Checking the Waste: A Study in Conservation

by Mary Huston Gregory

During the seventy-five years from 1820 to 1895, nearly 4,000,000,000 tons were mined by methods so wasteful that 6,000,000,000 tons were destroyed or allowed to remain in the ground so that it could never be recovered. Within the next ten years as much was produced as in the entire seventy-five preceding years, and in this period 3,000,000,000 tons were destroyed or left in the ground beyond the reach of future use. Up to this time the actual amount of coal used has been over 7,500,000,000 tons; the waste 9,000,000,000 tons.

Experts estimate that in the beginning there were somewhere about 2,000,000,000,000 tons of available coal, so that we have now, with all our wastefulness, used less than two per cent. of our original inheritance. But we must remember that in the ten years closing with 1905, we used as much as during the entire history of our country up to that time, and the rate of consumption is still increasing. In 1907 the amount mined was about 450,000,000 tons. Counting on a continuance of the same rate of increase, in 1917 it will be 900,000,000 tons a year, and if the same conditions should continue for twenty years we should be using and wasting in one year as much as we have used in all our history up to the present time. By that time more than one-eighth of our original supply will be gone, and in less than two hundred years nearly all of it will have for ever disappeared.

That is a long time to look forward, but a short time in looking backward. It carries us back only to the childhood of Benjamin Franklin and others prominent in our early history; and if this nation could look forward to only an equal period of prosperous development in the future the time would seem short indeed.

But the danger of our coal supply becoming exhausted lies not so much in its present use as in the rapid increase in its consumption. Fifty years ago (about the time of the Civil War) we were using an amount equal to a little more than a quarter of a ton for every man, woman and child then in the country. Now the rate is five tons, or twenty times that amount, for each person of all our greatly increased population.

The Pittsburg Coal Company owns about one-seventh of the great Pennsylvania anthracite fields. From the amount it is now mining each year and judging from the amount of coal it is able, with present methods, to reclaim from an acre of coal land, the estimate is made that this Pittsburg field will be exhausted in ninety-three years. A like comparison of all the eastern fields indicates that by the beginning of the next century there will be practically no cheap fuel left in the entire Appalachian basin.

The Geological Survey reports that, taking into account the available coal which can be reached and mined by present methods, and supposing the present conditions of use, waste, and increase to continue, the coal supply will be exhausted by the year 2015 A. D., but taking into account the probable improvements in its use, the year 2027 A. D. is estimated as the time when the present coal fields will be exhausted, and the middle of that century as the time when all coal fields in the United States will be gone.

This true story well illustrates the need of conservation and the folly of careless waste. High in the hills of the Pittsburg region a thick bed of excellent coal was found by the early settlers. It was impossible for them to build roads up the steep cliffs, so some method of getting the coal down to the valleys had to be devised. Buffaloes roamed the western plains in countless millions, and were so abundant about Pittsburg that the supply seemed inexhaustible. So the pioneers killed the buffaloes, filled each skin with a few bushels of coal, sewed it up, and tumbled it down the mountain side.

This was the way they marketed their coal—by destroying their buffaloes. For many years no one dreamed that there was any end to the supply of buffaloes. And so both east and west they were killed for their skins, which sold for a few cents, for their horns, for a supply of steak, or for mere sport; and then one day people woke up to find that the buffalo had disappeared, not in one settlement only, as they had supposed, but everywhere. There are a few remaining, carefully cared for by the government. They are among our most valued possessions, and yet only a few years ago they were destroyed, wasted, by millions.

This passing of the buffalo, the skins of which, as common then as burlap bags are now, were used to market our first coal, carries with it a deep lesson as to what will happen to the coal itself, even within the present century, unless our people awake to the consequence of what they are doing and make a determined effort to stop all unnecessary waste.

Let us see where and how these wastes occur. The first serious loss of our coal occurs at the mines. There are three great wastes in mining.