Conservation Through Engineering / Extract from the Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior

by Franklin K. Lane

NATIONAL STOCK TAKING.

The Government should have a more complete knowledge of the coal and of other foundation industries than can be found elsewhere, and we should not fear national stock taking as a continuing process. It is indeed the beginning of wisdom. The war revealed to us how delinquent in this regard we had been in the past. One day when the full story is told of the struggle of the Army engineer to meet war emergency demands, and this is supplemented by the tale of the effort made by the Council of National Defense and the War Industries Board, it will be realized more seriously than now how little of stock taking we have done in this generous, optimistic land.

When any such undertaking is proposed, however, it at once appears to arouse the fear that it is somehow the beginning of a malevolent policy called "conservation," and conservation has had a mean meaning to many ears. It connoted stinginess and a provincial thrift, spies in the guise of Government inspectors, hateful interferences with individual enterprise and initiative, governmental haltings and cowardices, and all the constrictions of an arrogant, narrow, and academic-minded bureaucracy which can not think largely and feels no responsibility for national progress. Needless to say this fear should not, need not be. The word should mean helpfulness, not hindrance—helpfulness to all who wish to use a resource and think in larger terms than that of the greatest immediate profit; hindrance only to those who are spendthrift. A conservation which results in a stalemate as between the forces of progress and governmental inertia is criminal, while a conservation that is based on the fuller, the more essential use of a resource is statesmanship.

To know what we have and what we can do with it—and what we should not do with it, also!—is a policy of wisdom, a policy of lasting progress. And in furtherance of such a policy the first step is to know our resources—our national wealth in things and in their possibilities; the second step is to know their availability for immediate use; the third step is to guard them against waste either through ignorance or wantonness; and the fourth step is to prolong their life by invention and discovery.

COAL AS A NATIONAL ASSET.

Enough has been said, perhaps, to indicate how vast are the fields of coal which this country holds. It may be that any day some genius will release from nature a power that will make of little value our carboniferous deposits save for their chemical content. By the application of the sun's rays, or the use of the unceasing motion of the waves of the sea, the whole dependence of the world upon coal may be upset. That day, however, has not yet come; and until it does we may consider our coal as the surest insurance which we can have that America can meet the severest contest that any industrial rival can present. It is more than insurance—it is an asset which can bring to us the certainty of great wealth, and if we care to exercise it, a mastery over the fate and fortunes of other peoples.

Next to the fertility of our soil, we have no physical asset as valuable as our coal deposits. Although we are sometimes alarmed because those deposits nearest to the industrial centers are rapidly declining and we can already see within this century the end of the anthracite field, if it is made to yield as much continuously as at present, yet it is a safe generalization that we have sufficient coal in the United States to last our people for centuries to come. An extra scuttleful on the fire or shovelful in the furnace does not threaten the life of the race, even if some Russian or Chinese of the future does not resolve the atom or harness the hidden forces of the air. Whatever fears other nations may justifiably have as to their ability to continue in the vast rush of a machine world, there can be no question of our ability to last.

The present strike, however, makes quite clear, perhaps for the first time, that it is not the coal in the mountain that is of value, but that which is in the yard. And between the two there may be a great gulf fixed. Therefore, we are put to it to make the best of what we have. We turn from telling how much coal we use to a study of how little we can live upon and do the day's work of the Nation. And this is, I believe, as it should be. Indeed I feel justified in saying that the problem of this strike is not to be solved in its deeper significances until we know much more about coal than we know now, and this especially as to the manner in which it is taken from its bed and brought to our cellars.

PUBLIC RESPONSIBILITY.