Fascinating article from a 1908 issue of the Atlantic Monthly magazine when President Theodore Roosevelt began the process of national conservation of natural resources.
MAY 1908 ATLANTIC MONTHLY
BY JOHN L. MATTHEWS
The Conservation of Our Natural Resources
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.
In the consideration of this proposition two questions immediately arise: first, what are these resources and how are they to be conserved? second, how can the states and the federal government cooperate to attain this result? Leaving the first of these for the moment and considering the second, the immediate motive of the present conference, we find an attempt to solve by a master stroke a problem for which no solution is provided in our form of government: that of bringing about parallel legislation in several states at the same time. Our government is organized from the point of view of the individual states, and it is so made up that both the people of these states as individuals, and the states themselves as governing entities, may have effective influence in shaping national legislation at Washington. There is nothing whatever of a reciprocal nature whereby the whole nation may either force, impel, or request a single state to legislate in a manner common to all. Any movement toward such interference within a state would be considered such an infringement of the rights of the states as might possibly plunge us again into the abyss of civil war. The tendency of the present administration toward centralization is well known; yet even the President would hesitate to attempt to bring about his purpose by other means than those which he has adopted.
Yet these means, "spectacular" as one governor has called them, appear before trial to offer a happy means of bringing about co legislation without infringing upon the dignity of any member of the Union. Calling the Democratic South and the Republican North into a common conference has become necessary, too, just because of their political difference; for any measure which might be brought to the notice of their respective congressmen would obtain favor or disregard according as the congressmen were with or against the party of the President.
The immediate purpose is to bring about three sorts of legislation: that which controls national resources, that which controls state resources, and that which directs the development of resources privately controlled. In this the cooperation of the states is not only desirable, it is absolutely essential. The federal authorities may enact laws for the maintenance and development of the public domain, both in land and in water; they may enter into partnerships, and do so enter, for the improvement of navigation and power in navigable streams and for carrying on irrigation; they may acquire land and establish reservoirs where such reservoirs can be shown to be necessary for the purpose of maintaining navigation; they, may shape the methods of taking fuel from the public land by inserting their requirements in the lease or deed under which the land is partially alienated. In addition, they may carry on a campaign of education aimed to persuade individuals to adopt rational methods. But a state can go much farther. It may buy land and plant forests without regard to the purpose for which the forest is established. It may drain local swamps. It may create reservoirs on small and insignificant streams, for the purpose of providing a town water supply, of improving water power, or for any reason whatever. It may enter into partnership, with its citizens and cooperate with them in forest development, in guarding against fires, in the erection of dams, in the management of mines, in any way it may choose. It may exercise its police power to provide that those who own private forests must police them, must cut fire breaks, must burn their slashings, and may not cut to exceed the increment in any year. It may encourage tree planting by direct legislation and by passing taxes on wooded lands. It may by law put land in escrow during the carrying out of large improvements; and it may even direct the economy of fuel at the furnace.
