US Environmental Movement Begins

This series has three easy 5-minute installments. This first installment: The Pinchot Speech.

Introduction
The nation-wide movement for the conservation of the natural resources of America had its formal beginning on May 13, 1908. President Roosevelt took the unprecedented step of calling together on that date all the Governors of the various States for a conference on this theme. With the Governors were gathered the members of the United States Supreme Court, the members of the President’s Cabinet, and the presidents and other chief men of leading scientific associations.

From this notable and distinguished conference sprang the Governors’ Proclamation, which we give in full below. Prefacing the Proclamation, we place an address by the chief worker for conservation, Mr. Gifford Pinchot. This speech, delivered shortly before the gathering of the Conference, had an undoubted influence upon it. We then close with a summary by Professor Graham Taylor, seeking to estimate the extreme importance of the conservation movement, and especially of the Governors ‘ Proclamation, which he ranks with the Declaration of Independence in its value for future generations.

The selections are from:

• Address to the Meeting by Gifford Pinchot
• Proclamation by The Governors.
• an essay by Graham Taylor.

For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Summary of daily installments:

We begin with Gifford Pinchot (1865-1946). He was the first head of the US Forestry Service and a Governor of Pennsylvania.

Time: 1908

There are certain renewable resources and certain resources which are not renewable at all. The non-renewable resources are the minerals. What may happen in the case of thousands of centuries hereafter does not interest us at all. We know that when the coal is gone, so far as we are concerned, it is gone for good, and we have a supply of anthracite for about only fifty years.

Not only that, but in certain kinds of coal-mining, and some men say that the average will bear out the statement I am about to make, only about half the coal in the ground is actually mined before the roof is allowed to fall in, and what remains is permanently inaccessible for all time to come. In other words, our methods of mining are such as to eliminate from consideration at the start one-half of that which is absolutely indispensable as a necessity for our present kind of civilization.

What may happen in the future it is difficult to predict, but we know, so long as present methods continue, that coal is a necessity, and we know that the supply of coal is limited, and we are acting as if it made no difference whatever that that supply should be exhausted.

Of the 50 per cent. which is mined, on an average about 90 per cent. is wasted; or, to put it in another way, only about 10 per cent., and in many cases only 5 per cent. of the energy of the coal is actually transformed into work.

The sum total remains that under our present methods an excessively small quantity of the value of the coal to all our people is ever put to use, and there is in such a statement as this a very serious indictment of our whole people; and with all due allowance for the necessities of the case, for the rapidity with which we have reached this stage, there is a definite indictment of the intelligence of our people as a whole for that, judging from the point of view of the single individual.

What should any of us say of a man adrift at sea in an open boat with a little barrel of water, or with a keg of water, enough water to last him with ordinary use for five days, and he knew that the chances of his being picked up at sea were infinitesimal, he was out of the track of ships, and he knew with the best time he could make it would take twenty days to reach land —- what should we think of that kind of a man if, under these circumstances, he not only drank all the water he wanted, but used the rest of it to wash his hands? And yet we are not only using all the coal we want, but we are throwing a lot of it away.

We have handled natural gas in precisely the same way. The great flambeaux have been kept burning day and night, year in and year out, in certain gas-fields, until what had been foreseen as an inexhaustible supply, and so described until people really came to believe it, was all gone. How many oil-fields of the United States are already exhausted, and with the utmost hopefulness in forecasting the discovery of new fields, is it not fairly reasonable to suppose that, within a comparatively short time, the oil, too, will have gone the way of much of the gas?

In no other case except that of the forests have we as a people so distinctly emphasized our lack of foresight as we have in the case of the mineral fuels, and the result is especially important, because in our present state of civilization we must have them to go on with our work. We ought to have known better, and the time is easily come, when, instead of the limitations which are imposed upon us by commercial conditions, we ought ourselves, as a nation, to grasp this question of mineral fuels definitely and attempt its definite and foresighted regulation. It is one of the great problems which we must meet, one of the most difficult ones, and one of the most essential ones; for, when our mineral fuels are gone, so far as we can see now, the only practicable source of power will be sun-power or waterpower and will be difficult to use for many of the purposes for which coal is now employed. We have done, to some extent, this thing with our metal ores, but I will not dwell on that aspect of the subject.

There are a good many other types of conservation which we must keep in mind in relation to the land. For example, it has been said over and over again, and correctly, that the greatest tax a farmer has to pay is the tax levied on his land by the rain. In other words, it costs him more year by year for the land carried by erosion from the surface into the streams than it does to pay any other tax which falls upon him; and a singular beauty of our methods of cultivation which allow this is well illustrated by the fact that after the farmer has lost this soil from the field where it belongs, it goes down into the channels of the river, where it does not belong, and costs the nation millions of dollars to take it out. If there ever was a loss that cut both ways, it is this loss of soil from the farmer.

If we have been short-sighted in the matter of mineral fuel, we have been vastly more short-sighted in the matter of the forests. Wood is not less necessary to our present civilization than coal, and the best figures which the Forest Service has been able to obtain (doubtless they are not correct) is that at our present rate of consumption we have standing timber for only about twenty years, and in this connection it is well to add, just as in the case of the man floating in the open boat, that there is no other supply from which we can expect to meet our demands. The Canadians are coming to need all the wood they have, so with the Mexicans. South America is a wonderfully rich continent in forests, but to import timber from that country means that it would be at an expense vastly greater than that of timber grown at home.

We have permitted ourselves to get into a condition where a timber famine is not only likely, but certain, and where the best we can expect to do is to mitigate the famine somewhat, but how much we can mitigate it I do not yet know. How much the use of reenforced concrete and the use of steel and the employment of other construction will help cannot be said, but that these will help to a great extent there can be no doubt. The curious fact remains that there never has been a large substitute for wood, and it is a peculiar fact with the employment of these other methods of construction that there is vastly more wood used for construction in the United States today than when all the construction was of wood; in other words, we are in a place where we must suffer, and in this case we must pay the bill.

Fortunately, it is not altogether too late, because the forest is a renewable resource, and so we have a chance to correct the faults of the past. That we are trying to do. We have about 165,000,000 of acres of national forests established in the West, and shall have others in the East, and naturally these forests will be brought to the point where they will produce the most timber possible from their physical situation, but we cannot expect to meet from one-fifth of the forests of the United States a demand which is exceeding five-fifths, and which is consuming that five-fifths three times faster than it is being produced. In other words, there is distinctly trouble ahead. I said a little while ago that a change in public sentiment was the essential and indispensable factor in this movement of conservation. It is nowhere truer than in the case of the forests. Four-fifths of the forests are in private hands, and unless the owners of these four-fifths will join in the movement to minimize the timber famine, use their forests rightly, we shall have vastly more trouble than we shall have if they help.

It is certainly true that as our forests are destroyed at the headwaters of our streams, our water-powers suffer, the navigability of our streams suffers, irrigation suffers, and the domestic and manufacturing water-supply suffers. Wherever our streams flow, and they flow from wherever the stream rises in the mountains or in the forests, and they do so pretty much all over the country, there forest preservation is just as important because of the streams as it is because of the other services which the forest renders.

We have been equally short-sighted in allowing great monopolies to be formed for the use of waterpower from these streams without the possibility of government control. The idea is growing that it is a fair thing which should win, that the interest of the people at large is greater than the interest of any single man or single body of men less than all the people, and that when Uncle Sam gives us his natural resources it is no more than fair that he should acquire the use of them in a way to do as much good on the one side and as little harm on the other as possible.

The Governors begins here. Graham Taylor begins here.

More information here and here and below.