President White—We must hasten on, for we have some other addresses that will be very interesting to the children. There are a great many present that have come no doubt to see the wild life pictures. So we shall have to hasten in order to reach them.
Dr. Bessey, who was to have been next on our program, will be here at 3:30 o’clock.
Address, “Conservation Redifined”
We shall now call on Mr. E. T. Allen, of Portland, Oregon, whose subject is “Conservation Redefined.”
Mr. Allen—On a hot afternoon, a bare-footed boy, on his way home from school, in western Washington, eager as any school boy for the swimming hole, or whatever waiting attraction had kept his eye on the clock since about 2:00 o’clock, stopped, hesitated, then clambered down a steep, brushy slope to the stream at its foot, filled his hat with water, climbed up the hill again laboriously so as not to spill his burden, and put it on a camp-fire some voting citizen had left burning by the roadside. It still smoked, so he went back twice, three times. About then, the man who told me this story came along and asked the boy why he made it his business to put out that fire.
“Why, it told in a little book I got at school,” was the reply, “why every one should try to stop forest fires. It told what grown-up people can do by being careful and passing laws and such, but it said a boy may do as much as anybody by putting out some little fire with water or dirt before it gets big.”
Now, the action of that school boy, and of the teacher who handed him the booklet, and of the State authorities who instructed her to do so, and of the man who wrote the booklet and enlisted the State’s co-operation in its distribution to a hundred thousand children, and of the timber owners through whose protective association that man was hired and the cost of printing and distributing that booklet was paid, was Conservation. It was forest Conservation, definitely conceived, definitely executed, and with an exceedingly definite result.
About a month ago I was talking to an extremely intelligent man, a scientific man whose life is devoted to bettering humanity. He said, “Allen, do you believe in Conservation?”
Rather astonished, I replied, “It’s my trade, isn’t it?”
“Oh, I don’t mean forest protection, like putting out fires and making trees grow, but forest Conservation—Pinchotism, tying up everything for future generations.”