Preservation of forests as a measure of public safety / Address before the 17th National Irrigation Congress, Spokane, Wash., August, 1909

Address Delivered Before the Seventeenth National Irrigation Congress
HELD AT
SPOKANE, WASHINGTON, U. S. A.
AUGUST, 1909.
BY THE BRAZILIAN DELEGATE
L. BAETA-NEVES, Mining and Civil Engineer.

Address before the 17th National Irrigation Congress, Spokane, Wash., August, 1909.
L. BAETA-NEVES
Mining and Civil Engineer; Graduate of the Ouro Prete Mining School, Brazil; Chief of the Technical Department of the Directory of Railway and Public Works in Minas Geraes, Brazil; Member of the Historic and Geographic Institute of the same state; Member of the National Geographic Society of Washington; Knight of Columbus; Honorary Member of the Rotary Club of Los Angeles, Cal.; Representative of the Brazilian Government before the Scientific Congresses 16th Irrigation and 3rd Dry Farming in America, and Vice-President and Corresponding Secretary of this Congress; Special Delegate of Brazil before the 17th National Irrigation Congress at Spokane, Wash., where, by selection, he addressed the meeting on behalf of the Foreign Representatives.
I really feel glad and exceedingly honored in coming again before this Congress and my pleasure is great in telling you once more how much I appreciate the warm welcome of the North American people, and how much I have enjoyed the pleasant stay in this most hospitable city.
I come now with the same feelings and sentiment that I tried to translate to you on the opening session of this most important meeting full of very valuable lessons from any view point; on that day I had the great honor of speaking to you on behalf of the foreign delegates of this convention bringing greetings from the Brazilian Government and from the different nations here represented. But now, allow me to say, Americans, and distinguished representatives of foreign continents and islands, that translating the good feelings and altruistic sentiment of the people of the countries of Columbus, I am going to speak with my whole soul, my whole heart, on behalf of the sacred rights of humanity, addressing you on a subject very dear to me in which I have been deeply interested since my childhood; a subject on which I have learned a great deal from two men of universal reputation, who, for the glory of the western hemisphere, were born under the purest sky of America—I mean Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot. I stand for the forest, for the preservation of forests as a measure of public safety. My paper is in part an extract of a report that I sent to Brazil to be read this week at the request of the 4th International American Medical Congress, held now at Rio De Janeiro “on the most efficacious means of preventing and lessening the effects of periodical droughts.” In that paper I wrote about the lessons of the Irrigation Congress, which lessons we are already profiting by, having improved the Irrigation projects of which I wrote the address printed in the proceedings of the 16th National Irrigation Congress, last year. I am pleased to say that in this report I emphasized also the great work which has been done by the dry farming Congress, whose lessons are the best to teach the people of the arid district of the world, how to use profitably by the water, almost always so expensive and difficult to be obtained in such districts. You will find on the last proceedings of the dry farming Congress at Cheyenne, a paper of mine on the combination of irrigation and dry fanning processes, which combination I think will give the best results in rendering more fit to sustain life a region subject to drought. To the medical Congress, I suggested that a branch of the dry farming of America should be established in Brazil according to the wishes of its indefatigable secretary my good friend Mr. John T. Burns. Being requested by his excellency Governor Norris, of Montana to work in Brazil, as a vice-president and corresponding secretary of the Congress I feel exceedingly honored in giving my very best service to my brothers of North America, assuring them that they can count upon my great admiration for your country, where I am living for one year with my family always in close touch with the American family and people. Allow me to say, ladies and gentlemen, that keeping the same love for my native land, in my heart, will have for ever a warm room for the American people. But let me stop, ladies and gentlemen, of speaking of my feeling that, in spite of my sincerity, I cannot express by words as they come from the bottom of my heart; the whole session would be too short for translating them and I must go back to the subject of my paper. In my report to the International Medical Congress I wrote also about the Cactus of Luther Burbank, of California, and incidentally I called the attention of the Brazilian Engineers to the recent process in which the English government is now interested, facilitating the atmospheric precipitations for small water supply near the coast, causing the deposit of dew as has been practiced in Gibraltar. I have read something about this process on an interesting paper of Mr. George Hurbard read this year on March 3rd, before the Royal Society of Arts, London: I wrote too about the forests considering them like I am about to do.