a man to rob his land and to lay out for him a farm scheme. This is a chimerical notion; but the people are bound to express themselves unmistakably in some way on this subject.
Even if we should ultimately find that crops do not actually deplete land by the removal of stored plant-food in the way in which we have been taught, it is nevertheless true that poor management ruins its productivity; and whatever the phrase we use in our speaking and writing, we shall still need to hold the land-usurer to account.
No man has a right to plunder the soil.
The man who tills and manages the soil owes a real obligation to his fellow-men for the use that he makes of his land; and his fellow-men owe an equal obligation to him to see that his lot in society is such that he will not be obliged to rob the earth in order to maintain his life. The natural resources of the earth are the heritage and the property of every one and all of us. A man has no moral right to skin the earth, unless he is forced to do it in sheer self-defense and to enable him to live in some epoch of an unequally developed society; and if there are or have been such social epochs, then is society itself directly responsible for the waste of the common heritage. We have given every freeholder the privilege to destroy his farm.
The man who plunders the soil is in very truth a robber, for he takes that which is not his own, and he withholds bread from the mouths of generations yet to be born. No man really owns his acres: society allows him the use of them for his lifetime, but the fee comes back to society in the end. What, then, will society do with those persons who rob society? The pillaging land-worker must be brought to account and be controlled, even as we control other offenders.
I have no socialistic program to propose. The man who is to till the land must be educated: there is more need, on the side of the public welfare, to educate this man than any other man whatsoever (page 36). When he knows, and his obligations to society are quickened, he will be ready to become a real conservator; and he will act energetically as soon as the economic pressure for land-supplies begins to be acute. When society has done all it can to make every farmer a voluntary conservator of the fatness of the earth, it will probably be obliged to resort to other means to control the wholly incompetent and the recalcitrant; at least, it will compel the soil-robber to remove to other occupation, if economic stress does not itself compel it. We shall reach the time when we shall not allow a man to till the earth unless he is able to leave it at least as fertile as he found it.
I do not think that our natural soil resources have yet been greatly or permanently depleted, speaking broadly; and such depletion as has occurred has been the necessary result of the conquest of a continent. But a new situation will confront us, now that we see the end of our raw conquest; and the old methods cannot hold for the future. The conquest has produced great and strong folk, and we have been conserving men while we have been free with our resources. In the future, we shall produce strong folk by the process of thoroughness and care.
Ownership vs. conservation.
This discussion leads me to make an application to the conservation movement in general. We are so accustomed to think of privileged interests and of corporation control of resources that we are likely to confuse conservation and company ownership. The essence of conservation is to utilize our resources with no waste, and with an honest care for the children of all the generations. But we state the problem to be the reservation of our resources for all the people, and often assume that if all the resources were in private ownership the problem would thereby be solved; but, in fact, the conservation question is one thing and the ownership of property quite another. A corporation may be the best as well as the worst conservator of resources; and likewise, private or individual ownership may be the very worst as well as the best conservator. The individual owner, represented by the "independent farmer," may be the prince of monopolists, even though his operations compass a very small scale. The very fact that he is independent and that he is intrenched behind the most formidable of all barriers—private property rights—insure his monopoly.
In the interest of pure conservation, it is just as necessary to control the single men as the organized men. In the end, conservation must deal with the separate or the individual man; that is, with a person. It matters not whether this person is a part of a trust, or lives alone a hundred miles beyond the frontier, or is the owner of a prosperous farm,—if he wastes the heritage of the race, he is an offender.
We are properly devising ways whereby the corporation holds its property or privileges in trust, returning to government (or to society) a fair rental; that is, we are making it responsible to the people. What shall we do with the unattached man, to make him also responsible? Shall we hold the corporate plunderer to strict account, and let the single separate plunderer go scot-free?
The philosophy of saving.
The conservation of natural resources, therefore, resolves itself into the philosophy of saving, while at the same time making the most and best progress in our own day. We have not developed much consciousness of saving when we deal with things that come free to our hands, as the sunshine, the rain, the forests, the mines, the streams, the earth; and the American has found himself so much in the midst of plenty that saving has seemed to him to be parsimony, or at least beneath his attention. As a question of morals, however, conscientious saving represents a very high development. No man has a right to waste, both because the materials in the last analysis are not his own, and because some one else may need what he wastes. A high sense of saving ought to come out of the conservation movement. This will make directly for character-efficiency, since it will develop both responsibility and regard for others.
The irrigation and dry-farming developments have a significance far beyond their value in the raising of crops: they are making the people to be conservators of water, and to have a real care for posterity.
Civilization, thus far, is built on the process of waste. Materials are brought from forest, and sea, and mine, certain small parts are used, and the remainder is destroyed (page 20); more labor is wasted than is usefully productive; but what is far worse, the substance of the land is taken in unimaginable measure, and dumped wholesale into endless sewer and drainage systems. It would seem as if the human race were bent on finding a process by which it can most quickly ravish the earth and make it incapable of maintaining its teeming millions. We are rapidly threading the country with vast conduits by which the fertility of the land can flow away unhindered into the unreachable reservoirs of the seas.
The conservation of food.
The fundamental problem for the human race is to feed itself. It has been a relatively easy matter to provide food and clothing thus far, because the earth yet has a small population, and because there have always been new lands to be brought into requisition. We shall eliminate the plagues and the devastations of war, and the population of the earth will tremendously increase in the centuries to come. When the new lands have all been opened to cultivation, and when thousands of millions of human beings occupy the earth, the demand for food will constitute a problem which we scarcely apprehend to-day. We shall then be obliged to develop self-sustaining methods of maintaining the producing-power of land.
We think we have developed intensive and perfected systems of agriculture; but as a matter of fact, and speaking broadly, a permanent organized agriculture is yet unknown. In certain regions, as in Great Britain, the producing-power of the land has been increased over a long series of years, but this has been accomplished to a great extent by the transportation of fertilizing materials from the ends of the earth. The fertility of England has been drawn largely from the prairies and plains of America, from which it has secured its food supplies, from the guano deposits in islands of the seas, from the bones of men in Egypt and the battlefields of Europe.
We begin to understand how it is possible to maintain the producing-power of the surface of the earth, and there are certain regions in which our knowledge has been put effectively into operation, but we have developed no conscious plan or system in a large way for securing this result. It is the ultimate problem of the race to devise a permanent system of agriculture. It is the greatest question that can confront mankind; and the question is yet all unsolved.
The best husbandry is not in the new regions.
The best agriculture, considered in reference to the permanency of its results, develops in old regions, where the skinning process has passed, where the hide has been sold, and where people come back to utilize what is left. The skinning process is proceeding at this minute in the bountiful new lands of the United States; and in parts of the older states, and even also in parts of the newer ones, not only the skin but the tallow has been sold.
We are always seeking growing-room, and we have found it. But now the Western civilization has met the Eastern, and the world is circumferenced. We shall develop the tropics and push far toward the poles; but we have now fairly discovered the island that we call the earth, and we must begin to make the most of it.
Another philosophy of agriculture.
Practically all our agriculture has been developed on a rainfall basis. There is ancient irrigation experience, to be sure, but the great agriculture of the world has been growing away from these regions. Agriculture is still moving on, seeking new regions; and it is rapidly invading regions of small rainfall.
About six-tenths of the land surface of the globe must be farmed, if farmed at all, under some system of water-saving. Of this, about one-tenth is redeemable by irrigation, and the remainder by some system of utilization of deficient rainfall, or by what is inappropriately known as dry-farming. The complementary practices of irrigation and dry-farming will develop a wholly new scheme of agriculture and a new philosophy of country life (page 44).
Even in heavy rainfall countries there is often such waste of water from run-off that the lands suffer severely from droughts. No doubt the hilly lands of our best farming regions are greatly reduced in their crop-producing power because people do not prepare against drought as consciously as they provide against frost (page 52). It is often said that we shall water Eastern lands by irrigation, and I think that we shall; but our first obligation is to save the rainfall water by some system of farm-management or dry-farming.
Agriculture rests on the saving of water.
The obligation of the farmer.
The farmer is rapidly beginning to realize his obligation to society. It is usual to say that the farmer feeds the world, but the larger fact is that he saves the world.
The economic system depends on him. Wall Street watches the crops.
As cities increase proportionately in population, the farmer assumes greater relative importance, and he becomes more and more a marked man.
Careful and scientific husbandry is rising in this new country. We have come to a realization of the fact that our resources are not unlimited. The mining of fertilizing materials for transportation to a few spots on the earth will some day cease. We must make the farming sustain itself, at the same time that it provides the supplies for mankind.
We all recognize the necessity of the other great occupations to a well-developed civilization; but in the nature of the case, the farmer is the final support. On him depends the existence of the race. No method of chemical synthesis can provide us with the materials of food and clothing and shelter, and with all the good luxuries that spring from the bosom of the earth.
I know of no better conservators than our best farmers. They feel their responsibility. Quite the ideal of conservation is illustrated by a farmer of my acquaintance who saves every product of his land and has developed a system of self-enriching live-stock husbandry, who has harnessed his small stream to light his premises and do much of his work, who turns his drainage waters into productive uses, and who is now troubled that he cannot make some use of the winds that are going to waste on his farm.
The obligation of the conservation movement.
What I have meant to impress is the fact that the farmer is the ultimate conservator of the resources of the earth. He is near the cradle of supplies, near the sources of streams, next the margin of the forests, on the hills and in the valleys and on the plains just where the resources lie. He is in contact with the original and raw materials. Any plan of conservation that overlooks this fact cannot meet the situation. The conservation movement must help the farmer to keep and save the race.
