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.