Report, Standing Committee on Waters

Report of the Standing Committee on Waters. W. C. Mendenhall, Washington, D. C., Acting Chairman.

To the public the Conservation movement seemed to rise suddenly in the last few months of 1908 and the early part of the year 1909, but what the people of the United States was really witnessing then was not so much the origin of a movement as its organization. Through a generation before that time Government bureaus, individuals, and associations here and there had been methodically assembling facts, and those who were familiar with these facts had been reaching conclusions that were oftentimes disturbing in their tenor. These individuals and groups were brought together, their conclusions were given publicity of a most effective type, and what had been scattered and disorganized recognition of a vital problem was given solidarity and nation-wide recognition by the acts of President Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot in organizing the National Conservation Commission and calling the Conference of Governors. The Forest Service, the Reclamation Service, and the Geological Survey had locked up in their archives the results of decades of research by their representatives, and these results supplied the facts which were the stimulus and the basis for the Conservation movement. Since that first great meeting, the Conservation Congress, giving official expression to the movement and formulating its doctrines and its platform, has served as a medium for the exchange of ideas among those who are engaged in one or the other of its manifold activities, for the subject-matter of Conservation is as comprehensive as the materials with which humanity deals. Furthermore, the term itself has been impressed upon the public mind. It has passed out of the category of a cult for the few, and has been taken up by statesmen and politicians, scientists and divines, commercial organizations, manufacturing associations, and has even invaded the realm of diplomacy. This proves merely that the seeds were well sown by those who were sponsors for the movement. Their work, the task of focusing public attention upon a theretofore neglected but vital series of problems, was superlatively well done.

Years have passed since that time. It is appropriate that we review the results of those years as it was appropriate in 1908 to make our first inventory of the primary subject-matter of Conservation, namely, our natural resources. The period of initiation, difficult but well performed, is past. There remains a task that will never be finished—the equally difficult and the infinitely slower process of applying the principles of Conservation to our every-day activities. Such an application must be practical, reasonable, and gradual so that modes of life and industrial habits in which change is to be affected can be given time and opportunity to adjust to that change. How well have we, the workers in the ranks for these principles, performed our task? In what fashion has the movement been carried on? What real and creative steps have been taken in the public interest to reserve for future generations without unnecessary suppression of opportunity for the individual in the present or denial of his needs, that share in our natural wealth which should be so reserved?

I shall confine myself to a brief and casual review of that phase of the Conservation movement which deals with the one resource—water. Even in dealing with this one item in the subject-matter of Conservation, I shall have to leave aside for treatment by others, and indeed by other organizations than this, that phase of the problem of the waters which deals primarily with transportation and its allied problems of river improvement and waterway construction. There still remains a broad field, for water is the universal resource. Doctor McGee has estimated that the ultimate control of population in the United States will be exerted by the limitations in its water supply. We cannot say that this limit in population, even though it be placed at from five hundred to one thousand million people, is one that does not concern this generation, for we feel very keenly now in our arid and semi-arid sections the handicap which lack of water places upon our growth. Irrigation and dry-farming methods are attempts to overcome this handicap and forces us to realize that the ultimate growth predicted by Dr. McGee can be reached only through the most careful husbanding of the most universal and important gift of nature—water.

Because the human body, like all other organic structures, is largely water and because all of its nutritive and renewing processes are exercised by the function of water as the solvent of other foods, it has a primary value to man superior to that of any other substance. Its secondary value, scarcely less important than the primary and closely related to it in character, is as an aid in the production of nearly all things which man uses. In the humid regions, the supply is sufficient naturally so that the necessity of water is ordinarily given no more thought than the necessity for air, although without either we should instantly perish. Man’s use of water in crop production, hence, is automatic and unconscious in the eastern United States, but in western part, and especially in the arid districts, he at once becomes conscious of its importance because plans and crops fail without it. He establishes engineering works and conducts it to the land in order that food may be grown upon the land. Here, in the pioneer stages of settlement, comes the first great waste. Water was and too frequently still is carelessly used in irrigation. An equivalent of twenty or twenty-five feet in depth has been applied annually to the land where four or five feet is ample. The excess is sheer waste and in its application the land is ruined. Canals are often carelessly constructed and half of their carrying capacity leaks out before the tract to be irrigated is reached.

As settlement increases and demand becomes more intense, these conditions are improved. Their improvement in our own arid West and Southwest began under the pressure of necessity before the Conservation movement was given a name, but that improvement nonetheless represented the application of Conservation principles and the movement centered attention upon this and similar wastes, made men more generally conscious of them, and stimulated preventive measures. This stimulus, acting upon the public mind, aided many of the Government bureaus that for years had been combating such waste. The Department of Agriculture has a Bureau of Irrigation Investigations, which has systematically studied irrigation methods in the West and Southwest and has published many valuable reports calling attention to the losses of water in irrigation and suggesting methods for its prevention. The Geological Survey in its series of water-supply papers has repeatedly warned communities of the injuries and economic waste resulting from bad management of water supplies. The Reclamation Service, represented in its foundation a branch of Conservation, established and made a practical working idea. Since its foundation it has systematically continued the great work begun by the passage of its organic act in 1902, and is reclaiming, by careful and economic methods, millions of otherwise waste acres in the public land States. It has reached the point where the building of impounding reservoirs and of the canals by which the impounded water is conducted to the lands has been brought to practical completion on many of the projects so that its task is transformed into one of inducing settlement, of inculcating principles of economic irrigation practice in the minds of the farmers; of increasing the duty of water and therefore its usefulness, to the maximum; and of reclaiming through the establishment of drainage systems, lands which have been ruined by over-irrigation under the old systems absorbed by the reclamation projects. This movement is a part of, has aided, and has in turn been aided by the propaganda. It is practical Conservation of a high type.

I should like to diverge here for a moment to a collateral phase of Conservation activity which indirectly bears upon reclamation by irrigation. Our coal land laws provide for the sale of those parts of the public domain underlain by coal deposits at prices of not less than $10 or $20 per acre. Prior to 1906, this law was interpreted as evaluating coal lands on the basis of the thickness, quality and depths of individual beds, and basing sale prices upon these values. Through the fruition of this policy, coal lands are no longer sold at the minimum legal price unless they have minimum values. If coals are of sufficiently good quality and exist in sufficient thickness, they may now be sold at $40, $50, $100, $200, or even $500 per acre. A recent sale in the Rock Springs district, Wyoming, of one section of land at prices ranging from $370 to $410 per acre, netted the Government one quarter of a million dollars more than would have been received under the old policy of sales at minimum prices. This increment of a quarter million goes, like all other receipts from sales of public lands, into the reclamation fund and is there used in the application of water to the arid lands in the West. The Conservation phase of the present coal land policies is thus closely related to the question of waters and their use. The valuation of this natural resource and the sale at valuation prices was one of the collateral movements which stimulated and led to public recognition of the need of Conservation. It is a thoroughly practical application of Conservation principles and is an excellent example of governmental activity in this direction.

In one of the arid valleys of southern California in which irrigated lands bring prices of from $500 to $3,000 per acre and in which the limit to the number of acres to which such values are affixed depends wholly upon the quantity of water available, there has of course been earnest study of every possible means by which this quantity could be increased or made to serve a larger acreage. Here, in 1909, an interesting, practical step in Conservation was taken. Prior to that period water users in this valley who derive an important part of their supply from underground resources which, because of excessive drafts, were becoming depleted, had adopted the unique device of spreading flood waters which would otherwise escape to the sea and be lost, over the rough alluvial lands at the base of the mountain slopes in order that they might there sink and replenish the underground resources. The lands best adapted to this purpose had remained public lands because of their rough and uncultivable character, although adjacent to them were privately owned lands worth many hundreds of dollars per acre. In 1909 a law was passed by which these public lands were set aside for use in the distribution of these flood waters. They are now, and will remain, a permanent public reserve devoted to the conservation of water supplies and the increase of the quantity available for irrigation in a region in which water for this purpose has perhaps a higher value than in any other part of the United States. Here again is an example of practical Conservation work accomplished through the co-operation of private and governmental agencies.

The passage of the so-called Weeks bill in 1911 likewise marks a great advance in the direction of Conservation legislation. This is the bill which provides for the creation of an Appalachian forest reserve by the purchase of privately owned lands in the Appalachian Mountains. Its administration is in the hands of a commission whose active agents are the Forest Service and the Geological Survey, and one of the features of the bill is the clause which provides that the Geological Survey must affirm that the purchase of the lands will favorably affect the navigability of the streams on whose headwaters they lie, before the purchase can be made. Thus the conservation of waters is involved as well as that of the forests and of lands through the prevention of erosion. Those of you who for years advocated such a bill and assisted in its final enactment will agree with me, I believe, in the statement that its passage would not have been possible without the preliminary education of public opinion accomplished by the great pioneer advocates of the Conservation principles.